Viking and Medieval Scandinavia

Manors and manorial demesnes are a familiar part of the medieval world of Europe, outside of the north. Very little focus has been on manorial demesnes in Iceland, which has an abundance of sources on manors and demesnes. These sources have mostly been overlooked, but this article reveals some of the rich history of Icelandic medieval manorial demesnes, shedding new light on the Nordic medieval world. Manorial demesnes in Iceland existed from as early as the sources go, the eleventh century, and probably earlier. They were the centre of chieftain and clerical power, large and populous farms with large production.

Place-names can tell us much about a country’s history and landscape. The present article examines Icelandic place-names with possible Christian content that are attested before the Reformation (1550), and lists all such names, with the exception of ambiguous ones containing the elements ‘helg-’ and ‘kross-’, which are too numerous to incorporate. In addition to providing evidence that a place-name might derive from association with a church or its patron saint, the documentation indicates the length of time it may take for a new place-name to be adopted (several centuries), and the fact that more than one place-name could apply to the same location.

The location of Eric the Red’s farmstead of Brattahlið in Greenland’s Eastern Settlement has long been debated. Following investigations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was later concluded that it lay in the modern settlement of Qassiarsuk. A contrary view has been propounded by Ole Guldager who has suggested that a Norse ruin group at Qinngua, at the top of Eiríksfjörðr (Tunulliarfik fjord), is a more likely location. This paper presents new palaeoenvironmental evidence involving pollen analysis and landscape history, together with a consideration of settlement structure culminating in the excavation of a putative church site, and suggests that wherever Eric’s farm was located, it was probably not at Qinngua.

Through a critical review of previous scholarship, the article argues that the conversion of the Danish king Harald Bluetooth should not be dated to c. 965, as is usually done, but to 963, which is the date implied by Widukind of Corvey. The cleric Poppo, whose ordeal convinced the king and his men of the superiority of Christ, was not an obscure missionary, but a close collaborator of Archbishop Bruno of Cologne, who at the time was the regent of Germany. On this background, a new interpretation of the political significance of the event in Germany and in Denmark is developed. Finally, it is suggested that the new clerical culture that was developing in German court circles in the mid-tenth century, as well as the concomitant exaltation of the German king and emperor’s quasi-sacral nature, made conversion a much more attractive option for pagan rulers in northern and eastern Europe than during previous centuries; this might contribute towards explaining the sudden success of Christianization in these regions in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.

The word skáld is often explained as deriving from words for ‘abuse’, and the skald would thus have received his name as a ‘defamer’. This paper tests the arguments of that interpretation and arrives at the conclusion that ‘skáld’ is more probably derived from words for ‘sound’: the skald proclaims. Through a discussion of the word rún, the argument is made that the runes could be understood as sounding in a way analogous to the activity of the skald: in an oral society, writing would have been understood as the carrier of voice. The name of one of the most prolific rune carvers, Œpir, has seemed mysterious: why would anyone call himself ‘the screamer’ or ‘the loud-mouth’? In this paper, it is suggested that if the runes were considered as voice carriers, Œpir in the sense of ‘the proclaimer’ would be a congenial signature for a rune carver — or for several carvers.

Iceland differed from other Norse colonies as it lacked social structures found elsewhere, but also because the Icelanders established their own complex social structures. This article examines aspects of these social structures to determine how they contributed to a new Icelandic identity. The emergence of these social structures may be attributed to factors such as new patterns of social liability that may have developed in response to the unusually scattered population. The settlement pattern may have contributed to the significance of the role of law in early Iceland: a legal framework was required to manage the settlers’ claims and rights to the land. There emerged in Iceland a sense of what defined the settlers, its basis being the law and ‘legal attachment’. The uniqueness of Iceland’s social structures was intertwined with the landnám itself. It was the unsettled land that gave the Icelanders the freedom to create their society.

This article is an attempt to analyse some of the important aspects of the ideology of the ruler in pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. These aspects are the notion of ‘sacral kingship’ as it has been perceived within the study of Norse religion and the methods used in dealing with this subject; the relation between the notions ‘descent from the gods’ and ‘euhenerism’; possible solutions to the fact that we have both the gods Freyr and Óðinn as progenitors of the Scandinavian and Germanic kings; the relation between the Christian notion of rex iustus and the pagan ideology of kings. Basically the article argues that these subjects cannot be dealt with without a comparative view of the Scandinavian and Germanic material.