Thraldom

Abstract

“Thraldom,” the old Scandinavian word for slavery, is an elusive phenomenon characterized by different conditions of dependencies and with fluid transitions between being free and unfree; a person could be at once socially respected but still unfree; you could voluntarily go into slavery; you could be sentenced to time-limited slavery for a criminal offense; you could give away your child to become a slave; but you could also buy yourself out of slavery. Hence, slavery was not a black-and-white social phenomenon. You could be a chattel thrall, living in the barn with the cows, or a legally unfree steward, living on and running the king’s estate. In this study all conceivable source materials are analyzed, such as archaeology, runic inscriptions, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves. Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages, and it seems the Scandinavians became major players in the northern European slave trade. However, the hypothesis is that the Scandinavian Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia; instead their “business model” seems to have been to raid, abduct, and then sell off captured people at major slave markets. Their quest was not people, but silver. Scandinavian slavery eventually was abandoned, a process that is very obscure, and seems to have disappeared in society in the beginning of the fourteenth century.