The Not-Yet-Fully-Welcome ‘Guests in the House’

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Translation from the Swedish original – Gäster I huset. Kulturell överföring mellem slaver och skandinaver 900 till 1300, Lund 2001. 2 Skre, ‘Exploring Skiringssal’, 42. 3 Cf. Schachtmann, Strobel, and Widera, Politik und Wissenschaft. 4 E.g. the conference ‘Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea and Poland: Cultural and Material Exchanges’, Gdańsk, 28–30 September 2008, co-organized by the Nordic Centre for Medieval Studies (Bergen) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology (Warsaw). 5 E.g. Naum, Homelands Lost and Gained. 6 Besides my serious reservation against the use of this collective name, its Germanic origin suggests the English translation Vends (like in Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic) rather than Wends. 7 Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic, 134. 8 The old-Slavic terms: ‘liutyj’ (Sreznevskii, Materialy dla slovaria drevne-russkogo iazyka po pis'miennym pamiatnikam, 96) and ‘luty’ (Słownik języka polskiego, 235) leave no doubt about the Slavic origin of this collective name. They allow a guess that this ethnonym was created by contrasting the inhabitants of the lands located on both sides of the Oder. The Liutici were supposed to represent a ‘wild/severe/cruel’ people (Lübke, Qui sint vel unde huc venerint; Urbańczyk, Trudne począkti Polski, chapter 12). 9 Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic, 133. 10 Brather, ‘The Beginnings of Slavic Settlement’, 329. 11 Snorre Sturluson claimed that Olav firstly married Geira, a daughter of Mieszko I, whom Snorre typically mistook for his son Boleslaw Chrobry – ‘Saga om Olav Tryggvason’, chapter 22 (p. 136), chapter 29 (p. 141). 12 Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Keiserzeit, 196f; Duczko, ‘Real and Imaginary Contributions’, 131f; Wood, The Missionary Life, 238. 13 Nilsson, ‘Kring några bortglömda tankar om Suigi och Olof Skötkonungs dop’, 212. 14 Housted, Stednavne af slavisk oprindelse på Lolland, 89. 15 Skre, ‘Dark Age Towns’, 27. 16 Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic, 136. 17 Cf. also Indruszewski, Man. Ship, Landscape. 18 Jensen, ‘Saxos graenser’, 9. 19 Blomkvist, The Discovery of the Baltic, 140. 20 Housted, Stednavne af slavisk oprindelse på Lolland, 88. 21 Cf. analysis in Labuda, ‘Słowianie w wizjach historiografii’. Quite understandably, that intellectual atmosphere provoked the emergence of a counter-ideology, which glorified past achievements of the Slavs and promoted pan-Slavic solidarity; Urbańczyk, ‘Mediaeval Archaeology in Polish Historic-Political Discourse’. 22 E.g. Svanberg, Decolonizing the Viking Age 1; Svanberg, Death Rituals in South-East Scandinavia. 23 Cf. discussion in Urbańczyk, ‘Deconstructing the “Nordic Civilization”’. 24 Roslund, Gäster I huset, 322. 25 I want to express my thanks to Maciej Trzeciecki for his comments regarding specialist ceramological aspects. 26 Texts in non-Germanic languages make less than 5% of Roslund's ‘Literature’ (pp. 331–50). 27 Several names of the eminent Slavic scholars are seriously misspelled at p. xii and p. xiii, and at p. 229. Such nonchalance is not rare in Scandinavian literature – e.g. Nils Blomkvist in his book published also by Brill in 2005 consequently calls eminent Polish professor Lechiewicz instead of Leciejewicz. 28 I have to admit that similar tendency dominates also among archaeologists working south of the Baltic Sea, and exclusions from this bad tradition are still rare despite obviously positive results (e.g. Dulinicz, Frühe Slawen im Gebiet zwischen unterer Weichsel und Elbe). 29 What Mats Roslund calls ‘eastern Denmark’ today is south-western Sweden. 30 To my surprise, the index does not even contain ‘Bornholm’, which means that this key island placed half way between the south-Scandinavian and west-Slavic lands has not deserved the author's interest. The most probable reason is that the island belongs today to Denmark. 31 Cf. valuable reviews by Jones (The Archaeology of Ethnicity) and Jenkins (Rethinking Ethnicity).