Odin's Seminar - No boundaries

Dr. Vibeke Roggen is an Associate Professor at the University of Oslo, specialising in philology, Latin translations, and the work of the priest Niels Thomessøn.

She has also worked on the reception of Latin in Norway, with a particular focus on texts composed prior to 1650. In 2005, she was admitted to the Academia Latinitati Fovendae.

In 2015 she worked on a new uncensored Norwegian - Latin dictionary, which included words for sexual acts which had been previously censored on a religious basis.

Roggen has several publications which investigates Thor Heyerdahl’s linguistic theories about Odin and the Old Norse god’s assumed links to Azerbaijan.

Friðriksdóttir studied at universities in Reykjavík, Iceland, and Brighton before completing her doctorate in medieval literature at the University of Oxford in 2010. 

 Friðriksdóttir then went on to receive research fellowships at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík and at Harvard University from 2010 to 2016. She was a lecturer at Yale University from 2017 to 2019 but is now working at the National Library of Norway. 

Friðriksdóttir has published several articles, an edited volume and two books about mediaeval literature and manuscripts, and her most recent publication is “Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World”, published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Currently Friðriksdóttir is working on several projects, including a new edition of mediaeval law.

Professor Emma Usmanova Archaeologist and Researcher at the Karaganda State University, Saryarka Archaeological Institute, Kazakhstan.

Usmanova is an archaeologist who works mainly with pre-historic times and funerary archaeology. She has published over 14 books and is known for her work with Eurasian burial rites, the history of horse riding, and symbolism in pre-historic graves and contemporary Nomad traditional culture in Central Asia. 

Usmanova has advised in several TV documentaries and is also an organiser of the annual Thor Heyerdahl Festival of ancient technologies and cultural communications in Kazakhstan.

Professor Erika Hagelberg - Department of Bioscience The University of Oslo.

Profesor Erika Hagelberg is a British evolutionary geneticist and Professor of Biosciences at the University of Oslo. Hagelbergs early work was on the development of methods to extract and analyse DNA from archaeological bones. 

 Hagelberg worked on the earliest applications of bone DNA typing in forensic identification, including the first use of microsatellite DNA in forensics. Hagelberg has worked at several universities during her career, such as the University of London, University of Cambridge, and the University of Otago, before joining the University of Oslo in 2002. 

Hagelberg has, together with Professor Johann Rasmus Brandt (UiO), completed an interdisciplinary research project, funded by the Research Council of Norway “Thanatos: dead bodies - live data. A study of funerary data from the Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine town Hierapolis in Phrygia, Türkiye”. Hagelberg has also been participating in the research project “Race and ethnicity and the science of human genetic variation 1945-2012", funded by the Norwegian Research Council’s SAMKUL-program.

Ynglingasaga is a part of the compilation of sagas about the Norwegian kings by the medieval historian Snorre Sturluson (1178-1241). The saga traces the lineage of the Norwegian kings back to the Viking gods Odin and Frey, who is also called Yngve. Therefore, the descendants are called Ynglings. 

In the saga the gods originate in Asia, but eventually migrate and settle in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Snorre mentions that at least two kings are buried in mounds at Borre. Until the mid-19th century, historians put great trust in the factual truth of Snorri's narrative, as well as other Old Norse sagas. In the early 20th century, this trust was largely abandoned with the advent of saga criticism. 

 Historians has come to believe that the motives Snorri give to their characters owe more to political circumstances in the 13th century than in earlier times which it describes.

The Thor Heyerdahl Archives were added to UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” Register, 2011. 

In 2011, Thor Heyerdahl’s archives became one of Norway’s contributions for UNESCOs documentary heritage Memory of the world. Through his expeditions and research Thor Heyerdahl investigated how different cultures have influenced another through history. 

Currently, this list includes 238 collections from all over the world. The Heyerdahl Archives span the years 1937 to 2002 and include his photographic collection, diaries, private letters, expedition plans, articles, newspaper clippings, original book and article manuscript. The Heyerdahl Archives are administreted by the Kon-Tiki Museum and the National Library of Norway in Oslo. 

Thor Heyerdahl was, and still is, one of the most famous Norwegians known outside of Norway. Born on October 6, 1914 in Larvik, Norway, he died on April 18, 2022 in Cola Micheri, Italy. It was the Kon-Tiki Expedition from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 that brought Thor Heyerdahl international fame. In the course of 101 days, he and five other men drifted across approximantely 8 000 kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. 

The documentary film about the voyage was awarded an Oscar in 1951 and the book about the expedition was translated into approximately 66 different languages.