Horses in the viking world have long been considered a male affair. However, there are numerous connections between horses and women, expressed in the written sources, the art, and the archaeological material. This study examines the horsemanship of three burial contexts with horses and women: chamber grave 2 of Kosel-East, Schleswig (Viking Age Denmark), chamber grave Bj.581 of Birka, Uppland, Sweden, and the ship burial of Oseberg, Vestfold, Norway. In these graves, women had been laid to rest together with horses and horse tack. The combination of artefacts signalizes different roles in the viking equestrian world, indicating that women might have taken active parts in the Viking Age ‘horse industry’.
Abstract While many Old Norse myths and legends reflect their audiences’ values, it is more in doubt whether Old Norse gods were perceived as interested in human morality. Some past scholars have rejected connections between Old Norse religion and morality, and most modern handbooks ignore the topic entirely. I survey Old Norse poetry for instances in which the gods or other supernatural beings reward or punish human acts like altruism, violence, oath-breaking, and devotion and thereby demonstrate that at least some worshippers did conceive of supernatural agents taking an interest in their conduct. Modern observers only have access to behaviours that reflect the themes of that poetry, however, leaving open the possibility that the gods and other creatures were once supposed to judge a wider spectrum of activities.
Abstract This paper analyses the reliability of descriptions of drinking rituals in Old Norse sources depicting the Viking Age ( c. ad 800–1050), particularly with regard to the motif of the lady with the mead cup. The poems depict a god or hero receiving a cup of mead from an otherworldly woman in what scholars have interpreted as hieros gamos , a sacred marriage between a ruler and a female deity to legitimize his rule. However, using vernacular texts to analyse pre-Christian rituals and modes of thought is problematic at best. This paper is therefore inspired by Simon Nygaard’s interpretation (2018; 2022; 2023) that Old Norse poetry may contain fragments of ritualized oral performances. It employs the analysis of poetic metrics, potential ritual formulae present in runestones, and the reported roles of female ritual specialists to propose a reconstruction model for the ‘mead’ ceremony.
Abstract A notable resurgence of interest in skjaldmeyjar (commonly termed ‘shieldmaidens’) in the fields of archaeology and gender studies has been ongoing over the last decade. Yet most saga scholarship on the subject continues to assume a post-feminist critical position reading gender identities as social groups in a structural hierarchy. These perspectives highlight the problematic and anachronistic nature of the concept of gender itself, which has attained so many layers of polarization that applying it to premodern cultures inevitably carries over some contemporary bias. This article repositions the discourse on skjaldmeyjar by shifting critical focus away from gender and onto these figures’ individual modes of personhood. Instead of seeking to gender, this inquiry aims to emphatically un gender: not impose or coin any labels, but do away with labels altogether. What happens when all the familiar stereotypes are discarded? Close readings of skjaldmeyjar reveal the material objects with which they are semantically linked (shields, weapons, armour) are not passive props but play active roles in shaping and redefining the body-self parameters of their wielders and wearers. These observations are brought into dialogue with recently posited reassessments of mind and materiality in archaeological theory to illuminate the ways in which material objects actively contribute to identity formations and personhood configurations. Personhood is thus no static state of being, but an active embodied process. An extended exposure to the violence of war does not come without personal cost. This opens the door to investigating the psychosomatic dimensions in literary depictions of skjaldmeyjar , with particular emphasis on trauma and combat stress. From said observations, an apparatus is constructed to illustrate the dynamic of these psychosomatic effects.
Abstract Viking activity in the Iberian Peninsula is a field of study marked by fragmentary and limited sources that restrict the knowledge available to modern scholars. Yet despite their brevity and small number, it may be possible to extract additional information from the surviving texts if one reads them together with a comparative and contextual analysis that looks into the local geography, conditions, and history. The result is largely speculative, but bound by logic, and may open new avenues of inquiry that, while not filling every gap in our knowledge of the Viking Age in Iberia, may nonetheless offer a less restricted view of the period. This is my attempt at that exercise, focusing on a few episodes that hold a greater promise of additional information.
Abstract AGLA is an enigmatic, powerful (‘magic’) word ubiquitous in medieval Scandinavian inscriptions, particularly in Norway and Northern Europe. What was the word’s origin, and what did it mean? It adds a dimension to its riddle that Jewish tradition has a similar-sounding word that played a similar role as a powerful word in amulets and a few discussions of esoteric knowledge. The article discusses the runic AGLA in medieval Scandinavian inscriptions and the Hebrew ʾaglāʾ in Jewish tradition. Its main research questions are: How do medieval Scandinavian runic inscriptions use the word AGLA? How do Jewish texts and amulets use the Hebrew ʾaglāʾ ? Do the runic AGLA and the Hebrew ʾaglāʾ represent the same word and attest to a case of interreligious borrowing? If so, did the word originate in a Jewish context, or did Jewish tradition borrow it? And, if the runic AGLA is borrowed from the Jewish ʾaglāʾ , how did it migrate to Scandinavia?
Abstract This article takes the long-debated topic of the berserkr warrior-type and addresses a previously unresearched piece of information for the etymological evidential category. The circa late-ninth century poem, Haraldskvæði , or ‘Words of the Raven’, serves as the basis for this examination of two verbs used to describe sound generated by berserkir and ulfheðnar as well as other potentially connected sounds, such as those made when drawing a sword. The literature and controversy within this topic are outlined and critiqued prior to discussion on the likelihood of these two verbs being used as descriptors of sound generated by predators and therefore strengthening the claim that berserkir wore bear-shirts. It is hoped that etymologists are able to proceed from this article and evaluate the verbs in greater detail.
