Some Viking Reading

Rune-stick N B644 (late 12thc.) from Bryggens Museum, Bergen. Photo Judith Jesch

It's quite common for various media and/or internet sites to put up a list of suggested book titles for people wanting to learn more about the Vikings. A recent one is this on Medievalists.net entitled 'Which Books About the Vikings Should I Read'? A couple of years ago the Guardian did 'Top Ten Books About Vikings'. I know I'm a bad person for shuddering when I looking at these lists. Well, maybe not quite shuddering, but having mixed feelings about them. The lists often include books which are not about Vikings at all, but are for example modern fiction, or fourth-hand retellings of myths and legends. Such lists often mix books aimed at different audiences without really specifying what kinds of audiences they are aimed at. And, I'm afraid to say, some of the books on those lists are just not very good. I recognise it is not easy to put such lists together - there are so many books about Vikings out there and it is impossible to read them all. It's also quite hard to judge them, precisely because some which are suitable for some audiences are not suitable for other audiences. Some books are written by experts, and some are put together by jobbing writers trying to make a living. Or people who have just discovered the Vikings and are taking you the reader on their rocky journey finding out about them. Or, some of them written by experts having an off day. Or by people who are an expert in something completely different (you'd be surprised how much of that goes on).

So my list of recommended reading might be just as unsatisfactory as those that I turn my nose up at. Nevertheless, I am going to have a go, since those other lists have inspired me to try to do better. Far be it from me to tell you what you 'should read' - the internet is already too full of people telling other people how to think or behave. But I offer my list for a very specific audience: those who genuinely want to learn about Vikings but are still relative beginners. Intelligent and interested beginners. I'm afraid this list is particularly aimed at those who are thinking of making this a fairly serious study, whether in an educational institution or not. I am going to avoid the myriad of coffee table and popular books which in my view provide entertainment rather than instruction, even though some of these are very good. But they're often a one-stop shop - people might read them (or flick through the pics) once and then never think about Vikings again. Other people read as many such books as they can get their hands on but don't really learn very much because these books often just say the same things, re-use the same images, and, in some cases, peddle the same myths. Just because a lot of books say something doesn't mean it's true. You'd be amazed how many 'serious' books by experts get a bit muddled when trying to explain the word 'Viking'.

What I'm interested in are books that help you engage with the evidence and thereby to think about the process of how we find out about the Viking Age, not just what the 'answers' might be. I'm going for the popular but not the populist. I'm mainly interested in books that have something new to say, have new ways of saying it that make us think, even if they might at some level be 'wrong'. I'm generally very much in favour of thinking. But thinking requires time and commitment, which is why I'm sticking to the more serious end of the market, though you'll see that seriousness can be found in all kinds of places! And yes, I do still, somewhat against the current tide, believe in experts. All I can promise is that, if you read some of the books below, you will be well-equipped to evaluate all the other books about Vikings out there. I have provided some comments to help you identify those you really want to read, just in case you can't get through all of them.

Another word of warning: aficionados will notice that many books that might have made it onto this list are simply not there. There are two possible reasons for this: I might not have read them (I certainly haven't read everything), or I have read them and was not impressed! And I'm not telling which. Other books, while excellent, might be missing because they just are not the kind of book I had in mind for this particular list, which is, I admit, quite personal. I have therefore also avoided books which are too obviously trying to be clever and iconoclastic, or genuinely trying to say something new but which are not well-written or well-argued - life is too short for them.

It's not that easy to find one good book that will tell you everything, or almost everything, you need to know. There's a simple reason for this, which is that Vikings and the Viking Age are complex topics that are not easily reduced even to 300 pages. Also, definitions of what constitutes the Viking Age. or what 'Vikings' really are, do differ, and rightly so. The terms cover a wide variety of people and places over quite a long period of time, and within those places and that time there is a lot of variation. Studying those people, places and times requires a serious commitment to multi-disciplinarity (no, archaeology is not always the only answer, let alone archaeological science), a knowledge of several languages, and the general ability to deal with evidence that is always fragmentary and often elusive. There are really very few geniuses out there who can do this, though quite a few make a noble effort. So what should you read as a general introduction?

