The Viking Society for Northern Research is a group dedicated to the study and promotion of the ancient culture of Scandinavia.
[1] After some debate, this was broadened to include all those interested in the Norsemen and the history of the North, and an inaugural session of the reconstituted Viking Club or Orkney, Shetland and Northern Society was held at the King's Weigh House Rooms on 12 January 1894.
[3] Punch made fun of the Nordic titles of its officers with a satirical "Saga of the Shield-Maiden": There'll be many a black, black eye, mother, in the club to-morrow night, For the Things-bothman and the Law-bothman have together arranged to fight; While the stakes will be held by the Skatt-taker, and the Jarl will join the fray, And we Shield-maidens will shriek and whoop in Old Norse, as best we may!
In the words of Punch: If we scratch up a scanty Skanian skill with skald and skal and ski, In the foremost place of societies soon in Europe we'll be!
[8] The mockery touched off vehement exchanges of letters in the Orkney Herald and the Shetland News in which St. Magnus was used as a pen name and reference was made to effeminacy and nithings.
[13][14] Collingwood, an art professor who became a philologist and translator as well as illustrator of Old Norse texts, presented his oil painting The Parliament of Ancient Iceland to the society and it hung in their meeting room.
[15] From its earliest days the Society brought together the prominent scholars in the field: William Morris, Eiríkr Magnússon, Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Frederick York Powell were among the active members in its early days, and its publications, lectures, and symposia have continued in the same vein, featuring Gabriel Turville-Petre, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Ursula Dronke, for example.