There is a stereotype about how vikings loved their beer and mead, and it wasn’t invented by Marvel Comics. Here, you see a stone carved with a scene of Scandinavians from the Early Middle Ages and they are enjoying their alcohol. In the Old Norse poem _Grímnismál_, some of the deceased warriors await the final battle of Ragnarök in the great hall of Valhalla, passing the time drinking delicious mead of the heavens.
In the poem _Gestatháttr_ (Old Norse, possibly 10th c), which is a sort of guideline for how travelling guests ought to conduct themselves, the speaker ruminates on the blessings and downsides of consuming alcohol:
“A worse provision no man can take from table than too much beer-bibbing: for the more he drinks the less control he has of his own mind. . . .
Drunk I was, I was over-drunk, at that cunning Fjalar’s. It’s the best drunkenness, when every one after it regains his reason” . .
Source(s): @norse-mythology.org, “Viking food and drink” Daniel McCoy. Image wikipedia fromGotland, Swedish Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm. Stanzas 12 and 14 of “Hávamál” (_Gestatháttr_ is embedded in this poem), Northvegr Foundation, Poetic Edda, Thorpe trans, “Havamal or “The High One’s Lay”).