Well, if you live in, or have an interest in, Britain or Ireland, you could do worse that start with Jayne Carroll, Stephen Harrison and Gareth Williams, The Vikings in Britain and Ireland (British Museum Press, 2014). What I most like about this book is that the three authors come from different disciplines: Carroll is a philologist and onomast, Harrison an archaeologist and Williams a numismatist and museum curator, so you are in good hands when they evaluate the evidence. There is indeed a good focus on evidence and what it does, or does not, tell us, with some well-chosen illustrations which go beyond the ones that usually appear in such books. It's a good place to start though obviously its coverage is geographically limited..

Having sailed around the northwest European archipelago, you'll probably want to find out more about Scandinavia, where the Vikings came from, next. It's not actually easy, especially if you don't read any Scandinavian languages. Let's hope that by 2025, when the new museum of the Viking Age opens in Oslo, there will be some decent introductions to Viking Age Scandinavia. In the meantime, Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton University Press, 2014) is quite a good place to start. It takes a broad view of the Viking Age, focusing on the period as transformational for Scandinavia and largely from a Scandinavian point of view. It starts with a fictional vignette of a Scandinavian chieftain and his followers back home celebrating their successes abroad in both raiding and other activities. The core of the narrative is however closely linked to the primary sources, which it brings to life successfully, while keeping a keen critical sense and often emphasising what the sources do not reveal. The book is thematically organised (with chapters on violence, emigration, ships, trade, etc.) which means the author tends to whiz around different times and places, often without a very clear chronology (a bit surprising in a historian). It's also quite light on the important evidence of archaeology, especially excavated sites, with the historian preferring written sources even when they are post-Viking Age. But the Swedish author does love his rune-stones! In general, it does the job in an engaging way.

Although Winroth's book is well-illustrated, it can usefully be supplemented by the perfect picture book, Steve Ashby and Alison Leonard, Pocket Museum: Vikings (Thames and Hudson, 2018). It is literally like carrying a museum around with you, with nearly 200 artefacts pictured, with brief but useful explanatory texts. A picture book that is also educational.

Moving from there to a more specialised archaeological study, I can't resist recommending Steven P. Ashby, A Viking Way of Life (Amberley, 2014). It's a book about - wait for it- combs! And hair! The author does a great job of showing how a simple, everyday object opens up all kinds of meanings in the Viking Age. It starts with the question of how you actually make a comb. First you have to catch your animal whose antler or bone you will use as raw material. And it's not as easy as you think. From these beginnings a complex and fascinating narrative emerges. A book that everyone can relate to, even if you no longer have much hair you probably had some once! The author is not fully reliable when it comes to the literary sources, but he has a good go, and I forgive him for otherwise producing such an exciting book.

While archaeologists occasionally stumble over sagas and poetry, the literary scholars are similarly uncertain when it comes to material culture. Thus, Christopher Abram, Myths of the Pagan North: Gods of the Norsemen (Continuum, 2011) is really quite vague on the material evidence for the pre-Christian beliefs of the Vikings. But he comes into his own discussing the medieval Icelandic literary sources. I particularly liked his emphasis, and detailed analysis, of some skaldic poetry which is almost certainly genuinely from the pagan period. In particular, he moves his gaze away from the fixation with Iceland that the written sources tend to bring, and makes some controversial but stimulating suggestions about religious conflict in tenth- and eleventh-century Norway.

Beliefs, myths and religion are an important aspect of studying the Vikings, so I am also happy to recommend Carolyne Larrington, Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes (Thames and Hudson, 2017). Of all the myriad books about the myths, this one is I think most successful in keeping a balance between retelling the undeniably attractive stories and actually giving the reader a sense of the significance of and relationships between the sources. While this is a book aimed at the general public, Larrington successfully steers her mythological ship with the firm hand of the expert scholar.

While we are on the topic of literature, all study of the Vikings has to grapple with the Icelandic sagas. Scholarship has veered between believing them to be written records of Viking Age oral tradition to discounting them as literature 'because all literature is lies' (direct quote from a senior Norse specialist). Nowadays, saga scholarship often ignores the problem and prefers to study the sagas without considering if, whether, or how they might provide insights into the Viking Age. To me that is the interesting question, which is far from resolved. Since no one has resolved it, the best thing do to is first to get to know this fascinating corpus and the best way of doing that is by reading Margaret Clunies Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge UP, 2010). This is the best place to find out what exactly a saga is, how many types there are, and indeed every saga gets at least a mention. But there are also some really useful close readings of extracts which will help the reader develop a good idea of how sagas work. Though Clunies Ross doesn't explicitly see it this way, I also think this is the first step to an understanding of how sagas relate to the Viking Age (the short answer is, in many complicated ways, and it's never straightforward!).

