Medieval Scandinavia Research Articles

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Time perception has important consequences for how human activity is structured. The question of how time perception has shifted in history could therefore be of certain importance in archaeological interpretation. This article is an attempt to analyze the construction of time in early- and high-medieval lreland and Scandinavia. The bell and the sound of the bell related to a theological concept in Christian ideology which referred to time. The bell was to become an utensil of power in the process of christianization. With help of the bell, the church partly abolished the subjectivity in the perception of time. When the bell rang it thereby dictated a common sense of time. We could therefore perhaps assume that a conceptual polemic concerning time has been one of the reasons for conflicts in medieval Ireland and Scandinavia.

Wearing the wolf skin: psychiatry and the phenomenon of the berserker in medieval Scandinavia.

This paper examines the berserker, a frenzied warrior attested to in both the written and material sources of medieval Scandinavia, and elucidates the characteristics that define him. It critiques explanations for the phenomenon offered in the existing historiography and whether this can be explained as a psychiatric diagnosis. It concludes that the berserker cannot be simply defined as a culturally bound or other psychiatric syndrome, or accounted for by psychogenic drugs alone. Instead, it proposes that berserk frenzy constituted a transitory dissociative state shared among a small warband steeped in religious/spiritual ideology. In entering this state, the psyche of the berserker was reconstituted in an almost archetypal pattern. Further research is required into this phenomenon in other contexts, including modern conflicts.

The Kalvestene: A reevaluation of the ship settings on the Danish island of Hjarnø

The ship setting site on the island of Hjarnø, known as the Kalvestene (“the calf stones”), is a grave field made up of ten small ship settings dating to the Viking Age. Although it is a comparatively small site, textual evidence suggests that, surprisingly, the Kalvestene were well-known, at least in some parts of medieval Scandinavia. The site is unusual among Danish grave fields in that all the settings are ship shaped, with no surviving circle, oval, or triangle settings, mounds, or other monument types. It has been assumed that this anomaly is due to natural erosion and anthropogenic intervention because Ole Worm’s 1650 description and drawing of the site indicates there were once more than twenty settings, including circle settings. This article reconsiders that assumption using a range of interdisciplinary approaches and evidence. It critically analyzes medieval and early modern written records and surveys previous studies of this site (including those unpublished), offers a reinterpretation of geophysical data alongside aerial photogrammetric and LiDAR data, and presents the results of our survey of the Kalvestene. In particular, we aim to answer three questions: how accurate is Worm's study? How do the ship settings at Hjarnø compare to other Danish ship settings? And, why were the Kalvestene famous?

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf

Reviewed by: Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf Łukasz Hajdrych Medieval Scandinavia, Norse Paganism, old Norse religion, old Scandinavian religion, Christianization, demonology, mythology, the Eddas jonas wellendorf. Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 206. The study of the mythology and religious practice of pre-Christian Scandinavia poses many problems for contemporary scholars: incompatibility of terminology, lack of extended sources, and their contamination by later Christian tradition. Jonas Wellendorff's recent Gods and Humans deals with these issues in a highly interesting way. Over the five chapters of the monograph, Wellendorf discusses pagan Scandinavian religion and its transition towards Christianity through the perspective [End Page 120] of ancient and medieval Latin and Scandinavian texts. Wellendorff devotes Chapter 1 to the process of Christianization of Scandinavian lands and the attempts of missionaries to reduce the old Norse gods to the ranks of Christian demons. In Chapters 2 and 3, Wellendorf discusses the issue of anti-pagan texts in their relation to the old Scandinavian religion, showing the attempts by bards and other indigenous authors to preserve the memory of the old gods in a new way, acceptable to Christianity. However, by far the most interesting issues Wellendorf discusses are treated in the final two chapters, in which he analyses how Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson deployed new methods of thinking about pre-Christian beliefs. Both thirteenth-century authors reinterpreted the old Norse gods as humans who had traveled to the Scandinavian lands from western Asia to found the various dynasties of these lands, and claimed that, because of their extensive knowledge and skills, they were eventually mistakenly worshipped as gods. Wellendorf shows that through this euhemerizing strategy, those authors secured the memory of the old gods among the Scandinavian peoples, protecting them from oblivion in the new Christian conditions. The great value of this work lies in its principles of interpretation and the perspective that Wellendorf uses to show us what kind of religion the pre-Christian Norse actually practiced. By using Augustine's and Varro's tripartite theological classification of religion into the mythological, the civil, and the natural, Wellendorf demonstrates that the Scandinavian cultus indeed involved very different forms of "religion" than what we are accustomed to denote by that term today. Although his analysis deploys categories from classical Latin works, in every moment of the study Wellendorf remains aware of more recent methodological problems, especially the issue of the definition of "religion." Indeed, Wellendorf devotes a considerable part of Chapter 1 to discussions of the problem of the modern creation of the category "religion" and the issues raised by applying this term to pre-Christian religions (or "beliefs," or "faiths," or "traditions," or whatever term we use to describe old Norse "religious" practices and mythology). But Wellendorf's book is more than just a brilliant study devoted to medieval Scandinavian culture. It is also an invaluable work for anyone interested in early modern Scandinavian historiography. In the final sections of the book (Chapter 5 and the Epilogue), Wellendorf describes an important transition from Scandinavian pagan mythology to the fully Christianized historiography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Christianization era, the old Norse gods were, as elsewhere, reduced to the rank of demons. However, there is a notable contrast to what happened for example in eastern Europe, where old beliefs were slowly but systematically eradicated and incorporated into Christian religion or eventually died out, in the process losing [End Page 121] almost every aspect of their former identity., In the Scandinavian culture, the memory of old gods survived into an era when they could be drawn upon without fear of being accused of practicing paganism or witchcraft: they were thus available to be incorporated anew into the culture. The discovery of the manuscript of the Poetic Edda in 1640 was one of the inspirations for early modern Scandinavian scholars to rewrite their old mythology, debunk it, and link it directly to the classical Greco-Roman mythology. Wellendorf shows the sincere will of the seventeenth-century scholars and bards to preserve ancient culture by proving that what had been rejected in recent centuries...

