The Vikings in Ireland and Beyond: Before and After The Battle of Clontarf, ed. Howard B. Clarke and Ruth Johnson

Abstract

This collection of papers, edited by Howard B. Clarke and Ruth Johnson, originated at the seventh Midlands Viking Symposium, entitled ‘Viking-Age Ireland and its Wider Connections’, which was held in Dublin in 2011, its first meeting outside England. The volume opens with lines from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Trial Pieces’, inspired by Dublin’s Viking archaeology, followed by a short account of the career of the late Richard Hall, who died in 2011 and to whom the volume is dedicated. Hall, Essex-born but Belfast-educated, was long associated with the York Archaeological Trust and played a major role in shaping understanding of Viking-Age towns. These preambles show how Ireland’s Viking Age is simultaneously a matter of national consciousness and a subject of more than national scholarship. An interdisciplinary approach has long characterised study of the Viking Age, and the volume is a witness to the continuing vitality of this aspect of the field: contributors include historians, archaeologists, art historians, numismatists, students of names and literary scholars. A strong awareness of shifting paradigms is maintained throughout the collection. The opening paper offers an engaging survey of academic study of the period since the 1830s, including sharp assessments of past agendas, and several papers begin with substantial historiographical round-ups of previous scholarship, before suggesting new interpretations. While there is an unfortunate lack of cross-referencing—some authors evidently wrote in ignorance of the new arguments and material presented elsewhere in the volume, which strikes a slightly jarring note—there is, nevertheless, a coherence to the collection, thanks to a consistency of interest in similar new ideas, approached from a refreshing number of different directions. Too numerous and too substantial to do justice to in a sentence or two, the twenty-seven contributions will not be individually reviewed here, but readers will find efficient summaries in the book’s preface (pp. xxvii–xxxiv).