A much-neglected literary topic is the afterlife of the Vikings in medieval English literature. This is expertly presented in Eleanor Parker, The Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England  (I.B. Tauris, 2018). Starting with contemporary poems like The Battle of Maldon, Parker traces how Vikings are presented in a wide range of medieval texts in English and Latin, many of them little-known, even to specialists. She sets out to complicate the narratives of historians past and present for whom the Vikings came 'not to govern but rather to destroy'. She does this by examining how literature and popular traditions told more complex stories of England’s Viking Age, demonstrating both the lasting impact and legacy of, and the regional diversity of English responses to, the people most of the texts figure as ‘Danes’. The very complexity of these divergent responses to England's  Viking past is clear, if indirect, evidence of just how important an impact the Scandinavians had.

It's not possible to study Vikings without some grasp of runes and runic inscriptions and Martin Findell, Runes (British Museum Press, 2014) is the best place to start. Admittedly, Findell has more of a soft spot for the runes of Anglo-Saxon England, rather than the far more copious Scandinavian corpus (unbelievable!). But he gives a nicely pedagogical and well-illustrated account of the significance and study of these absolutely contemporary, if occasionally rather laconic, texts.

Words, words, words. For those who are most comfortable with pictures, and for a different kind of thinking, there is nothing better than Dayanna Knight, The Viking Coloring Book (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017). The author is a trained archaeologist and, like many an archaeologist, good at drawing. Except that she is far better than most, being a quite exceptional artist who can bring the Viking world to life in a way that goes far beyond the technical drawings of the average archaeological report, while still being as accurate as it is possible to be. Plus, colouring pictures is a very relaxing thing to do in our stressful world, and you really get inside the Viking mind while doing it.

Disclaimer: It is true that I am personally acquainted with every single author mentioned above, so there may be a wee bit of bias in my choices. But then, I wouldn't be doing my job very well if I didn't know all these great scholars and fabulous communicators, so I hope I can be forgiven. Enjoy!

Westfjord Stories I

Although the Westfjords (Vestfirðir) of Iceland are sparsely populated nowadays, they do figure quite largely in a variety of Old Icelandic texts. Several sagas are set, wholly or in part, in the region, including some very well-known ones like Gísla saga, which has its own trail mainly around the Dýrafjörður area. Here however I will just look at a few anecdotes from my favourite text Landnámabók which both interested me and are linked to places I visited on my recent tour of the region.

Flying to Ísafjörður, our Air Iceland Connect plane was named after Þuríðr sundafyllir 'sound-filler'. The lady was a settler from Hálogaland, in Norway, where she had the particular talent of filling every sound with fish at a time of famine. She continued her fishing leadership role in Iceland. Having settled Bolungarvík (where we stayed at the splendid Einarshúsið guesthouse), she established a fishing ground at Kvíarmið out in the mouth of the Ísafjörður and took as payment one ewe from each of the farmers in the region. She could be seen as the founder of the fishing industry which is still such an important part of the economy of the Westfjords. The name Ísafjörður nowadays refers to the fjord in which the town of the same name is situated, but then seems to have referred to the whole of what is now known as Ísafjarðardjúp, as discussed by Svavar Sigmundsson. Ísafjörður is particularly associated with the little-known saga of Hávarðr. This saga is several times referred to in Landnámabók which appears to have used an earlier version of it as a source.

A memorable experience on our trip was the extremely hairy drive down to Rauðasandur, near Patreksfjörður. The eponymous beach is extremely beautiful and, as the name suggests, the sand is indeed fairly reddish. The explanation seems to be that this colour derives from some scallops with reddish shells which form the sand. However, the sand did not strike me as particularly red on our visit, but I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'red'. This colour term was a bit wider in Old Norse than in modern English, also being applied for instance to gold. Although I don't have a convincing picture to demonstrate, I could just about see the sand as reddish gold (as indeed in the picture here). Landnámabók provides an alternative explanation, namely that the place was named after a certain Ármóðr inn rauði 'the red'. The area is still being farmed and one can see why it would be an attractive proposition for a settler, particularly one who would arrive by boat rather than the vertiginous road over the mountain that we took. Since Landnámabók does not have much to say about Ármóðr, we can perhaps assume that his nickname was derived from the place-name, rather than the other way around, and that the colour and size of the beach were sufficiently distinctive for it to be an important navigational marker. Uncertainty about the origin of the name could explain the alternative forms, Rauðisandur 'Red Sand' and Rauðasandur 'Sand of Red'.

