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Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 800-1200
This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held in Oslo in late 2005, which brought together scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines from Scandinavia, Great Britain and Ireland. The papers here began as those read at the conference, augmented by two written immediately after by attendees, but have been updated in light of the discussions in Oslo and more recent scholarship. They offer historical, archaeological, art-historical, religious-historical and philological views of the interaction and interdependence of Celtic and Norse populations in the Irish Sea region in the period 800 A.D.-1200 A.D. Contributors are Ian Beuermann, Barbara Crawford, Claire Downham, Fiona Edmonds, Colmán Etchingham, Zanette T. Glørstad, John Hines, Alan Lane, Julie Lund, Jan Erik Rekdal and David Wyatt.
The Norse Sorceress
Old Norse literature abounds with descriptions of magic acts that allow ritual specialists of various kinds to manipulate the world around them, see into the future or the distant past, change weather conditions, influence the outcomes of battles, and more. While magic practitioners are known under myriad terms, the most iconic of them is the völva. As the central figure of the famous mythological poem Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Völva), the völva commands both respect and fear. In non-mythological texts similar women are portrayed as crucial albeit somewhat peculiar members of society. Always veiled in mystery, the völur and their kind have captured the academic and popular imaginati...
Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity
Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity seeks to understand these artefacts not as signals of steady, pre-existing cultural units and relations, but as important components in the active and contingent constitution of identities. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on...
Tales of the Iron Bloomery
In Tales of the Iron Bloomery Bernt Rundberget examines the ironmaking in southern Hedmark in Norway in the period AD 700-1300. Excavations show that this method is distinctive and geographically limited; this is expressed by the technology, organization, development and large-scale production. The ironmaking practice had its origins in increasing demands for iron, due to growth in urbanization, church power, kingship and mercantile networks. Rundberget’s main hypothesis is that iron became the economic basis for political developments, from chiefdom to kingdom. Iron extraction activity grew from the late Viking Age, throughout the early medieval period, before it came to a sudden collapse around AD 1300. This trend correlates with the rise and fall of the kingdom.
The Northern Routes to Kingship
This book argues that tribal Scandinavia was set on the route to kingship by the arrival in the AD 180s–90s of warrior groups that were dismissed from the Roman army after defeating the Marcomanni by the Danube. Using a range of evidence, this book details how well-equipped and battle-seasoned warriors, familiar with Roman institutions and practices, seized land and established lordly centres. It shows how these new lords acquired wealth by stimulating the production of commodities for trade with peers and Continental associates, Romans included, to reward retainers and bestow on partners. In these transcultural circumstances, lords and their retainers nurtured artisanal production of exqu...
Viking-Age Transformations
The Viking Age was a period of profound change in Scandinavia. As kingdoms were established, Christianity became the encompassing ideological and cosmological framework and towns were formed. This book examines a central backdrop to these changes: the economic transformation of West Scandinavia. With a focus on the development of intensive and organized use of woodlands and alpine regions and domestic raw materials, together with the increasing standardization of products intended for long-distance trade, the volume sheds light on the emergence of a strong interconnectedness between remote rural areas and central markets. Viking-Age Transformations explores the connection between legal and e...
Women and Weapons in the Viking World
“Invigorating . . . Gardeła reappraises the connections between women and violence in an early-medieval society that has left few texts to guide us.” —Studies in Late Antiquity This book sets out to investigate the idea of “the armed woman” in the Viking Age through a comprehensive and cross-cultural approach and weaves a nuanced picture of women’s lives in the Viking world. The Viking Age (c. AD 750–1050) is conventionally portrayed as a tumultuous time when hordes of fierce warriors from Scandinavia wreaked havoc across the European continent and when Norse merchants traveled to distant corners of the world in pursuit of slaves, silver and exotic commodities. Until fairly re...
The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World
This latest title in the highly successful Ancient Textiles series is the first substantial monograph-length historiography of early medieval embroideries and their context within the British Isles. The book brings together and analyses for the first time all 43 embroideries believed to have been made in the British Isles and Ireland in the early medieval period. New research carried out on those embroideries that are accessible today, involving the collection of technical data, stitch analysis, observations of condition and wear-marks and microscopic photography supplements a survey of existing published and archival sources. The research has been used to write, for the first time, the ‘s...
Looting or Missioning
Until now insular and continental material, mostly metal-work, found in pagan Viking Age graves in Norway, has been interpreted as looted material from churches and monasteries on the British Isles and the Continent. The raiding Vikings brought these objects back to their homeland where they were often broken up and used as jewellery or got alternative functions. Looting or Missioning looks at the use and functions of these sacred objects in their original Christian contexts. Based on such an analysis the author proposes an alternative interpretation of these objects: they were brought by Christian missionaries from different parts of the British Isles and the Continent to Norway. The object...
Rulership in 1st to 14th century Scandinavia
This book seeks to revitalise the somewhat stagnant scholarly debate on Germanic rulership in the first millennium AD. A series of comprehensive chapters combines literary evidence on Scandinavia’s polities, kings, and other rulers with archaeological, documentary, toponymical, and linguistic evidence. The picture that emerges is one of surprisingly stable rulership institutions, sites, and myths, while control of them was contested between individuals, dynasties, and polities. While in the early centuries, Scandinavia was integrated in Germanic Europe, profound societal and cultural changes in 6th-century Scandinavia and the Christianisation of Continental and English kingdoms set norther...
