The Viking World

Stefan Brink, Neil Price, Stefan Brink, Neil Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134318254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Filling a gap in the literature for an academically oriented volume on the Viking period, this unique book is a one-stop authoritative introduction to all the latest research in the field.

Bringing together today's leading scholars, both established seniors and younger, cutting-edge academics, Stefan Brink and Neil Price have constructed the first single work to gather innovative research from a spectrum of disciplines (including archaeology, history, philology, comparative religion, numismatics and cultural geography) to create the most comprehensive Viking Age book of its kind ever attempted.

Consisting of longer articles providing overviews of important themes, supported by shorter papers focusing on material of particular interest, this comprehensive volume covers such wide-ranging topics as social institutions, spatial issues, the Viking Age economy, warfare, beliefs, language, voyages, and links with medieval and Christian Europe.

This original work, specifically oriented towards a university audience and the educated public, will have a self-evident place as an undergraduate course book and will be a standard work of reference for all those in the field.

PART I
VIKING AGE SCANDINAVIA

People, society and social institutions

CHAPTER ONE
SCANDINAVIA BEFORE THE VIKING AGE

Lotte Hedeager

What is known as the Middle Ages in Scandinavia begins around AD 1000, half a millennium later than the rest of western and central Europe. Only from this date onwards did Scandinavia consist of unified kingdoms and Christianity was established as a serious force in pagan Scandinavia. It is consequently only from this date onwards that Scandinavia has its own written history. This does not, however, mean that the people of Scandinavia were without history, or without any knowledge of ancient events. Quite the opposite, in fact, although their historical tradition was oral, transmitted from generation to generation within the constraints of rulers and traditions of composition and performance.

The archaeological research tradition in the Scandinavian late Iron Age, that is, from the migration period onwards (i.e. from the fifth century), has since the 1990s been juxtaposed with the Old Norse sources from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. This is due to the new approach in archaeology, which focuses on cognitive structures, mentality, cosmology and systems of belief. However, the use of Old Norse sources as an explanatory framework for the late Iron Age causes obvious methodological problems and has been a matter of serious debate in the wake of this new research tradition. Although written down in a Christian context, and although the fact that they may exaggerate and fabricate at some points, these sources contain valuable information on the mentality and cognition of the pre-Christian past. The reason is that structures of collective representations in any society are highly stable and change very slowly. Using the terminology of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school this is ‘la longue durée’—and following Pierre Bourdieu we are faced with the concept of ‘habitus’. Both of them furnish archaeologists with a general theoretical framework of long-time perspective, enabling them to get beyond the archaeological and textual evidence.

Lacking a modern separation of economic, political and religious institutions, pre-Christian Scandinavia can so far be compared to traditional non-western, pre-industrial communities; in both cases the world-view of a given society tends to fuse these separate domains into a coherent whole. A number of new excavations have contributed to a keener interest in ‘central places’ and ‘cult sites’, while major new finds of manorial settlements, gold hoards etc. have encouraged interpretations using terms such as ‘kings’, ‘aristocracy’, and the like, providing a concrete counterpart to Old Norse literature, new directions in research into the history of religion, and place-name studies. Among the most important sites in this respect are Gudme/Lundeborg on Fyn (Nielsen et al. 1994; Hedeager 2001), Sorte Muld on Bornholm (Watt 1999), Uppåkra in the province of Skåne (Larsson and Hårdh 1998; Hårdh 2003) and Borg in Lofoten (Munch et al. 2003).

A new, interdisciplinary research movement has developed around these issues where religious, judicial and political conditions are seen as closely interwoven and where an alternative understanding of the connection between political authority, myths and memory, cult activity, skilled craft production and exercise of power in the late Iron Age has emerged (Myhre 2003 and Hedeager 2005 as the latest outlines). The interdisciplinary approach has been developed through the five-year research project Vägar till Midgård at the University of Lund (Jennbert et al. 2002; Andrén et al. 2004; Berggren et al. 2004). A similar approach is to be found in some other research projects (Melheim et al. 2004, and to a certain degree in Jesch 2002). Earlier studies have been based primarily on the economic character, involving such aspects as agriculture and settlement, economy and society, trade and urbanisation. Combined with burial evidence these topics have usually been the starting point for models of the social and political organisation.

