Viking and Medieval Scandinavia

This article argues that the name Hvíta-Kristr, ‘White-Christ’, by which the God of the Christians came to be known in Scandinavia during the conversion period, should be taken as a Celticism introduced into Norse usage and not as evidence of religious syncretism.

This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the ways in which medieval writers used gender in their writing about the past. Taking Landnámabók as its case study, it discusses the depiction of Auðr in djúpauðga and the other female colonists proposing that the variety of representations of female settlers (as colonists of varied statuses and in different places in the physical and human landscape) could be connected with the way in which Landnámabók itself was compiled and thus that varied (competing?) ideas existed in medieval Iceland about the status of women in relation to men.

This article re-examines the arguments for the origins and meaning of the word ‘Denmark’ and the historical context in which it arose. It rejects the idea that ‘Denmark’ originally referred to the eastern part of the later kingdom in sources such as Ohthere’s Voyage and the Jelling stones, and looks instead to ninth-century Frankish annals for evidence of the name. It argues that ‘Denmark’ originally referred to an area on the Danish-Saxon border, and by drawing on work on ‘ethnogenesis’ attempts to explain how this name came to apply to the entire area of the later kingdom.

This article attempts to demonstrate how the interpretation of the ‘Conversion Verses’ of Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld can often depend heavily on the prose narrative of the sagas in which they are embedded. It is argued that the poet’s progression from one religion to another is merely an illusion constructed within the prose framework; when divorced from the wider saga context, Hallfreðr’s stanzas are shown to comprise not a linear sequence but a cluster of separate utterances in which the poet’s conversion is depicted multiple times through a variety of rhetorical lenses.

This article argues that post-medieval material is a key to understanding the enigmatic Old Norse god Loki. It seems that there were two Lokis: the mythological character and a vätte ‘domestic spirit’ living under or by the fireplace. The mythic character derived from this vätte, via the figure of the youth by the fireplace, parallel to the fairy tale Ash Lad who extensively overlaps with the Loki of myths. Loki and the Ash Lad are both indispensable super-providers yet unacceptable to the establishment; they are essentially ‘semi-otherworlders’. Hence there is no real contradiction between their beneficial and destructive activities.

This article discusses magic as it appears in the corpus of the Postola sögur. It suggests that such texts’ descriptions of magic are subordinated to discursive demands rather than empirical accuracy.

This article examines the taking of prisoners and collecting of ransoms by Vikings on the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula, as described in two eleventh-century documents. Both documents are valuable sources for an understanding of Viking activity in the most westerly area of continental Europe.

This article examines the use of traditional forms and conventions of eddic wisdom poetry in Sólarljóð and Hugsvinnsmál, two explicitly Christian neo-eddic compositions of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. I argue that these poems drew on and adapted aspects of mythological wisdom poetry, particularly within their complex narrative frames, in order to convey the authority of Christian teaching of a potentially problematic nature. This led to some poetic difficulties that may help to explain why the genre was not more successful, but these challenges also demonstrate the creativity which makes these poems so intriguing.

This article argues that some innovations in Viking-Age personal naming practices reflect differing attitudes towards the naming of male and female children. Gender imbalances in a number of innovative personal name deuterothemes which exist in both male and female versions (the latter developing from the former) suggest that deuterothemes indexing pre-Christian religious life were much more frequently applied to female children. This contrasts with the use of the so- called theophoric protothemes, which were more commonly used in naming males.

This article presents a cognitive model associated with the Old Norse concept of the níðingr. It is argued that the socially disruptive nature of the níðingr is associated with divine wrath, which again entails expulsion and misfortune. These ideas are primarily investigated in Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and the Christian legal formulas Tryggðamál and Griðamál, and it is suggested that the archaic ‘níðingr model’ was adapted to Christian frames of reference after the conversion.