More than you might think!

Scandinavia around the birth of Christ was not some isolated and desolate hinterland to the continental Germanic world. We know for a fact that Roman trade networks reached far into Scandinavia from archaeological finds of roman coins and other goods. However, much of the archaeological evidence available comes from Sweden and Denmark. I am not very familiar with sources that deal with Norway but I'd hazard a guess there's a good deal of information in Norwegian that hasn't made it into English.

Before we talk about what was going on in Scandinavia, we need to talk about what was NOT going on. One of the most common tropes in ethnographic works in Lat Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is a common origin for Germanic peoples in Scandinavia. Goths and Lombards for example traced their origin from Scandinavia to the Baltic Coast before becoming involved in continental affairs. Many efforts have been made to connect places in Sweden such as the island of Gotland to the ancestral home of the Goths. Such efforts are usually somewhat misguided and archaeological evidence is often inconclusive.

However, there is precious little evidence for Scandinavia actually serving as a "womb of nations". Ancient authors often point to population growth or war as pressures for migration from Scandinavia, but we need to keep in mind that these are not necessarily, or even often, the source of migration for populations. Economic opportunities, trade relations, military service and so on also serve to explain population movements in this time period.

It would also be a mistake to ascribe later recorded practices to these Scandinavian communities. Efforts at reconstructing Germanic pantheons, political systems, mythology, or legal systems based off of later works such as the sagas, law codes in the post-Roman world, or later works such as the Gesta Danorum are misguided and really bring us no closer to understanding this part of Europe at this time.

So now that we have established what wasn't happening, what was? We know for example that Scandinavia was home to a variety of groups that we might label "tribes" which likely centered around kin groups led by chieftains and their retainers. Scandinavia in the Roman Iron Age was also seemingly a rather war like place to be with many deposits in Danish bogs containing weapons and armor, often proposed to be the fruits of victory offered up to divine forces. As the name also implies, iron was the tool of choice for the Germanic world at this point having eclipsed bronze in utility some several centuries before. Weapons and mail made of iron are well represented in discoveries from this time, even if many of the finer goods such as mail coats were likely imports from the Roman world.

This world was likely quite a violent one with no centers of organized political control, instead a very high number of groups were likely in competition with each, occasionally coalescing into short lived larger polities. Young men from these polities may have sough their fortune and livelihoods in the Roman periphery and Roman world proper as mercenaries, traders, and raiders targeting Roman and other Germanic areas for exploitation.

So what about the daily life of the "average person"?

Farming in much of Scandinavia is difficult but perfectly feasible with common crops being millet, barley, wheat, peas, and beans. Cows were almost ubiquitous throughout the Germanic world with pigs, sheep, and horses also contributing. According to Malcolm Todd's work The Early Germans goats and chickens are scantily attested, and fruit cultivation also remained quite primitive. Roman wine is very scarce, instead the drink of choice, besides water, seems to have been grain based alcohols with a smattering of mead and fruit based drinks produced locally.

Inhabited spaces were likely quite small with only a few families living alongside each other in farming settlements. We know from bog deposits that certain products such as butter were produced locally, other goods such as Roman bronze, glass, and iron products are also well represented, and Roman gold in coins likely provided the basis of Scandinavian gold crafts.

Burials from this time are usually assumed to have been cremations, but burials from bogs, whether through executions for crimes or as ritual offerings, are well represented, and many of the bodies are found disfigured in certain ways such as having been flayed, or covered in branches, or decapitated. Sources such as Tacitus do propose some religious practices such as horse divination, the procession of a fertility deity, and worship of a sacred pair of twins are all plausible, and consistent with other evidence from different parts of the world, but attempting to reconstruct an entire Germanic belief system from these smatterings of evidence is implausible.