MYTH, MEMORY AND ART

Although without a written history of its own, Scandinavia in the sixth and seventh centuries was nevertheless known to have held quite a special position in the minds of the migration-period Germanic peoples in Europe as the place from which many of them, or at least the royal families, claimed their origin (Hedeager 1997, 2000). This Scandinavian origin myth, repeated by several of the early medieval narrators and maintained by the Germanic peoples of early medieval Europe, was more than just a series of authors copying one another. Myths played a vital role in the creation of a political mentality among the new Germanic warlords and kings in Europe (Hedeager 1997, 1998, 2000; Geary 2003; Hill 2003). Naturally, the factual element within these early European migration myths is much disputed (see Hedeager 2000 and 2005 for references). What is crucial, however, is not to what extent these people once emigrated in small groups from Scandinavia, but that their identity was linked to Scandinavia and that their kings were divine because they descended from Gautr or Óðinn/Wotan, with this figure’s clear association with the Germanic pagan religion and, maybe, the Scandinavian pantheon.

The much later Old English poem Beowulf may draw on traditions that have roots in the sixth and seventh centuries. Here there are possible ties between the ruling families of the Wylfingas, etymologically identical to the Wuffingas, the East Anglian royal family, and the Wulfings who were thought to live in what is now south-western Sweden and south-eastern Norway during the late fifth and sixth centuries. Furthermore, there are archaeological indications of kindred relations between the royal families of East Anglia and Scandinavia in the sixth and seventh centuries (Newton 1993: 117), not least the connection revealed between the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the ship burials from Vendel and Valsgärde in the mid-Swedish Mälar area (Bruce-Mitford 1979; Lamm and Nordström 1983).

From the sparse written but rich archaeological material it is evident that close contacts existed between the noble families of southern Scandinavia and those of western Europe during these centuries. The Scandinavian origin myth among the Germanic royal families/peoples, expressed in contemporaneous written sources, is supported by the archaeological evidence, notably weapons, jewellery, and, not least, art and iconography (Hedeager 1998). From about the beginning of the fifth century up until the seventh, the Nordic figurative world was used as a symbolically significant style among the migrating Germanic peoples. It was imitated and elaborated, becoming an impressive elite art style (Salin 1904; Karlsson 1983; Haseloff 1981; Roth 1979; Speake 1980; Näsman 1984: map 10; Hines 1984; Lund Hansen 1992; Høilund Nielsen 1997), until the point when Catholic Christianity put down firm roots during the first half of the eighth century (Roth 1979: 86). In Scandinavia, on the other hand, where a pagan warrior elite persisted during the Viking Age, the Nordic animal style ceased to develop from around AD 1100.

It did not survive the meeting with a new belief system and the political and social implications that this entailed. This can of course be explained through the idea that the people—especially the elite—had acquired different tastes and therefore preferred a new style around 1200 under the influence of the Church. More convincingly, however, it can be argued that the lack of potential for survival and renewal of the animal style in a Christian context had to do with its anchoring in a quite different system of belief (Hedeager 2003). The obvious role of animal style as an inseparable part of the pre-Christian material culture indicates that the animals also may have had an indisputable significant position in the pre-Christian perception of the world (Kristoffersen 1995, 2000b; Hedeager 1997, 1998, 2003, 2004; Jakobsson 2003; Gaimster 1998; Andrén 2000; Glosecki 1989; Magnus 2001; Lindstrøm and Kristoffersen 2001).

The Nordic animal ornamentation does not only incorporate animals, it is animals, that is to say, it is entirely a paraphrasing of a many faceted complex of animal motifs which suggests that these styles, structurally speaking, incorporate an overriding abstract principle, reflecting social order and—perhaps subconsciously—also reflecting the physical order of the universe (Roe 1995: 58). As a recurrent theme in the Old Norse texts we find a dualist relationship between man and animal. It is expressed in the words hugr, fylgja and hamr. It consists of protective spirits which attach themselves to individuals, often at birth, and remain with them right through to death, when they transfer their powers to another member of the family. Fylgja often appears as an animal and is usually visible only at times of crisis, either in waking or in dreams. It is an externalised‘soul’ but also an embodiment of personal luck and destiny, and the concept has much in common with the less attested hamr (Orchard 2002; Raudvere 2001: 102 f., 2003: 71).

