Full Description
This volume explores the changes that occurred during the Viking Age, as Scandinavian societies fell in line with the larger forces that dominated the Insular world and Continental Europe, absorbing the powerful symbiosis of Christianity and monarchy, adapting to the idea of royal lineage and supremacy, and developing a buzzing urbanism coupled with large-scale trade networks. Presenting research on the grand context of the Viking Age alongside localised studies, it contributes to the furthering of collaborations between local and 'outsider' research on the Viking Age. Through a diversity of approaches on the Viking homelands and the wider world of the Vikings, it offers studies of a range of phenomena, including urban and rural settlements; continuity in the use of places as well as new types of places specific to the Viking Age; the social significance of change; the construction and maintenance of social identity both within the 'homelands' and across large territories; ethnicity; and ideas of identity and the creation and recreation of identity both at home and abroad. As such, it will appeal to historians and archaeologists with interests in Viking-Age studies, as well as scholars of Scandinavian studies.
Contents
1. Introducing Vikings Across Boundaries
Marianne Moen
Part I: Exchange and Travel: Connections Across the Viking World
2. Feasting, Friendship and Alliances: The Socio-political Use of Insular Vessels in Viking-Age Norway
Aina Margrethe Heen-Pettersen
3. Viking-Age Landing Places: A Time for Reconsideration?
Jens Ulriksen
4. Scandinavians on the Southern Baltic Coast
Hauke Jöns and Anna Kowalska
5. Western Finland in the Viking World
Ingrid Gustin and Anna Wessman
6. Pre-Viking-Age Ship Burials at Salme in Estonia: The First Eastern Vikings or Indications of a Shared Culture Milieu?
Marika Mägi
Part II: Communicating Identities: At Home and Abroad
7. Women as Bearers of Cultural Tradition in Viking-Age England
Jane Kershaw
8. Urban Way of Life as Identity? A Case Study from Ribe's Emporium
Sarah Croix
9. Displaying and (re)Negotiating Identities: Migration and Funerary Rites in Viking-Age Northern Scotland
Frida Espolin Norstein
10. 'Vikings' and the Formation of the New Identities and New Centres of Power in the Upper Volga
Nikolaj Makarov
11. Sámi Vikings?
Hege Skalleberg Gjerde and Jostein Bergstøl
12. Warrior Identities in Viking-Age Scandinavia
Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson
Part III: Dynamic Social Expressions in Life and Death
13. Socially Significant Viking-Age Housing
Frands Herschend
14. The Martial Function of the Central Places in Viking-Age Scandinavia
Torun Zachrisson
15. The Dead of the Viking-Age Towns in Scandinavia
Sarah Croix
16. A Geography of Slavery: Ceramic Networks and Communities in the Lake Mälaren Valley, Sweden c. AD 950 to 1150
Mats Roslund
17. Warfare and Recruitment in Iron Age Central Norway
Ingrid Ystgaard