My third anecdote relates to what is now called Hrafnseyri, but is in the old texts mostly known as Eyrr or Eyri (along with Flateyri and Þingeyri - spits of land sticking out into the fjord were the ideal settlement sites in this region it seems). As mentioned in my previous blog post, the place was eventually named after Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, a topic to which I will return in another post. But the first settler there was a certain Ánn rauðfeldr 'red-cloak' who received the land from the eponymous settler of Arnarfjörður, Örn, when the latter moved over to the more clement Eyjafjörður. Ánn had married a certain Grélöðr while harrying in Ireland, and she had thought there were bad smells emanating from the ground at their first residence in Dufansdalur. But when they moved to Eyri, she thought the grass had the fragrance of honey. While we were there, someone was cutting the grass around the church and the whole place was indeed very sweet-smelling!.

One Day Without Vikings?

I am a serial migrant. Twice in my life I have made the move to a new country (not including shorter stays of a few years in yet other countries), in both cases becoming a citizen and intending to stay. It looks like the second one is my forever home - I have now been a UK citizen for a quarter of a century and have no plans to move. In my first adopted country, I was schooled from a young age in the slogan 'No taxation without representation!' and that motivated me to become a citizen in my second adopted country - I was by then paying taxes and wanted to take a full part in the life of the country that was now home. I therefore naturally have an interest in tomorrow's National Day of Action on Feb 20th to Celebrate the Contributions of Migrants to the UK, or @1daywithoutus / #1daywithoutus.

But I also have a professional interest in the contributions of migrants, at least those in the past. If we take the long view historically, then of course everyone in these islands is a migrant, at least since the last Ice Age covered them, and I do think everyone should reflect on that simple fact, as well as on the contributions of migrants, whether over the last 10,000 years, or the last 10 years. Among the many identifiable groups who have made an enormous contribution to the life of these islands are the people of Scandinavian origin we call 'Vikings', who settled here between the ninth and eleventh centuries. To some they are best known for raiding and pillaging, as if they were the only people in the Early Middle Ages who did these things (they weren't). But most people also know that they moved into large swathes of eastern and northern England, into large parts of Scotland, and that they founded towns and other settlements in Ireland. These immigrants were not raiders and warriors, but farmers and traders, and families with women and children as well as men.

What was their contribution? Well, by farming the land and engaging in local, national and international trade, they made the contribution to the economy that we normally expect of immigrants (and the indigenous inhabitants, too?), and they paid their taxes. They came in sufficient numbers for their language and culture to become an indelible part of the language and culture of these islands. Even the first word in the previous sentence comes from Old Norse, this infiltration of some of the most basic features of the language (in this case a pronoun) being unprecedented in any other migration other than that of the Anglo-Saxons before them. At the other extreme, the English word 'law' comes from Old Norse - the Vikings gave us the very foundation of this nation's existence. It is not possible to have one day without Vikings, even now in the twenty-first century.

Words and place-names of Old Norse origin are around you, everywhere, everyday. You can find out more about the Vikings' contribution to the English language through the Gersum project. You can learn more about English place-names of Old Norse origin at the Key to English Place-Names. You can also find out about physical objects from the Viking period through for example the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. And this year is the Year of the Viking, when you can come to Nottingham for a special British Museum / York Museums Trust exhibition opening in November. As well as the exhibition, there will be a lot of different events dedicated to explaining the contributions of those migrants, the Vikings, branded as 'Bringing the Vikings Back to the East Midlands'. These will be advertised on the website of the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham, so keep your eye out there! Or just follow Viking Midlands on Twitter - the project is currently in its infancy but more information will follow soon.

In the meantime, remember the migrants, not just tomorrow, but every day!

