Viking and Medieval Scandinavia

The Icelandic Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr is investigated as an import into the late medieval culture of Iceland. Despite its status as import, the narrative can be viewed as a useful clue to the ideas and beliefs current among the medieval Icelandic audience. It serves as an instance of the importance of taking translated literature into fuller account when medieval Icelandic mentalities are explored. Among the topics discussed in this article are playfulness and irony in the narrative and its discourse on emotions, gender, love and carnality. From this discussion, the romantic saga of Flóres and Blankiflúr emerges as a sophisticated narrative which in medieval Iceland would have functioned as a subversive or even rebellious text, particularly in its treatment of gender demarcations and adolescent love.

This paper is based on an investigation of references to and descriptions of burials in all forty of the Íslendingasögur. The sheer number of burials mentioned in these sagas makes them an enlightening example of how their authors/compilers remembered their ancestors in writing. They are shown as taking place along a timeline that extends from ‘pagan’ (pre-950) to early Christian (post-1000). The adoption of Christianity in the year 1000 is perceived as a point of rupture, possibly one involving considerable trauma, in social praxis. The descriptions of burials become key reference points in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic cultural memory of this distant past. In their textual instantiation, these descriptions can be regarded as ‘sites of memory’ just as surely as the physical burial mounds and graves themselves.

Landnámabók contains an anecdote about Auðun stoti, ‘the Stutterer’, an early Icelandic settler, who encounters a magnificent grey horse that emerges from and ultimately returns to a lake on the Snafellsnes peninsula. Certain key characteristics of this horse recall Grani, the horse of the hero Sigurðr. Auðun’s family connections point beyond a purely Norse context, however. Landnámabók claims that Auðun was married to the daughter of an Irish king and even quotes a genuine Irish name for both his wife and probably also his father-in-law. This makes it noteworthy that the core characteristics of Auðun’s ‘lake-horse’ not only invoke images of Grani, but also directly parallel accounts of the Grey of Macha, the horse of the hero Cú Chulainn in Irish tales of the Ulster Cycle. This article discusses the value of the anecdote about Auðun’s ‘lake-horse’ for the understanding of Irish-Norse cultural relationships.

Arabic sources of the ninth and tenth centuries are valuable yet poorly studied material on the expansion of Scandinavians, called Rus by these writers, into Eastern Europe. While these sources have usually been introduced as auxiliary material for other witnesses, such as the Slavonic Primary Chronicle and Old Norse and Byzantine writings, there are ample grounds to examine their accounts as an independent body of information. A comparison of Arabic and non-Arabic accounts on the Rus reveals important geographical, social, and cultural differences in their descriptions, opening up a new perspective on this chapter of the Viking Age.

This article examines the depictions of royal luck in three sagas of Óláfr Tryggvason. In existing scholarship Old Norse concepts of luck defy clear definition, having been read variously as Christian and pagan; abstract and concrete; individual and societal; predetermined and serendipitous; innate and endowed from above. These apparent oppositions need not be mutually incompatible. Rather, the sagas discussed in this article approach these thematic concerns from multiple angles simultaneously. Since the texts are the products of an iterative tradition, notions of luck are shaped diachronically by layers of subjective ideology and idiosyncrasy, arising from multiple stages of authorial, editorial, and critical (re)interpretation.

The present article investigates the unique features of Icelandic geographical terrain and its impact upon cognitive reality of medieval Iceland. The focus is on saga depictions of Viking-Age individuals on Iceland’s western coast passing into their local mountains when they die. This, it is contended, does not constitute death in the conventional sense of ceasing to be but instead a transformation into ambiguous ‘other’ entities which continue to inhabit the landscape in an altered state. Textual analysis is brought into dialogue with archaeological data concerning placements of mounds and burial sites in the same region and time frame. The aim is to illuminate the role of Icelandic landscape as a stage shaping medieval Icelandic beliefs and attitudes vis-avis their dead. Instead of a dichotomous opposition between this-world and other-world, it is proposed that the medieval Icelandic landscape was perceived as both at the same time.

Fate in medieval Scandinavia is generally defined as a religious category. The present article argues, however, that a socio-political analysis of fate as it is used both in Íslendingasögur and Eddic poetry offers an alternative, more effective definition. This definition is further refined by placing fate in a structural relationship with magic.

The account of Sigurðr jórsalafari’s crusade (1107-1110), as preserved in the kings’ sagas, contains a few distinctive pieces of information on Sintra and Lisbon. While not accurate in terms of political conditions at the time of writing, in c. 1220 or later, they do give a reasonably accurate account of the state of affairs in regard to the Lisbon region in the early twelfth century, suggesting that the author (or authors) of Morkinskinna may have had access to a special source of information on Portugal. Based on an analysis of the description of the castle of Sintra, in combination with the skald Halldórr skvaldri’s account of Sigurðr’s battles, this article proposes that the information was drawn from a prosimetrum that preserved the crusader’s original perception of Sintra and Lisbon.

Some scholars have contended that the seven-day week in Scandinavia predates the introduction of Christianity. This argument has had its basis in the fact that four of the seven vernacular day-names include the names of ancestral gods and goddesses, respectively Týr, Óðinn, Þórr, and Frigg. In the present article the argument is taken up for reconsideration. The use of theophoric day-names by the Church in England and Germany at the time of the introduction of Christianity into Scandinavia (c. 950-1100) is surveyed in detail. On this basis, it is proposed that Church institutions would not have resisted the introduction of such names in the newly Christianized Scandinavia.