CКАНДИНАВСЬКІ ТІНГИ Й ОСЕРЕДКИ КУЛЬТУ ЯК РИТУАЛЬНИЙ ПРОСТІР: СТАН ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ

The article investigates the most recent studies on ritual space (thing-assemblies, cultic sites, and ceremonial buildings) in the late Iron Age and medieval Scandinavia. Various rituals, performed at these locations, allowed elites and rulers to gain and maintain power, to create and sustain social order, to resolve conflicts. The paper explores the works of A. Sanmark (research on assemblies as ritual space), F. Iversen (centers of cult), O. Sundqvist (cultic sites and buildings), L. Sonne (political leaders and cult), L. Larsson (ceremonial structures), and other contemporary scholars. The newest studies on ritual space analyze problems of rulership, relations of rulers and people. Scholars investigate how exactly political and social leaders utilized ritual acts and places to their benefit. This leads to a focus on the socio-political aspect of rituals and ritual space. Studies also indicate mythological and religious dimensions of assemblies. Archaeologists and historians analyze a variety of ritual acts and emphasize the most important features of ritual places. Researchers interpret landscape, man-made structures, and show their relation to performative acts. Among them, O. Sundqvist and F. Iversen, who study outdoor cultic sites. The research on ceremonial structures (cultic buildings and meeting halls) indicates similar traits. The studies on ritual space demonstrate similarities between thing-assemblies, cultic sites, and ceremonial buildings, in particular meeting halls. Most researchers emphasize that it is hard to distinguish between these types of gathering places, inasmuch as they were multifunctional. Contemporary scholars also stress the impact of rituals on the local, regional, and nationwide communities as well as on rulers of various ranks and their relations.

Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia ed. by Karoline Kjesrud, and Mikael Males

Faith and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia ed. by Karoline Kjesrud, and Mikael Males

Norwegian wooden carved portals of the XI-XII centuries. The problem of the origin and development of style

The article is devoted to study of Art`s Early Medieval Scandinavia XI-XII centuries. This process is concerning with transitional from Late Viking Art to early Romanesque. The main focus is on the group of Norwegian wood carving portals. The system of portals decorum is the result of artistic interaction between late pagan art and art of Christianity. This process reflected in wooden portals of Norwegian stave churches and others monuments of Scandinavian wooden, stone sculptures and objects of applied art.

When Gods Become Bureaucrats

AbstractEven gods are not always above bureaucracy. Societies very different from each other have entertained the idea that the heavens might be arranged much like an earthly bureaucracy, or that mythological beings might exercise their power in a way that makes them resembles bureaucrats. The best-known case is the Chinese “celestial bureaucracy,” but the idea is also found in (to take nearly random examples) Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, the Hebrew Bible, Late Antiquity, and modern popular culture. The primary sources discussed in this essay pertain to an area of history where bureaucracy was historically underdeveloped, namely medieval Scandinavia. Beginning with the Glavendrup runestone from the 900s, I examine a way of thinking about divine power that seems blissfully bureaucracy-free. Moving forwards in time to Adam of Bremen’s description of the temple at Uppsala (1040s–1070s), I find traces of a tentative, half-formed bureaucracy in the fading embers of Scandinavian paganism. In the 1220s, well into the Christian era, I find Snorri Sturluson concocting a version of Old Norse myth which proposes a novel resolution between the non-bureaucratic origins of his mythological corpus and the burgeoning bureacratization of High Medieval Norway. Although my focus is on medieval Scandinavia, transhistorical comparisons are frequently drawn with mythological bureaucrats from other times and places. In closing, I synthesise this comparative material with historical and anthropological theories of the relationship between bureaucracy and the divine.

