Viking and Medieval Scandinavia

This article analyses how the power of central ecclesiastical authorities was projected into the far reaches of Northern Europe by means of short, written texts (bréf). It focuses particularly on the portrayal of document-bearing messengers in Lárentíus saga, a fourteenth-century biography of Lárentíus Kálfsson, the bishop of Hólar from 1324 until 1331. The saga repeatedly underlines that the authority of the literate clerics who carried the written mandates of bishops and archbishops was unpredictable, open to challenge, sometimes overstretched, and sometimes undermined. This representation of ecclesiastical administration supplies a useful corrective to some recent trends in modern scholarship, which have tended to cast written documents as straightforward and secure mechanisms that neatly translated the ideas of the Roman Church’s central planners into the realities of everyday life on the periphery.

Kennings can provide insight into Old Norse poets’ conceptualization of emotions, cognition, and the body, by way of the artistic associations the poets have made in their creation. This essay examines kennings from the whole corpus of skaldic poetry for the head, breast, and heart to explore what conceptions of emotions appear in them. Furthermore, it is considered how these conceptions conform to the ideas represented in the verse and prose of the two longest Íslendingasögur that contain skaldic poetry, Egils saga and Njáls saga. It is demonstrated that, within the tradition of kennings, emotions are depicted entirely as residing in the heart and the breast, and never in the head. This also holds true for cognitive abilities, which are - setting aside the suspect kenning rýnnis reið - depicted as residing in the chest area. This pectoral model of the mind holds true for poems that are attributed to both early and later skalds and regardless of whether the poem has a Christian theme or not. It is concluded that the depiction of the heart and the breast as the seat of emotions and cognitive abilities is a deeply ingrained frame of knowledge in skaldic poetry across the entire period of its composition.

Is it possible for characters in fiction to be motivated by unique ideologies in the way that political movements are in real life? This essay considers the example of the Æsir (the dominant tribe of gods) in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Analogies with later ideologies are offered as a way to highlight the idiosyncratic ideological brew which seems to govern the Æsir’s actions. The Æsir have the acquisitiveness, violence, and sexual neurosis of a colonial regime. They have the reactionary’s aptitude for cynical manipulation of history. They have the frailties of the modern capitalist. These comparisons are used to sketch out an ideology which is more than the sum of its comparanda: Æsirism.

The article discusses the role of music in the collection of translated Old French lais known as Strengleikar and preserved in De la Gardie 4-7. It argues that the Norwegian translator’s prologue presents music as a lost Breton memory medium, which his translation project makes available in written form for a courtly elite accustomed to books in the vernacular. Music features in many of the lays in the collection, for example in Laustik, where it represents the experience of love, and in Strandar strengleikr, where harpists set the seal of courtliness on the poetic commemoration of royal deeds. While both of these lays can be read as self-referential in relation to the Strengleikar collection as a whole, Strandar strengleikr’s intense interest in the specific mediality of the lai, coupled with its glorification of its royal subject, raises the question of whether Strandar strengleikr is not in fact an original Old Norwegian composition, a so-called ‘bogus lai’.

This article investigates the nature and shape of the Brísingamen, a piece of jewelry belonging to the goddess Freyja, and argues that its function was that of a birth adjuvant: a necklace or possibly a belt consisting of one or several beads with stones worn as amulets for pregnant and parturient women. Understanding the Brísingamen as an object with an important function in reproductive matters illuminates a hitherto enigmatic scene in stanza two of the skaldic poem Húsdrápa: the fight between the gods Heimdallr and Loki described in the poem can be understood as an expression of the antagonism rooted in both gods’ roles in regeneration and (human) fecundity.

Scandinavian raiders operated in Aquitaine on and off for two hundred years. Sometimes they stayed for a short time, sometimes they remained for a number of years. Their appearances in the region were part of wider pan-European trajectories - they moved from place to place, literally ‘overseas’. This article examines the Scandinavian raiders’ origins, activities, and movements in just one decade: the 840s. What is particularly interesting about this period is that on the basis of a handful of silver coins found in Ireland a whole theory has arisen stating that the ‘Vikings’ involved had come from Ireland and returned there. It is shown that this was likely not so. There are some very clear examples of connections between Ireland and Aquitaine, but the 840s is not one of them.

Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (‘History of the Danes’), completed in the early thirteenth century, form the most celebrated Latin chronicle of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. This article investigates Saxo’s terminology of lord-man relationships, and how it relates to his conceptualization of political and social structures more broadly. It begins with a semantic analysis of Saxo’s concepts of social power, continues with extended comparisons with his classical Roman models and his Scandinavian contemporaries, and, in the two final sections, broadens its perspective to situate the text within recent debates about political ritual and ‘feudo-vassalic’ institutions in the central Middle Ages. It argues that the addition of a Scandinavian element to the broader European debates about medieval lordship can be an occasion to reflect on how those debates were framed in the first place, and to reassess critically notions of knighthood, political ritual, and feudalism.