Acknowledging that contact with the Other World passed through the animals and that the fylgja was the embodiment of personal destiny, also helps us understand how animal ornamentation could sustain an organising role in the Scandinavian—and Germanic—society up until the introduction/consolidation of Christianity. It also explains how the animal style was involved in the creation and maintenance of the socio-cosmological order and as such participates in the legitimisation of power (Kristoffersen 1995, 2000a, b; Lindstrøm and Kristoffersen 2001; Hedeager 2003, 2004, 2005).

GOLD AND GIFT-GIVING

The written sources, whether Old Norse or from early medieval Europe, give the impression of gift-giving as the decisive instrument in creating and upholding these political alliances, between lord and warrior-follower and among the warrior elite itself. Items of gold and silver, often lavishly ornamented, played an important role for ritual and ceremonial use in the social reproduction of the late Iron Age. Although the idea of gift-giving was embedded in the cosmological world and as such was highly ritualised all the way through (see Bazelmans 1999, 2000), it is only in the migration period (as in the Viking Age) that the amount of hoards signal an outstanding intense competitive display. During these centuries immense numbers of gold hoards were deposited all over Scandinavia. They consisted of a wide variety of precious objects—bracteates, rings, sword attachments, relief brooches etc.—and they were often highly decorated with animal ornamentation. On this premise, it may be presumed that not only objects but also elements of style—not least the iconographic ones—have been selected with a great deal of care. By means of animal ornamentation these objects were imbedded with special qualities and through time they got their own biography and therefore communicated specific messages.

Broadly speaking, the hoards have been explained in two different ways: as treasures, that is, ‘economic’ depositions meant to go back into circulation—or as tactical gifts, that is, ritual sacrifices, meant for the supernatural world and a way of creating alliances with the gods. In the past decade the latter explanation has been the dominant approach (for discussion see in particular Geisslinger 1967; Herschend 1979; Fonnesbech-Sandberg 1985; Hines 1989; Hedeager 1991, 1992, 1999; Fabech 1994a; Wiker 1999). Although a great deal of the gold hoards are found in areas which, from a modern and rational economic point of view, are marginal, in an overall perspective they are connected to fertile agricultural areas. This is particularly clear in Sweden where a majority of the gold finds come from the most fertile Swedish provinces of Skåne and Västergötland (approx. 22 kg, i.e. more than half of the gold from mainland Sweden in this period) (Hedeager 1999: 246). The amount of gold in Denmark is about 50 kg, in Norway it is much less (estimated one-third or less) (Hedeager 1999). The hoards have obviously been deposited in deliberately chosen localities in the landscape (see also Johansen 1996: 97). They have been found in central settlement areas, in—or very close to—houses, and they have been found in marginal areas where they are in particular linked to bogs, streams, coasts etc., that means the transitional zone between land and water, and this is where a majority of sacral place names, that is, names with Óðinn, Týr, Freyr and God, are located too (Brink 1996; Andersen 1998: 26; Jakobsson 1997: 91). This transitional zone appears to uphold a special position in the perception of the cultural landscape as places for negotiation with the Other World and the depositions must reflect some kind of past ritual practice. Once deposited, for generations the hoards may have shaped the landscape by creating a sacred topography in people’s minds. They may have represented the link between past and present, between this world and the Other World, and as such they gave legitimacy to the land by becoming part of the discursive knowledge of the people who lived in these areas. Although hidden, these hoards remained ‘visible’ for generations, continuing to play an active role in people’s negotiation with the past (Hedeager 1999).

The gold hoards were deposited in a period of great social stress, and gold played a special role as mediator in resource-consuming political alliances and long-distance networks. The hoards may...