Scandinavian Kingdoms Research Articles

Lukas G. Grzybowski. The Christianization of Scandinavia in the Viking Era. Religious Change in Adam of Bremen’s Historical Work

Lukas G. Grzybowski. <i>The Christianization of Scandinavia in the Viking Era. Religious Change in Adam of Bremen’s Historical Work</i>

Brokers of Salvation: Merchants and Missionaries in the Europeanization of the North, 800–1300

Abstract: The conventional narrative of the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity depicts a top-down, mass conversion carried out by the monarchs of Scandinavian kingdoms. This paper adds to these analyses the preexisting economic relationship between trade towns of Latin Christendom with Scandinavia and the Baltic and credits this trade for carrying ideas and cultural norms to the region, as well as for establishing trade routes along which missionaries would follow in the footsteps of these merchants. It traces the establishment of official bishoprics and sees of the Latin Church in Scandinavian and Baltic trade towns as well as the adoption of distinctly European forms of social organization. It also lends agency to the people of Scandinavia themselves, adding to the narrative their understudied role in the process by crediting their chieftains with willfully and strategically importing Christianity for their own gain rather than depicting them as passive agents with change foisted upon them from the outside. The primary sources bear out not an immediate change, but a gradual one, carried out not by armies and kings, but by merchants and trades-men, clergy and chieftains in their daily interactions, which built up social networks, compiled social trust, and contagiously spread cultural norms.

Archaic Martial Traditions in High Medieval Scandinavia: A Glimpse of Viking Age Warfare?

Most written evidence regarding warfare in Viking Age Scandinavia originates either from contemporaneous chronicles – recorded by those at the receiving end of Norse attacks – from skaldic poetry, or from high medieval Scandinavian texts. However, these sources often prove problematic: either in the form of chronicles from other parts of Europe, whichoften exaggerate the brutality of Viking raids, or from 13th century Icelandic writers, who embellish accounts of long deceased rulers. This article explores archaic martial features found in 12th- and 13th-century contemporaneous sagas and treatises to identify and analyse the continued influence of Viking Age military practices in high medieval Scandinavia. By comparing information found in three medieval texts to scholarly contributions on Viking Age warfare; skaldic poems; and archaeological evidence, this article aims to identify Viking Age military features that survived the military transformation, which followed the periods of internal struggles that the Scandinavian kingdoms underwent from the 1130s onwards.

Sápmi. Ziemia Samów a formowanie granic krajów północnej Europy

SÁPMI. THE SAMI LAND AND BOUNDARIES FORMATION OF NORTHERN EUROPESápmi is an area strongly connected with culture of the Sami people, the indigenous inhabitants of Northern Europe. Gradual formation of nation states – Russia and Scandinavian kingdoms – had negative impact on lifestyle of the Sami people. This impact had a significant influence on their mentality and modification of the genuine culture. The paper aims to study the main effects of boundaries formation of nation states for culture of the autochthons of Northern Europe.

Et fysisk objekt fra kardinal Nicolaus Breakespears legat til Norden 1152-54

A physical object from Cardinal Nicolaus Breakspear’s legation to Scandinavia, 1152-54This article gives an account of the background and discovery of the only remaining physical object from Cardinal Nicolaus Breakspear’s legation to Scandinavia 1152–54 on behalf of Pope Eugenius III. The Pope had invested in Cardinal Breakspear the authority to negotiate and make decisions on the organisation of the church in the three Scandinavian kingdoms: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Until then, the church in the whole of Scandinavia was under the archbishop of Lund. Lund at that time was part of Denmark, not of Sweden, as it is today. During his time in Norway, Cardinal Breakspear (c. 1100–1159) reorganised the Norwegian church under its own archbishop in Nidaros (Trondheim), and established a new Norwegian diocese in Hamar. The Pope’s plan was in addition to establish another archbishopry in Sweden, but that could not yet be achieved due to internal Swedish disagreements. The Sweden church, therefore, remained under the archbishop of Lund. When Cardinal Breakspear left Scandinavia from the town of Lomma close to Lund, he somehow must have dropped a lead seal which was attached to a letter from the Pope. This seal was then accidentally refound in the middle of the 1980s when Mr. Per Olsson dug in his garden in Lomma. He thought he had found an old coin and kept it in a drawer in his house. Per Olsson’s son, Magnus Linnarsson, later found out that the seal was from Pope Eugenius III. It is highly probable that this seal today is the only remaining physical artifact of Cardinal Breakspear’s legation to Scandinavia 1152–54. Cardinal Breakspear soon after his return to Rome became the new Pope under the name (H)Adrian IV. Until Pope John Paul II visited Norway in 1989, Nikolaus Breakspear is the only Pope ever to have set foot in Norway, and that happened before he was elected Pope. The seal is since 2011 included in the collections of Lund’s Historical Museum.