Sites of Power and Assembly in the Thames Valley in the Middle Ages

This article examines three sites of elite and royal power in the early second millennium AD in the Thames valley: Kingston upon Thames in Greater London, Westminster in the City of London, and Runnymede in Surrey. Using a backdrop of comparative material from medieval Scandinavia, these sites are examined in terms of their landscape qualities, particularly their liminal nature. On this basis, it is shown that they demonstrate attributes and features that are frequently connected to assembly sites. It is therefore argued that these sites may well, earlier in time, have been assembly locations that were consciously adopted and developed as royal ritual sites as part of the legitimising process of power.

A Matter of Honour: Evolving Moral Codes in the Sagas

Using the semantic shift in Old Norse/Icelandic conceptual categories associated with such terms as ágætr, frægđ, lof, metnađr, virđing, this essay explores the changing heroic ethos of medieval Scandinavia from a focus on achieved honour toward an idealized view of fame and honour as goals in themselves.

Intercultural Political Models in Egils Saga and Other Literary Sources. A Philological Study

This article examines the way rulers are depicted in Icelandic literary sources such as Egils saga and some other literary sources belonging to medieval Scandinavia. We may presume that the construction and description of the image of Norwegian kings in that age, when Christianity had not totally replaced the Old beliefs in Iceland, are conclusive when attempting to better understand and analyse the mixed ideology of power in 12th and 13th century Norway and Iceland. Our aim is to explore the foundations of the political ideology of Early Medieval Norway, which were consolidated in the 12th and 13th centuries, when the authors and sources constructed an intercultural model of kingship based on the recently Christianised culture over which the influences of the old faith was overlapping.

Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia

Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia

Between sea and river: Water in medieval Scandinavian towns

The general climate and topography of medieval Scandinavia, with high levels of rainfall and snow on a yearly basis, combined with an abundance of lakes, rivers, and smaller streams, meant that freshwater was easily available for most people. In this paper, we present an overview of how people interacted with water—both freshwater and salt water—in medieval (ca. 1050–ca. 1500) Scandinavia's towns. By describing how the supply of freshwater was organized and what it was used for, how shipping and fishing was regulated, and the use and impact of watermills, we are able to identify some actors and attempt to discern their motivation when they engaged in a wide range of activities involving both fresh and salt water in medieval Scandinavia. We argue that understanding water and water management in medieval Scandinavia necessitates a different approach compared to more arid regions, an approach which considers water as simply one resource among many, deeply embedded in a wider economic web.This article is categorized under:Engineering Water > Planning WaterHuman Water > Water GovernanceHuman Water > Water as Imagined and Represented

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia: Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf

Old Customs

Although they highlight the Norse (religious) term siðr ‘custom’ and its cognates, some researchers of pre-Christian Scandinavia suggest that the concept of religion involves a Christocentric discourse and should be used cautiously, or even only for Christianity. Some scholars therefore recommend a categorical distinction between pre-Christian (religious) siðr and Christian religion. This paper contributes to this ongoing discussion. I argue that while it is meaningful to highlight the term siðr and its cognates, the distinction between pre-Christian siðr and medieval Christian religion is problematic. 1) While siðr had various meanings in vernacular language, the current debate emphasises only its religious aspect, thus turning the indigenous term into an implicit etic concept. 2) The word siðr and its cognates were also used in medieval Scandinavian languages as designations for Christianity, and hence, the categorisation of pre-Christian siðr and medieval Christian religion is misleading. 3) The distinction between popular siðr and formal religion is fundamentally based on the two-tier model of popular/folk religion–religion. 4) The vernacular (religious) word siðr in the sense of ‘religious customs, the religious aspects of the conventional way of life’ and the heuristic category of (lived) religion are in fact complementary in the study of religion in both Viking and medieval Scandinavia.

Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350 ed. by Stefka Georgieva Eriksen

Reviewed by: Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350 ed. by Stefka Georgieva Eriksen Matthew Firth Eriksen, Stefka Georgieva, ed., Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350 (Disputatio, 28), Turnhout, Brepols, 2016; hardback; pp. xii, 442; 26 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €110.00; ISBN 9782503553078. This edited collection of thirteen essays seeks to reframe our understanding of how the intellectual aspects of Scandinavian literary and material culture evolved in the years 1100–1350. The contributors to this volume undertake to place the cultural pursuits of medieval Scandinavia within the wider intellectual milieu [End Page 164] of Western Europe. In doing so, their focus is upon the influence of European intellectual culture on the development of Scandinavia's own regional intellectual identity, or rather how Scandinavian intellectual culture adopted, adapted, and interacted with foreign ideas. Stefka Georgieva Eriksen has drawn together an excellent collection of articles, notable for their quality and refreshing variety. Introducing the volume, she presents some definitions that provide important context. Firstly, insofar as the contributions reference a Scandinavian vernacular, this is Old Norse. Thus, the literary cultures of Norway and Iceland are preferenced over those of either Sweden or Denmark. Similarly, the literary cultures of Western Europe—Latin, Old French, and German—are preferenced amongst those which influenced Scandinavian intellectual culture. Although the desire of the editor to tightly define manageable parameters for her contributors is understandable, that this is at the expense of a more inclusive view of European intercultural exchange is unfortunate. Secondly, 'intellectual culture', as understood within the volume, is broadly defined and includes, alongside scholars, those who pursued art, architecture, liturgy, music, medicine, or literature (p. 7). The book is richer for it. Conceived as a supplement to Eriksen's introduction, Gunnar Harðarson's contribution surveys Old Norse intellectual culture, highlighting some of its noted thinkers such as Snorri Sturluson and his nephew Sturla Þórðarson. In so doing, Harðarson considers intellectual interaction as represented within Old Norse literary sources. The intent here is twofold: to demonstrate the multidisciplinary nature of Scandinavian intellectual life, and to evidence the ubiquity of Latin intellectual culture. Following this, Ian P. Wei opens the first of the book's three thematic divisions, 'Negotiating Identity', with an article focusing on the intellectual culture of Paris, touching only lightly upon Scandinavia. While this may seem an odd contribution, it is contextually important to establishing 'mainstream' Latin intellectual culture. Wei asserts that this intellectual culture was more malleable than often assumed and that, rather than introducing broad normative moral assertions into Scandinavian intellectual society, allowed for an adaptable framework of intellectual discourse. Moving into architectural identity, Kjartan Hauglid examines Romanesque stone churches in Norway and their adoption of foreign architectural styles, arguing that the commissioning of such buildings was an expression of secular power. Turning then to Iceland, Bjørn Bandlien explores learning and text production, arguing that learning and social identity were closely associated in the primarily rural region. To this end, texts were authored not only for a learned clerical audience expecting classical and biblical references, but to a lay audience which anticipated tales of honour and regional association. Closing the section, Kristoffer Vadum takes as his case-study an Icelandic hagiography of John the Baptist by Grímr Hólmsteinsson. Vadum highlights the presence of significant passages drawn from canon law within the text, and uses these to explore the reception of canon law in medieval Iceland, its interpretation, and its use in political discourse. [End Page 165] Section 2, entitled 'Thinking in Figures', opens with a chapter by Rita Copeland which focuses on the teaching of grammar and rhetoric more broadly across Western Europe. She highlights the increasing trend toward the use of vernacular, and examines how this process altered interpretations of common tropes. Following this, Åslaug Ommundsen looks at the fragmentary evidence of Latin education in Norway and Iceland. Mikael Males contributes an examination of grammatical studies in the context of Old Norse and how Latin grammatica was adapted to native traditions. Closing the section, Mats Malm analyses the cultural absorption of Latin learning through examples drawn from both Iceland and Sweden, demonstrating the importance of regional circumstance on...

Meat and Taboo in Medieval Scandinavian Law and Literature

This article applies the anthropological concept of taboo to meat-eating prohibitions in medieval Scandinavia. The goals of this article are threefold: to examine the evidence for meat-based dietar...

Enthronement in Early Rus: Between Byzantium and Scandinavia

This article examines enthronement as a rite of inauguration in early Rus in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and what the practice of enthronement suggests in terms of the earliest mechanics of princely power in Rus. Enthronement is represented as a key constitutive act by the chronicles of Rus, which were composed by churchmen in the monasteries of Rus. Although the chronicles present the princes of Rus and their acts according to a Christian and Byzantine literary framework, the practices of power described suggest links with other cultural spheres, such as medieval Scandinavia. The chronicles of Rus thus incorporate practices and symbols of power referenced in the sagas and represented by artefacts, which may have reflected local practices in Rus.

Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia

Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia

Sagas and Space – Thinking Space in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia

Sagas and Space – Thinking Space in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia