Freya at the table

For the Vikings of the Viking Age, the rhythm was not starter-main-dessert but two meals that marked the day: dagmál (morning meal, after a few hours of work) and náttmál (evening meal). Apart from these stood the veizla, the great honor banquet, prolonged by the sumbl, the ritual ceremony where the drinking horn of mead was passed around while making oaths and honoring the gods. The offerings (blót) set aside for the Vanir formed a sacred category of their own, outside the ordinary meal.

Wild honey and its fermented version, mead (mjöðr), are the golden thread of this Northern cuisine: the only sweetener available before the sugar trade routes, it gilds porridges, binds offering cakes, and becomes the sacred drink of the sumbl. For a Vanir goddess linked to fertility and abundance, honey is the very taste of the earth's generosity.