In the early 1980s, a runestone fragment with a Christian inscription from the early eleventh century was discovered in Harstad town, northern Norway, in excavated masses originating from the farm Ervika. Runestones are very rare archaeological finds in this region, but, despite being included in runological overviews, the Ervika stone has not been studied or published by archaeologists or historians. This reflects a tendency where evidence of early medieval Christian influences and the Christianization processes in northern Norway have been surprisingly little discussed apart from general overviews and some local studies of specific find categories. In this article, we aim to initiate a broader debate about the complexities of the Christianization processes in northern Norway by presenting and evaluating relevant finds. This includes the material that has emerged over the last decade due to increased interest in private metal detecting. We emphasize the particularities of the geopolitical and sociocultural context in the north, where impulses from the Eastern Church and Saami culture and religion may have affected the reception and practice of the new religion. The Ervika runestone fragment serves as a point of departure, and we describe the find and its context in some detail to ensure it is included in future research by runologists, archaeologists, and historians.
It is widely accepted that the hólmganga, a traditional form of Norse duelling, was abolished in the early eleventh century. Or was it? This article examines the evidence for the survival of the form into the thirteenth century (and beyond). It asks what defines a hólmganga, as well as what it means for a social institution to endure across centuries. I identify in the Íslendingasögur practices and idioms that constitute hólmganga conventions, arguing that these should be approached as a spectrum, and I locate evidence for incidents which fall along this spectrum in the samtíðarsögur. The hólmganga, like many engrained cultural reflexes, refused to die out, but also refused to stay fixed: the same set of practices and terms could acquire starkly different meanings in different temporal, social-political, and cultural contexts.
This article argues that the most appropriate critical framework for interpreting the comedic aspects of the eddic poems Lokasenna and Þrymskviða — and understanding their social, cultural, and artistic functions for their medieval audiences — is Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. Both poems are archetypal examples of what Bakhtin calls ‘free play with the sacred’: their degrading humour renews rather than negates, purposefully supplanting images of violence, social fracture, and death with images of fertility and productivity. These texts specifically address anxieties around gender performance and sexuality by offering fantasies of regenerative humiliation without lasting damage or consequence, and their structured forays into subversion invite us to re-evaluate their role in the Codex Regius’s prosimetric compilation.
This article examines the attribution of Ambrósíuss saga biskups to Gunnlaugr Leifsson based on the reference to the monk’s composition of a nova historia sancti Ambrosii contained in Arngrímr Brandsson’s Guðmundar saga. The article assesses the nature of the historia in question, the reliability of the episode the reference is found in, and the motives behind its composition. By analysing the narrative context of the bishop’s saga and the meaning of the term historia in fourteenth-century Iceland, the expression in Guðmundar saga does not point to a prose work, but rather to a rhymed office of the saint, excluding the attribution of Ambrósíuss saga to Gunnlaugr. An intertextual analysis between the bishop’s saga, Bergr Sokkason’s Nikuláss saga erkibiskups (II) and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale shows that the historia episode in Guðmundar saga is modelled on a similar scene that is ultimately drawn from the Latin universal history via the saint’s saga. The differences between the source and the saga show that Arngrímr made conscious adaptations that served the purpose of his narrative. In the author’s plan, this article argues that the reference to Ambrose and the presence of Gunnlaugr bestowed reliability to an episode that probably never happened and suggested the presence of a text that not only does not coincide with Ambrósíuss saga, but also that probably never was.
The article compares two myths found in the Poetic Edda — Óðinn’s quest of the Mead of Poetry and Vǫlundr’s captivity and escape — and finds a series of analogies between both narratives: in both cases the protagonist is first tricked or left by a woman and afterwards he himself tricks and leaves a woman. In both cases the hero attempts at reaching his goal by hard work, which does not lead to success and then resorts to trickery, which brings success. Óðinn as well as Vǫlundr undergo (either literal or symbolic) snake metamorphosis and a bird metamorphosis. Both myths end with pregnancy, one literal and one symbolic. This complex analogy is then interpreted via the exploration of the mythological context and by revisitation of similar episodes in other myths. One of the recurrent ideas stressed in the article is the thesis that myths work like Rorschach blots and that we cannot ‘solve’ them by finding their ‘meaning’, we should rather study their form so we better understand their ability to evocate a multitude of meanings.
This article analyses the eddic poem Hárbarðsljóð in light of its spatial and kinetic tropes. In particular it focuses on the two central characters, Hárbarðr (generally assumed to be Óðinn) and Þórr, in relation to the binary of movement and non-movement or stasis represented in their verbal exchanges. Despite the absence of physical movement in the poem both Hárbarðr and Þórr draw on the idea of movement and stasis to hype up their own achievements or deride those of the other. The attack on freedom of movement is especially insulting for Þórr since his role encompasses guarding the border with Giantland. It also conflicts with his largely positive presentation in other mythological texts, which has not been noticed by scholars before. Instead, in Hárbarðsljóð he is made to appear powerless and must walk the long way to his destination.