Steinar Imsen (ed.), The Norwegian Dominion and the Norse World c. 1100-c1400 &amp; Taxes, Tributes and Tributary Lands in the Making of the Scandinavian Kingdoms in the Middle Ages (Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2010 &amp; 2011)

Book review of: Steinar Imsen (ed.), The Norwegian Dominion and the Norse World c. 1100-c1400 and Taxes, Tributes and Tributary Lands in the Making of the Scandinavian Kingdoms in the Middle Ages (Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2010 &amp; 2011)

L’Angleterre et la France, faiseurs de paix en Scandinavie en 1657-1660

The kingdoms of Denmark and of Sweden were at war seven times against each other between 1563 and 1720. The rivalry between these two Scandinavian kingdoms was very strong and they were never able to maintain a true peace in Scandinavia. In these conditions, it was necessary for foreign diplomats to act as a necessary intermediary between Denmark and Sweden, to enable them to negotiate in good conditions. This article discusses this foreign presence in Scandinavian negotiations. It analyses the roles of Chevalier Hugues de Terlon, the French ambassador, and Philip Meadowes, the English emissary, in the restoration of peace in Scandinavia in 1657-1660.

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation

Flattering Alliances: Scandinavia, Diplomacy, and the Austrian–French Balance of Power, 1648–1740, by Peter Lindström and Svante Norrhem, tr. Charlotte Merton

Peter Lindström and Svante Norrhem’s new book provides an Anglophone readership with an interesting and accessible window into two realms with which few of those readers will be familiar: the story of early modern Scandinavian diplomacy, and a particularly Scandinavian approach to the study of diplomatic history. While successful in the first of these intentions, by introducing readers to important aspects of the Scandinavian kingdoms’ interactions with the continental Great Powers France and Austria from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, the book’s greatest contribution will, I believe, come from its less intentional ability to expose its audience to the ways in which diplomatic historians in Scandinavia conceptualise and pursue their work. Lindström and Norrhem’s study aims to uncover the strategies pursued by France and Austria, driven by their intense rivalry, to influence the Scandinavian kingdoms and their political and social elites in the century following the Peace of Westphalia, and to measure the success and consequences of these strategies. Great Power efforts to curry favour in Sweden and Denmark assumed three primary forms: financial subsidies (sometimes quite substantial) offered directly to the Scandinavian governments; one-off gifts or short-term payments offered to influential Scandinavian individuals and families in order to influence their actions or encourage them to provide politically useful information; and the establishment of longer-term patron–client relationships, often spanning several generations, between the French or Austrian monarchies and prominent Scandinavian families which earned the Great Powers helpful and sometimes effective support within the Scandinavian power structure in return for longer-term financial assistance, honours and titles, and educational and career prospects for the families’ children (especially their sons).

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation. By Sverre Bagge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. vii + 325 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation. By Sverre Bagge. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. vii + 325 pp. $29.95 cloth. - Volume 84 Issue 3

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation, by Sverre Bagge

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation, by Sverre Bagge

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation by Sverre Bagge (review)

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation by Sverre Bagge (review)

Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation, by Sverre Bagge

Cross and Scepter: Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation, by Sverre Bagge. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014. vi, 325 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). This volume is intended to be a short, synthetic history of the introduction of Christianity and the formation of in Scandinavia as well as microhistory of state formation and cultural change throughout Latin Christendom in the High Middle Ages. author, Sverre Bagge, covers the changes that took place in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from the formation of the Three Kingdoms until the end of the Kalmar Union in the early sixteenth century. He explores the transition from Paganism to Christianity, the reception of European-style formal learning and the transformation of law and justice, military and administrative organization, social structure, political culture, and the division of power among the monarchy, aristocracy, common people, and the Church. Its approach is broad enough that it comes close to being a general history of medieval Scandinavia. A major theme of the book is the parallel development of the Scandinavian and other European states, for example Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary (pp. 36, 69, 77). Bagge begins the narrative in the Viking Age as the three arise out of a series of struggles between individual warlords. He emphasizes the apparently coincidental division between them, which had been established in the mid-eleventh century (p. 49). This sometimes leads to gaps, for instance he mentions Harald Bluetooth's boast about conquering Norway without comment (p. 31). further consolidation of the Scandinavian was intimately tied up with the introduction of Christianity. Bagge describes the development of church institutions, ecclesiastical law, royal legislative powers, and a court system: The rise of the ecclesiastical organization therefore forms an important part of the explanation for the stability of the three kingdoms (p. 83). debt to Joseph R. Strayer is notable, and openly acknowledged in the introduction (pp. 3-4). New military technology--heavy cavalry and castles--was also important, bringing a shift toward a more professional, elite army, and the evolution of the leding service obligation into a more fonnal tax (pp. 107-18). In his synthesis of those aspects, Bagge refers to the research of Charles Tilly (p. 4). Following this, Bagge turns to social and economic history, with an emphasis on social structures, royal and ecclesiastical revenues, and the growth of towns and trade. He describes the gradual development of bureaucracies and courts, and the division of power between monarchy, aristocracy, and the church. While the secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy controlled most of the revenues of the three countries, Bagge shows how individual kings could exploit the competition between them to achieve greater power than indicated by the modest resources under their direct control. He also looks at the issue of medieval nationalism, a hotly contested topic among modern scholars. …

Cross &amp; scepter: the rise of the Scandinavian kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation

Cross &amp; scepter: the rise of the Scandinavian kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation

Taxes, Tributes and Tributary Lands in the Making of the Scandinavian Kingdoms in the Middle Ages

Taxes, Tributes and Tributary Lands in the Making of the Scandinavian Kingdoms in the Middle Ages

Steinar Imsen (red.): Taxes, tributes and tributary lands in the making of the Scandinavian kingdoms in the Middle Ages

Steinar Imsen (red.): Taxes, tributes and tributary lands in the making of the Scandinavian kingdoms in the Middle Ages

The Conversion of Scandinavia

The Conversion of Scandinavia

State Formation and Courtly Culture in the Scandinavian Kingdoms in the High Middle Ages1

This article offers a comparative approach to the emergence of a courtly culture in the Scandinavian kingdoms in the High Middle Ages. Such a perspective has not been studied before on this topic, and the author proposes that it clarifies the correlation between state formation and courtly culture. The article argues that the two major explanations on courtly culture are complementary, suggesting that the one offered by Stephen Jaeger explains the courtly culture in Norway, while the second model of explanation, by Georges Duby, is more suited to explain the emergence of a courtly culture in Denmark and Sweden.

Atlas of Medieval Europe

The second edition of this atlas makes significant improvements to the first edition, reviewed in these pages in June 1999 (rev. ante, cxiv, 703–4), including forty new maps, and offers greater attention to the ‘peripheries’ of Europe, including Poland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Portugal and the Low Countries, which had been neglected in the earlier volume. As in the original edition, the atlas begins with a map offering a picture of the main geographical boundaries of the work. This covers the physical extent of Europe and the borders of the Mediterranean, including Eastern Europe, Byzantium and the eastern crusades as a matter of course—inclusions that had been thought to require justification ten years ago. Now, effort has been made to include geographical areas previously overlooked, with new maps on the ‘Scandinavian kingdoms, c.1000’, and ‘Poland in the Central Middle Ages’, for example. With the exception of the illustration of the physical features of Western Europe, each of the maps provided comes with a page or two of commentary. Appended to each commentary is an updated bibliography, and it is a pleasure to note that the detailed, useful, and somewhat quirky index remains as such. (The index references for ‘sheep’ have, if anything, been expanded.)

European political thought, 1450-1700: religion, law and philosophy

The collective, integrated work of fourteen distinguished historians, this book explores political thinking in Europe from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. European thinkers of the period may seem to have inherited a common vocabulary and a set of concepts, yet their concerns and their expression of those concerns were conditioned by the particular contexts in which they formulated and refined their ideas. The book therefore investigates the very possibility of a European political identity and how it was mediated and expressed across the continent. The only fully comprehensive account of European political thought in the early modern period, the book pays due regard to Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, the Scandinavian kingdoms, the realm of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the political thought of Islam.