What was the life of a young viking like before 1066. Would the children start training for battle as soon as they could walk? And when they DID start training, would Glima have been fighting style of choice?
I've been searching for sources that discuss this question and have had a hard time finding anything.
Thanks for your help!
Children would start training for... farming. Early Medieval Scandinavians were by and large not warriors at all but farmers. In fact, the reason the axe is commonly depicted as the Viking weapon of choice is because most people would own one, being a common tool to have on a farm.
This question is a few days old, but I thought it was a very interesting topic and wanted to suggest a few possibilities. First off, I'd recommend reposting the question a bit more precisely to get the attention of our Norse specialists. Perhaps: "What would the youth of Rollo of Normandy have been like? What kind of education or training would he have had?" If your research has already taken you into particular directions, the more specificity the better.
Three different options pop into my head. First, looking at contemporary sources, you might look at what Rollo actually did, then work to deduce what kind of training he might have had in leadership and logistics. Asser's Life of Alfred (an English king who famously fought the vikings in the late 800s) might serve as a useful comparison for what it was like to grow up in a violent society at that time.
It's a bit more difficult to know what life was like specifically for youths in Scandinavia. Archaeologists haven't pursued these questions systematically, and our best texts were written hundreds of years after events—usually in medieval Iceland, by people living a very different lifestyle from Viking Age lords like Rollo. That hesitation aside, you might want to check out the Havamal, which is an Icelandic poet's idea of the advice that Odin might have given a young freeman like Rollo. It comes from a very important collection of Norse poetry known as the Poetic Edda.
Another option would be looking at the Saga of the Volsungs, which talks a bit about how the young hero Sigurd was raised. It's a legendary story with lots of fanciful details, but it will give you an idea about what people's interests and priorities were when they discussed the education of youths. I'd recommend working from the Penguin paperback, translated by Jesse Byock. It has a terrific introduction explaining a bit about the text.
Finally, you might want to see if your library has Everyday Life in Viking Age Towns. If so, pick it up and read the article below. If not, request it from your Interlibrary Loan desk. This article talks about the experience of young in Dublin, which is not how Rollo would have grown up, but there's a lot of comparative discussion. As long as you remember that Rollo would have more likely grown up in a rural hall than an urban site, this can be a useful reference.
Each of the approaches I've recommended above would require a good amount of creativity, which means you've asked a really incisive question! If you try following any of them, I'd recommend meeting your professor to chat through your ideas.
And as a concluding note, I'd be pretty skeptical about references to glima. I haven't come across any in my own research. Although Glima is certainly a martial art now, I doubt it was one when Rollo was growing up. I'd speculate that back then "glima" meant something akin to modern English "wrestling," which could suggest competition or combat, but also artless roughhousing or brawling.