North Sea lands studies (c. 500-1500)

In recent years archaeologists working at Norse sites across the North Atlantic have excavated a number of very small churches with cemeteries often associated with individual farms. Such sites seem to be a characteristic feature of early ecclesiastical establishments in Norse settlements around the North Atlantic and they stand in marked contrast to church sites elsewhere in Europe. But what was the reason behind this phenomenon?

From Greenland to Denmark and from Ireland to the Hebrides Iceland and Norway this volume presents a much-needed overview of small church studies from around the North Atlantic. The chapters gathered here discuss the different types of evidence for small churches and early ecclesiastical landscapes review existing debates and develop a synthesis that places the small churches in a broader context. Ultimately despite the varied types of data at play the contributions to this volume combine to offer a more coherent picture of the small church phenomenon pointing to a church that was able to answer the needs of a newly converted population despite the lack of an established infrastructure and throwing new light on how people lived and worshipped in an environment of dispersed settlements.

While the medieval regions that form modern-day Britain Ireland Iceland and the Scandinavian states were very much like today home to diverse ethnic and linguistic groups it is evident that the peoples who inhabited the north-western Atlantic seaboard at this time were nonetheless connected by key cultural environmental historical and ideological experiences that set them apart from other regions of Europe. This volume is the first to focus specifically on these cultural and linguistic connections from the perspective of the history of emotions. The contributions collected here examine cultural encounters among medieval North Atlantic peoples with regard to the gradual development of shared emotional models and the emergence of early cross-cultural emotional communities in this region. The chapters also explore how the folk psychologies illustrated in the oldest European vernacular writing traditions (Irish English and Scandinavian) bear witness to cultural models for emotions that first took shape in pre-Christian times.

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.

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.

Between c. 1000 and c. 1200 ad emigrants from Normandy travelled long distances from their homeland spreading their political influence to the shores of the North Sea the Irish Sea the Mediterranean the Black Sea and the Baltic. Their willingness to cross the seas gave Normans access to new territories and new ideas extending their authority and reputation far beyond northern France. But how and why were these Norman groups able to develop such power? The chapters collected here engage directly with this question by examining the sites and processes that underpinned this expansion. The contributors ask what different Norman groups took from the societies around them and what they rejected; they consider how non-Norman powers — in Ireland England the Fatimid Caliphate Byzantium the Holy Land and Rus — responded to and were shaped by their interactions with Normans in contested zones; and they examine how Normans understood and imagined their own relationship with the sea as a place of exchange a zone of uncertain control and an ambiguous kind of border. Drawing together material culture and written evidence this far-reaching volume offers a fully-developed discussion of how and in what ways these Norman worlds and societies could be said to be ‘transcultural’ and in doing so makes a compelling case that attention to movement and maritime exchange must be central to our understanding of the extension of Norman influence in this period.

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.