The Poetry of the Shipping Forecast

Britannia Designs, Dartmouth

Despite being the world's greatest landlubber, I have always loved the Met Office shipping forecast, especially when broadcast late at night on Radio 4, and I know I am not alone. Undoubtedly my own reason for this lifelong devotion is partly its splendid litany of place-names, beginning with that most evocative word of all, Viking, followed by North and South Utsire, named after Norway's smallest municipality Utsira. The forecast then ends its ramblings round the rocks and waters of the northwest European archipelago (and some nautically nearby places) in suitably Norse and Viking fashion with Fair Isle, Faeroes and South-East Iceland.

But it's not just this abundance of Norse and Viking references that I love. I would go so far as to argue that the shipping forecast follows some rules that make it into a kind of poetry, the kind of poetry I like.

(1) It is formulaic. The basic structure of the shipping forecast is the same every time, and it makes use of a pre-determined and traditional vocabulary and phrases with which both author and listeners are familiar. Occasionally moderate. Showers. Good. Cyclonic. 6 or 7 at first in west.

(2) But like all good formulaic poetry it rings the changes through variation. Moderate or rough. Rain or showers. Poor. Variable 4 becoming northwesterly for a time.

(3) It has a fixed structure, each part introduced by a formula to keep the listener orientated: 'The shipping forecast is issued...', 'The general synopsis at midday', 'The area forecasts for the next 24 hours'. Within each part the content is formulaic and always in the same order, though making use of variation as described above.

(4) Its formulaic nature gives it a regular, fairly predictable, if somewhat staccato, rhythm.

(5) It is primarily oral, though you can also read it on the page.

(6) It has a function (even if not for me). I like poetry that has a function other than that of being poetry. Because of its important function the shipping forecast has to be read in clear and unemotional tones, which thereby emphasise the drama of 'rough or very rough', or 'severe gale 9'.

As you snuggle in your warm bed tonight, just spare a thought for those in peril on the sea.

P.S. I'm not the only lover of the shipping forecast who owns the charming little dish pictured above. Thanks to my ever-vigilant other half who found it for me.

All Over the Place

Inspired by the news that that stupid organisation Facebook apparently has located the lovely Baltic island of Gotland (see the view of Visby to the right) in the equally lovely country of Norway, I turned to that monumental mine of information on Norwegian farm-names, Oluf Rygh's Norske Gaardnavne, published 1897-1936, but available on the internet since 1999, thanks in part to Norway's special arrangements for conscientious objectors to military service....

There I did indeed discover that there are at least three farms called Gotland in Norway, two of them in Hedmark, which is I believe where Facebook located the Baltic island. There are also four occurrences of Danmark, for one of which Rygh notes that the names of foreign countries were often used in more recent farm-names, and indeed there is even a Sverige in the north of Norway. The Finlands are more complicated, since there the first element might be the word Finnr, meaning a 'Lapp, Sami'. Other explanations are also possible.

Moving over to the British Isles, it gets interesting. There are four Englands in Norway - which could be named after the country, or could contain the first element eng meaning 'meadow, pasture'. How do you tell the difference? Well the tones (pitch contours) of spoken Norwegian help! With Tone 1, the meaning is the country England, with Tone 2, it is the meadow-word. Similarly, the two examples of Skotland are pronounced differently, so only one of them is likely to be named after the country. Ireland, however, does not appear in this collection of farm-names.

And moving across the North Atlantic, we find four examples of Island. The etymologies (based on the earliest recorded forms) of all of these are quite complicated, but at least one of them seems to be named after the country, at least according to Rygh. And of course anyone who has been to Oslo knows about Grønland near the central railway station...once upon a time it was a farm, of course. All five of the Norwegian occurrences have Tone 1 and so appear to be named after the country.

Who says Old Norse is a useless subject? I do think those good folks at Facebook should study that and onomastics as well!

Languages, Myths and Finds

Just wanted to give a little plug to a project I have had some involvement with. This has very much been the Year of Vikings, and in particular the splendid exhibition at the British Museum, now sadly finished, about which I have blogged before.

