Full Description
There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. New work on the early Middle Ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, drew attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them. Here, a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach to the problems of their study is presented. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernable particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theatre of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and AEthelred Unraed. Two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in this collection but are shown not to be the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multi-disciplinary approaches evoke Vikings and Danes not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. The papers raise wider questions too, such as when did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers.
Contents
List of IllustrationsList of AuthorsList of AbbreviationsEditorial PrefaceForeword, by Barbara Yorke1. Introduction: Danes in WessexRyan Lavelle and Simon Roffey2. West Saxons and Danes: Negotiating Identities in the Early Middle AgesSimon Roffey and Ryan Lavelle3. The Place of Slaughter: Exploring the West Saxon BattlescapeThomas J. T. Williams4. A Review of Viking Attacks in Western England to the Early Tenth Century: Their Motives and ResponsesDerek Gore5. Landscapes of Violence in Early Medieval Wessex: Towards a Reassessment of Anglo-Saxon Strategic LandscapesJohn Baker and Stuart Brookes6. Scandinavian-style Metalwork from Southern England: New Light on the'First Viking Age' in WessexJane Kershaw7. Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: the Discovery and Excavation of an Early Medieval Mass BurialAngela Boyle8. Law, Death and Peacemaking in the'Second Viking Age': an Ealdorman, his King, and Some 'Danes' in WessexRyan Lavelle9. Thorkell the Tall and the Bubble Reputation: the Vicissitudes of FameAnn Williams10. A Place in the Country: Orc of Abbotsbury and Tole of Tolpuddle, DorsetAnn Williams11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066C. P. Lewis12. Danish Royal Burials in Winchester: Cnut and his FamilyMartin Biddle andBirthe Kjolbye-Biddle13. Some Observations on Danes in Wessex TodayLillian Cespedes GonzalezSelect BibliographyIndex
