Viking studies
More general subjects:
The Legacy of Medieval Scandinavian Encounters with England and the Insular World
The Vikings had a major and lasting impact on the English language. This volume is a unique companion to the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact providing expert discussions of its contexts backgrounds and the considerable afterlife of its effects through the Middle Ages and down to the present day. It contains thirteen new articles by leading specialists in the fields of early medieval languages literature and history specially commissioned in order to explore as wide a range as possible of the historical and cultural contexts for Anglo-Scandinavian encounters in the Viking Age and the evidence for them. These essays analyse in detail the Old Norse influence on English offering studies of words and their meanings in their textual and literary contexts and including lexicography dialectology and syntactic research; they explore findings from archaeology inscriptions and place-names; and they situate Anglo-Scandinavian contacts in the larger multilingual multicultural contexts of the North Sea and Irish Sea worlds.
The Making of the Eastern Vikings
Rus’ and Varangians in the Middle Ages
Historiography on the Vikings of the East — the Rus' and the Varangians — has been both multiform and varied but it has been invariably focused on actual historical events and the extent to which these are accurately reflected in written sources. In contrast very little attention has been paid up to now to the narrators behind these medieval accounts to their motives in writing or to the context in which they were working.
This volume aims to redress the balance by offering a re-examination of medieval sources on the Eastern Vikings and by highlighting ongoing ‘debates’ concerning the identities of the Rus' and the Varangians in the medieval period. The chapters gathered here compare and contrast sources emanating from different cultures — Byzantium the Abbasid Caliphate and its successor states the early kingdoms of the Rus' and the high medieval Scandinavian kingdoms — and examine what significance these sources have attached to the Rus' and the Varangians in different contexts. The result is a new understanding of how different cultures chose to define themselves in relation to one another and a new perspective on the history of the Scandinavian peoples in the East.
Alternative Facts and Plausible Fictions in the Northern European Past
How Politics and Culture Have Written and Rewritten History
The use of the past for contemporary purposes has been a feature of historical and archaeological investigation from ancient times. This ‘politicization of the past’ is often associated with at best an inadvertent detachment from an objective use of evidence and at worst its wilful misuse. Such use of the past is perhaps most evident in the construction of narratives of nations and ethnic groups — particularly in relation to origins or the perceived ‘golden ages’ of peoples.
This book seeks to assess the role played by different ideologies in the shaping of the past from early times up until the present day in the interpretation of the history and archaeology of Northern Europe whether in Northern Europe itself or further afield. It also considers how those who research interpret and present the Northern European past should respond to such uses. The chapters drawn together here explore key questions asking how contemporary ideologies of identity have shaped the past what measures should be taken to discourage an inaccurate understanding of the past and if scholars should draw on the past in order to counter racism and xenophobia or if this can itself lead to potentially dangerous misunderstandings of history.
Animals and Animated Objects in the Early Middle Ages
Since time immemorial animals have played crucial roles in people’s lives. In Continental and Northern Europe especially in the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages animals were both feared and revered. Varying and often ambivalent perceptions of fauna were expressed through everyday practices religious beliefs and the zoomorphic ornamentation of a wide plethora of objects that ranged from jewellery weapons and equestrian equipment to wagons and ships. This timely volume critically investigates the multivalence of animals in medieval archaeology literature and art in order to present human attitudes to creatures such as bears horses dogs and birds in a novel and interdisciplinary way.
The chapters gathered together here explore the prominence of animals animal parts and their various visual representations in domestic spaces and the wider public arena on the battlefield and in an array of ritual practices but also examine the importance of zoomorphic art for emerging elites at a time of social and political tensions across Scandinavia and the oft-overlooked Western Slavic and Baltic societies. This innovative book draws together scholars from across Europe in order to pave the way for a nuanced international and interdisciplinary dialogue that has the capacity to substantially increase our perception of human and animal worlds of the Early Middle Ages.
Networks in the Medieval North
Studies in Honour of Jón Viðar Sigurðsson
By the late thirteenth century Norgesveldet - the Norwegian realm - stretched far beyond its core in western Scandinavia. At its height in 1264 Norgesveldet connected Norse speakers in tributary territories ranging from the Irish Sea to Orkney and across the Atlantic to the Faroes Iceland and Greenland. But what held this disparate realm together? What were the dynamics of power between the men and women of the governing and elite classes of Norgesveldet? And what roles did different bodies play at different levels of society in creating and maintaining these networks - from kings and bishops to scribes and scholars traders and law-makers?
This volume aims to expand on and further recent important research into connections between Norway and the wider Norse North Atlantic from the eleventh century during which the Norwegian kingdom began to emerge through to the fourteenth-century decline of Norgesveldet with the creation of the Kalmar Union. Each chapter addresses a different facet of the Norgesveldet networks building a complex picture of both their function and their evolving nature. Taking as its inspiration the research and career of its honorand Jón Viðar Sigurðsson the volume explores medieval Norway and its wider connections using three key frameworks - sociopolitical networks legal and material networks and literary networks - with the aim of shedding new light on the people and processes of this North Atlantic polity.
Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies
Nature and the Environment in Old Norse Literature and Culture
Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies is the first anthology to combine environmental humanities approaches and the study of premodern Nordic literature and culture. The chapters gathered here present innovative research based on the most recent developments within ecologically informed literary and cultural studies. Covering a wide variety of sources the volume provides new insights into the Old Norse environmental imagination showing how premodern texts relate to nature and the environment - both the real-world environments of the Viking Age and Middle Ages and the fantastic environments of some parts of saga literature. Collectively the contributions shed new light on the role of cultural contacts textual traditions and intertextuality in the shaping of Old Norse perceptions and representations of nature and the environment as well as on the modern reception and (mis-)use of these ideas. The volume moreover has a contemporary relevance inviting readers to consider the lessons that can be learned from how people perceived their environments and interacted with them in the past as we face environmental crises in our own times.
History, Landscape, and Language in the Northern Isles and Caithness
‘A’m grippit dis laand’. A Gedenkschrift for Doreen Waugh
Doreen Waugh was a native Shetlander and a well-renowned scholar of Old Norse and Gaelic place-names in Northern Scotland and the Northern Isles. Not only did Waugh’s research significantly advance scholarly understanding of the ‘Viking’ settlement of the North Atlantic her generosity with both her time and knowledge inspired and motivated a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines from archaeology and history to historical geography linguistics and place-name studies.
Based on - and written in tribute to - Waugh’s work this interdisciplinary volume draws together essays covering Northern Scotland the Northern Isles and beyond both during and after the early medieval period. The contributions gathered here draw on Waugh’s wider-ranging research interests to offer a range of novel insights into the many communities cultures and customs that have characterized and connected the Northern Isles and their North Atlantic neighbours.
Werewolves in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature
Between the Monster and the Man
At the heart of any story of metamorphosis lies the issue of identity and the tales of the werwulf (lit. ‘man-wolf’) are just as much about the wolf as about the man. What are the constituents of the human in general? What symbolic significance do they hold? How do they differ for different types of human? How would it affect the individual if one or more of these elements were to be subtracted?
Focusing on a group of Old Norse-Icelandic werewolf narratives many of which have hitherto been little studied this insightful book sets out to answer these questions by exploring how these texts understood and conceptualized what it means to be human. At the heart of this investigation are five factors key to the werewolf existence - skin clothing food landscape and purpose - and these are innovatively examined through a cross-disciplinary approach that carefully teases apart the interaction between two polarizations: the external and social and the interior and psychological. Through this approach the volume presents a comprehensive new look at the werewolf not only as a supernatural creature and a literary motif but also as a metaphor that bears on the relationship between human and non-human between Self and Other and that is able to situate the Old-Norse texts into a broader intellectual discourse that extends beyond medieval Iceland and Norway.
Sainthood, Scriptoria, and Secular Erudition in Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia
Essays in Honour of Kirsten Wolf
While medieval Iceland has long been celebrated and studied for its rich tradition of vernacular literature in recent years attention has increasingly been paid to other areas of Old Norse-Icelandic scholarship in particular the production of hagiographical and religious literature. At the same time a similar renaissance has arisen in other fields in particular Old Norse-Icelandic paleography philology and manuscript studies thanks to the development of the so-called ‘new philology’ and its impact on our understanding of manuscripts. Central to these developments has been the scholarship of Kristen Wolf one of the foremost authorities in the fields of Old Norse-Icelandic hagiography biblical literature paleography codicology textual criticism and lexicography who is the honorand of this volume.
Taking Prof. Wolf’s own research interests as its inspiration this volume takes an unprecedented interdisciplinary approach to the theme of Sainthood Scriptoria and Secular Erudition in Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia in order both to celebrate Wolf’s profound career and to illustrate the many ways in which these seemingly different fields overlap and converse with each other in important and productive ways. From sculpture to sagas and from skaldic verse to textual editions and the translation of hitherto unpublished works the contributions gathered here offer new and important insights into our knowledge of medieval and early modern Scandinavian literature history and culture.
Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic
A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550
Anyone familiar with the Modern Icelandic language will know that the country’s policy is to avoid borrowing lexemes from other languages and instead to draw on their own vocabulary. This often results in the formation of a word pair consisting of a loanword and its respective native equivalent as the process of borrowing systematically eludes the tight tangles of language policy. But how did this phenomenon develop in the Middle Ages before a purist ideology was formed?
This volume offers a unique analysis of a previously unexplored area of Old Norse linguistics by investigating the way in which loanwords and native synonyms interacted in the Middle Ages. Through a linguistic-philological investigation of texts from all medieval Icelandic prose genres the book maps out the strategies by which the variation and interplay between loanwords and native words were manifested in medieval Iceland and suggests that it is possible to identify the same dynamics in other languages with a comparable literary tradition. In doing so new light is shed on language development and usage in the Middle Ages and the gap between case-study and general linguistic theory is bridged over.
The Cult of Saints in Nidaros Archbishopric
Manuscripts, Miracles, Objects
Scandinavia has often been considered as a peripheral part of the Christian world with its archbishopric in Nidaros an isolated outpost of the Catholic Church. This volume however offers a reassessment of such preconceptions by exploring the way in which the Nidaros see celebrated the cult of saints and followed traditions that were both part of and distinct from elsewhere in Christian Europe. The contributions gathered here come from specialists across different disciplines among them historians philologists art historians and epigraphists to offer a multifaceted insight into how texts and objects sculpture runes and relics all drove the cult of saints in this northern corner of Europe. In doing so the volume offers a nuanced understanding of the development of cults the saints themselves and their miracles not only in the Norse world but also more widely.