This volume explores the changes that occurred during the Viking Age, as Scandinavian societies fell in line with the larger forces that dominated the Insular world and Continental Europe, absorbing the powerful symbiosis of Christianity and monarchy, adapting to the idea of royal lineage and supremacy, and developing a buzzing urbanism coupled with large-scale trade networks. Presenting research on the grand context of the Viking Age alongside localised studies, it contributes to the furthering of collaborations between local and 'outsider' research on the Viking Age. Through a diversity of approaches on the Viking homelands and the wider world of the Vikings, it offers studies of a range of phenomena, including urban and rural settlements; continuity in the use of places as well as new types of places specific to the Viking Age; the social significance of change; the construction and maintenance of social identity both within the 'homelands' and across large territories; ethnicity; and ideas of identity and the creation and recreation of identity both at home and abroad. As such, it will appeal to historians and archaeologists with interests in Viking-Age studies, as well as scholars of Scandinavian studies.
Author(s): Hanne Lovise Aannestad, Unn Pedersen, Marianne Moen, Elise Naumann, Heidi Lund Berg (eds.)
Series: Culture, Environment and Adaptation in the North, 2
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 352
List of figures vii
List of plates ix
List of tables xiii
List of contributors xiv
Preface and acknowledgements xvi
1. Introducing Vikings Across Boundaries / MARIANNE MOEN 1
PART I. Exchange and travel: connections across the Viking world 9
2. Feasting, friendship and alliances: the socio-political use of Insular vessels in Viking-Age Norway / AINA MARGRETHE HEEN-PETTERSEN 11
3. Viking-Age landing places: a time for reconsideration? / JENS ULRIKSEN 25
4. Scandinavians on the Southern Baltic coast / HAUKE JÖNS AND ANNA KOWALSKA 42
5. Western Finland in the Viking world / INGRID GUSTIN AND ANNA WESSMAN 60
6. Pre-Viking-Age ship burials at Salme in Estonia: the first eastern Vikings or indications of a shared cultural milieu? / MARIKA MÄGI 80
PART II. Communicating identities: at home and abroad 97
7. Women as bearers of cultural tradition in Viking-Age England / JANE KERSHAW 99
8. Urban way of life as identity? A case study from Ribe’s emporium / SARAH CROIX 115
9. Displaying and (re)negotiating identities: migration and funerary rites in Viking-Age Northern Scotland / FRIDA ESPOLIN NORSTEIN 129
10. 'Vikings' and the formation of the new identities and new centres of power in the Upper Volga / NIKOLAJ MAKAROV 151
11. Sámi Vikings? / HEGE SKALLEBERG GJERDE AND JOSTEIN BERGSTØL 166
12. Warrior identities in Viking-Age Scandinavia / CHARLOTTE HEDENSTIERNA-JONSON 179
PART III. Dynamic social expressions in life and death 195
13. Socially significant Viking-Age housing / FRANDS HERSCHEND 197
14. The martial function of the central places / TORUN ZACHRISSON 212
15. The dead of the Viking-Age towns in Scandinavia / SARAH CROIX 236
16. A geography of slavery: ceramic networks and communities in the Lake Mälaren valley, Sweden c. AD 950 to 1150 / MATS ROSLUND 258
17. Warfare and recruitment in Iron Age central Norway / INGRID YSTGAARD 285
Index 304