In connection with the exhibition, the Languages, Myths and Finds project had the aim of encouraging conversations between specialist university academics and advanced research students in Old Norse and Viking Studies, and local communities around Britain and Ireland who were interested in knowing more about their Viking heritage. The communities chosen for the project were Cleveland, Dublin, Isle of Lewis, Isle of Man and Munster. Five small teams of six academics and students were chosen to work with each community, in each case developing and researching topics most suited to that locality, as identified in dialogue with the community.

The result is now five gorgeous booklets, each very different, which can be downloaded in pdf form and for free from the project website.

Enjoy!

Vikings: Life and Legend

Tjørnehøj brooch
©Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen

The Mega Viking Show has finally come to town, and your faithful blogstress was honoured and privileged to be present when Margrethe, Queen of Denmark, and various other dignitaries opened it last Thursday, as well as to get an early viewing of the whole thing. I don't propose to review the exhibition - there are plenty of reactions of all types to be read in the media. The exhibition is designed for the general public, rather than the expert, and I firmly believe that the outsider's view is the one to seek out. Interestingly, the reactions vary enormously - do read more than one review to get a sense of it all. Another reason I would find it hard to review is that so many of the objects are almost too familiar. This is not only because I saw a version of the same exhibition in Copenhagen last September, but also because some of them I saw last time the British Museum did a Viking exhibition, in 1980, and in other exhibitions in various places since. Yet others are familiar from the many illustrated coffee-table books about the Vikings that flood the market on a regular basis.

But some of the exhibits are relatively new and I thought I'd pick out a few of my favourites at random, for my and your delectation. My top favourite is probably the valkyrie figure discovered in 2012, but I have blogged about that before. Several other 'valkyrie' images can be seen in the exhibition, and they are a fascinating group, mostly relatively recent metal detectorist discoveries. Another recent (2007) metal detectorist find from Denmark of which I am inordinately fond is the ship-brooch pictured above and extensively used by the British Museum in its publicity for the exhibition. It is sometimes said to represent a dragon-ship, but it is quite clear to me that the two figureheads are those of horses, as indicated by their ears and manes. Although similar brooches are known, this is the only one I have come across on which the animals seem very definitely to be horses' heads, and is thus a unique representation of that figure so commonly found in skaldic poetry, by which ships are called 'horses of the sea'. I also like the little face between the horses' heads, though quite what he represents I do not know.

Oval brooches have always fascinated me because they are typical of Scandinavian women's dress, and when we find them around the world, they raise interesting questions about the role of women in Viking migrations. Many thousands of them are known, from a broad geographical and chronological range, and in a variety of styles. For me, the one that tops them all is definitely that found in 2004 in an archaeological investigation at Finglas, in Dublin. There's an interesting photo of how it looked when it first came out of the ground on the website of Icon Archaeology, but it can only truly be appreciated in its cleaned-up form, which shows very clearly its 'protruding animal ornament', as the archaeologists say. These include both whole animal figures, and animal heads, all of which strongly resemble bears. Although similar brooches with small animal figures are known, I think these are the only ones which are clearly bears. They look quite cute to us today, though the bear was of course a feared and fearsome animal, and widely significant in Viking language and culture. I haven't found a good photo of the brooch to show you, but it adorns the cover of The Viking Age: Ireland and the West (2010), edited by John Sheehan and Donnchadh Ó Corráin, shown above, and is discussed at length by Maeve Sikora in that volume.

Finally, although the exhibition is not strong on runic inscriptions, it was a real pleasure to see the Kirk Andreas III stone from the Isle of Man, with its simple (and incomplete) inscription 'Þorvaldr raised this cross'. While not the most exciting inscription, it is of interest because, along with most of its fellow Manx inscriptions, it records the earliest uses of the word kross in Old Norse, a word with a fascinating history which appears to be borrowed from Latin crux into Gaelic, from there into Old Norse (as suggested by the Manx inscriptions) and from there into English, as suggested by some place-names in the north-west of England. Oh, and the stone, which is clearly a Christian cross-slab, also has those well-known images of what appear to be Odin at Ragnarok on one side, and a Christian figure on the other (above, left). It was particularly nice to see it in London last Thursday, because on Friday I went off on another runological field trip to the Isle of Man, where we had to make do with a replica in St Andrew's church, Andreas, instead. But the display in the church did have a nice picture of the last time the stone went to the British Museum, for the 1980 exhibition (above, right).

Viking Reading

What with the upcoming Viking exhibition next year (see previous post), there is certainly a flurry of recent and forthcoming books on relevant topics. I have been scouring the internet and am amazed at how much is imminent, which I will never, ever have time to read! (Being a slow reader as I am). But I thought I'd draw your attention to the following about which I am sufficiently knowledgeable to recommend with confidence, even if I haven't read them yet... Please note that some of these books are not out yet, but those that aren't are all planned for publication within the next six months or so, and those that are are brand new, so you can start planning your buying and reading now! If you notice a certain Nottingham slant to the list, then that's simply because we have, or have had, some great people here.

For a general introduction to The Vikings in Britain and Ireland, the super trio of Jayne Carroll, Stephen Harrison and Gareth Williams will be hard to beat. Published by the British Museum Press, their book will be illustrated with objects from the British Museum, and possibly the odd snapshot of a signpost...

For a scholarly, but accessible, introduction to runes, see Runes by Martin Findell, also published by the British Museum Press, and again illustrated with objects from their collections.

A rather different sort of book is promised by Carlton Books for The Viking Experience by our former and current doctoral candidates Marjolein Stern and Roderick Dale. Buy it and see!

While the above are intended for the general reader, I must also mention the thick and deeply scholarly tome by Sara Pons-Sanz, The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English, 600 pages of the most thorough examination ever of this topic, which no serious scholar will be able to avoid.

So many of us come to the Viking Age through reading the Icelandic sagas. A new collection on Dating the Sagas, edited by Else Mundal and containing a paper by our alumna Slavica Ranković, will be essential reading for discovering what relationship, if any, the sagas of Icelanders have with the tales of their Viking ancestors.

Hverr sem þetta lesa, [þ]á berr hann prís (G 83 M).

'I Must Go Down to the Sea Again...'

There is a veritable flurry of Viking ship reconstructions and launchings going on at the moment, no doubt inspired by the very successful Havhingsten fra Glendalough / Sea-Stallion from Glendalough, which sailed from Roskilde to Dublin and back a few years ago. Only a few days ago, a copy of the Oseberg ship was launched in Tønsberg. It's called Saga Oseberg and there is a good video of its rather less than smooth launch here - I do hope it sails a bit better than some of its predecessors! The so-called Dragon Harald Fairhair was launched on the 5th of June, though I do wish the people responsible for the latter had consulted more, both about calling it a 'dragon' and Harald's nickname. Grrr. Unlike most modern Viking ships, this is not a replica of any actual ship, but rather a reconstruction based on a variety of sources. Meanwhile, Archaeology4Schools has embarked on a copy of the Ardnamurchan boat, found last year, though since not much more than some rivets survived of the boat, I do wonder what the basis of this reconstruction really is. At any rate, it sounds like lots of people are having lots of fun, and the seas this summer will be alive with Viking ships!

Hlymrekr

When I started this blog, I promised some account of my travels, but there has been too little of that (though I have travelled quite a lot in the last year or so) and too much of robbing things from the internet and the media. So I am quite happy to report on a recent lightning visit to Limerick. Apart from the usual things that make it a pleasure to visit Ireland (Guinness, friendly people, fiddle music leaking out of pubs, heathery mountains on the horizon) I was quite taken by the ruined church, round tower and cross at Dysart O'Dea (or however you wish to spell it). Both the splendid romanesque doorway to the church and the cross up on the hill had what seemed, to my inexpert eye, to be late-flowering Irish Urnes-style decoration (see the photo). And of course there were the usual pleasures of Irish sacred sites, with the garishly but lovingly decorated family graves, a tower house in the distance, and the nearest village with the 20 pubs in different colours. Coo....

Slaves of the Raven Banner

I'm currently 'listening again' to the interval talk from last night's Proms, with the great and the good of Viking Studies (Alex Woolf, Clare Downham, also a newish voice, David Wyatt) explaining slavery in the Viking Age. It can be heard again (for only a week, I think) on the BBC's Listen Again, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00cxlms. Lots of attention to sex and power, less to the economic aspects of the trade. Good to see the media keeping up their interest in the Vikings, even if there is nothing in this programme that would surprise anyone who did an undergraduate module on the Vikings. Not quite sure where the 'raven banners' fit in, either. But at least the point is made that the Vikings weren't unique in keeping slaves ('as common as a car is today'!).