Our second museum in December was the History Museum. We made great use of the free entry and spent several hours exploring the >1000 sqm of the Viking World exhibit. It was really well curated, with super modern digital displays to interpret the exhibits in several languages, ‘smell-o-vision’ stations where you can use a bulb to puff out some historical smells – smoke and sheep poop in a home, coriander seeds mixed into porridge, pine tar from a ship. We got to spell out messages in runes and hear old Norse. We also had lunch at the cafe, which was pricy (to offset the free admission), but pretty good! Graham had the Viking plate (I had the more modern and new-world-ingredient-full lasagne). We did not even see the upstairs, but I appreciated the ‘what is history’ exhibit, which took an airport metaphor so visitors could travel to different ‘destinations’ and consider different perspectives on historical interpretations.
The main departure lounge, for thinking about how historical artifacts are interpreted, and how our own ‘artifacts’ could be interpreted by future generations. Also, I liked the airport motif! 
Graham had the ‘viking plate’ lunch, which had all ingredients that would have been available in Sweden in 1000AD. Eat as your ancestors did! 
Vikings hoarded shit, and there are a lot of ‘big finds’ that have been made of coins and tools. If you know, you know.
The section on gender was especially well-done: it described how many 1800s and 1900s descriptions of grave contents and Viking life was interpreted through the then-contemporary lens of what men and women could/should do and be. When skeletons were crushed beyond recognizable sex-differences, they assumed all jewelry was for women, and all weapons were for men. More modern biochemistry methods make it possible to determine the sex of grave skeletons, and having an open mind allows for a more accurate idea of the range of possibilities in Viking life. The exhibit also challenged common ideas about whiteness and monoculture in Viking communities. The Viking world extended from Newfoundland and Greenland to Russia and from Scandinavia down to North Africa… everywhere they traveled by boat. Viking hoards have been discovered to contain Moroccan glass beads, bronze Buddha statues, roman coins, Polish amber, etc. Since Vikings brought back (probably enslaved) people from their raids, they also had cultural and ethnic diversity in their communities. Turns out folks that squeak about having people of colour in historical or Norse-mythology adaptations should really crack a book. Letting aside the fact that fiction can just be fiction, it would not have been weird for Vikings to know about, see in their communities, or adopt customs from non-scandi people. Interesting to think that a lot of the baggage we place on historical people is our own baggage.
Artifact of the day for me: Viking-era iron spikes that folks tied onto their shoes with leather straps to avoid slipping on ice. If a design ain’t broke, don’t fix it! In the spirit of Swedish advent calendars, the Historiska Instagram account has daily ‘gift tips’ from historia, and this was the idea from December 6th.