Croatia joined the EU beginning July 2013. Five books introduces the history of Medieval Croatia

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The Conversion of Scandinavia. Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe

Winner of the 2013 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize awarded by the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

In this book a MacArthur Award-winning scholar argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages. Overturning the received narrative of Europe’s military and religious conquest and colonization of the region, Anders Winroth contends that rather than acting as passive recipients, Scandinavians converted to Christianity because it was in individual chieftains’ political, economic, and cultural interests to do so.

Through a painstaking analysis and historical reconstruction of both archaeological and literary sources, and drawing on scholarly work that has been unavailable in English, Winroth opens up new avenues for studying European ascendency and the expansion of Christianity in the medieval period.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Anders Winroth is professor of history at Yale, is the author of The Making of Gratian’s Decretum, for which he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. He lives in New Haven, CT.

The Conversion of Scandinavia. Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe
By Anders Winroth
Yale University Press (January 24, 2012)
ISBN-13: 978-0300170269

Winner of the 2013 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize awarded by the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga

The story of the Viking expansion west across the North Atlantic between AD. 800 and 1000, the settlement of Iceland and Greenland, and the exploration of northeastern North America, is a chapter of history that deserves to be more widely known. Norse discoveries in the North Atlantic are the first step in the process whereby human populations became connected into a single global system. The Norse, and their Viking ancestors, are little known, misunderstood, and almost invisible on the American landscape. Although Norse voyages were known since the early 1800’s, the near absence of physical evidence of Vikings in the New World has rendered the information, and the possibility that Norse explorers reached the North American mainland five hundred years before Columbus, speculative, at best. Yet, discovery of a Viking site in Newfoundland in 1960 confirmed a pre-Columbian European presence in the Americas, and Norse artifacts found in archaeological sites scattered throughout the eastern Canadian arctic and sub-arctic, raise the issue of how far south of Newfoundland the Norse did explore, and what impact their contacts had on Native Americans.

The term “Viking” is indelibly associated with seafaring warriors. Carpentry, and especially boat building, were skills known to all Viking men, and along with maritime skill, was the characteristic upon which Viking expansion and influence depended. Viking craft had an advantage over all other watercraft of their day in speed, shallow draft, weight, capacity, maneuverability, and seaworthiness, giving Vikings the ability to trade, make war, carry animals, and cross open oceans safely. The territorial expansion of the Vikings from their Scandinavian homelands began in the last decades of the eighth century, and started as seasonal raids on the British Isles. Those Vikings who ventured west settled the islands of the North Atlantic. Many theories attempt to explain what propelled Vikings outward from their northern homelands: developments in ship construction and seafaring skills; internal stress from population growth and scarce land; loss of personal freedom as political and economic centralization progressed; but the overriding factor seemed to be an awareness of the opportunities for advancement. By taking on lives as soldiers of fortune, Vikings could dramatically alter their prospects: becoming wealthy, reaping glory and fame in battle, and achieving high status as leaders and heroes based on their own abilities and deeds. Although there is reason for speculation about how far the Norse traveled south of Newfoundland, recent archaeological research provides a solid basis for understanding more about Norse explorations and contacts in the north. Archaeologists found Norse artifacts in early Inuit (Eskimo) sites in the Canadian arctic and Greenland. That people of the Dorset culture had begun to replace their stone blades with metal after AD. 1000 seemed curious, although understood when both late Dorset and Early Thule sites began to produce not only Norse iron and copper, but a host of other Norse materials. Soon Norse materials were reported from many eastern Canadian arctic and northwest Greenland sites dating to the Norse period. These finds suggest that Native Americans interacted with the Norse in a variety of ways: by casual contacts, scavenging Norse wrecks, or outright skirmishes

This volume celebrated the Vikings’ epic voyages, which brought the first Europeans to the New World. In doing so, the ring of humanity that had been spread in different directions around the globe for hundreds of thousands of years, was finally closed. Even though Leif Eriksson’s was not the first—nor the last—voyage of Viking exploration, nor did it lead to permanent settlement in the Americas, his voyage achieved an important and highly symbolic goal that made the world an infinitely smaller place.

This book is a catalogue published in connection with an exhibition in Washington 2000 celebrating the Viking Passage to America in the 1000. It is still worth a read.

Vikings : The North Atlantic Saga
William F. Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward
Smithsonian Books; First Edition 2000
ISBN-13: 978-1560989950

Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse

The Vikings were the master mariners and ship-builders of the middle ages: their success depended on these skills. Spectacular archaeological finds of whole or partial ships, from burial mounds or dredged from harbours, continue to give new and exciting evidence of their practical craftsmanship and urge to seek new shores. The nautical vocabulary of the Viking Age, however, has been surprisingly neglected – the last comprehensive study was published in 1912 and was heavily dependent on post-Viking Age sources.

Far better contemporary sources from the later Viking Age are available to document the activities of men and their uses of ships from c.950-1100, and Judith Jesch undertakes in this book the first systematic and comparative study of such evidence. The core is a critical survey of the vocabulary of ships and their crews, of fleets and sailing and battles at sea, based on runic inscriptions and skaldic evidence from c.950-1100. This nautical vocabulary is studied within the larger context of ‘viking’ activity in this period: what that activity was and where it took place, its social and military aspects, and its impact on developments in the nature of kingship in Scandinavia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

JUDITH JESCH is Reader in Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, and author of Women in the Viking Age.

Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse
By Judith Jesch
Boydell Press 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0851158266

The Viking World (Routledge Worlds)

Filling a gap in the literature for an academically oriented volume on the Viking period, this unique book is a one-stop authoritative introduction to all the latest research in the field.

Bringing together today’s leading scholars, both established seniors and younger, cutting-edge academics, Stefan Brink and Neil Price have constructed the first single work to gather innovative research from a spectrum of disciplines (including archaeology, history, philology, comparative religion, numismatics and cultural geography) to create the most comprehensive Viking Age book of its kind ever attempted.

Consisting of longer articles providing overviews of important themes, supported by shorter papers focusing on material of particular interest, this comprehensive volume covers such wide-ranging topics as social institutions, spatial issues, the Viking Age economy, warfare, beliefs, language, voyages, and links with medieval and Christian Europe.

This original work, specifically oriented towards a university audience and the educated public, will have a self-evident place as an undergraduate course book and will be a standard work of reference for all those in the field.

The Viking World (Routledge Worlds)
Stefan Brink (Editor), Neil Price (Editor)
Routledge 2011

The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia

Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time.

This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. Combining strong elements of eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain of women’s power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the men’s physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move, in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a society permanently geared for war. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country, meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sami with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings’ bedrooms and on their battlefields, and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable burials and the tools of their trade.

Combining archaeology, history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before.

The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia
By Neil Price
Published by the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University 2002. New edition will be published 2014 by Oxbow
ISBN:         91-506-1626-9

Viking Ship Museum Boats

The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde is the Danish museum for ships and shipping in prehistoric and medieval times. The museum collection is based on the five viking ships which were excavated at Skuldelev in 1962 and through reconstructions of those and other vessels, the museum aims to bring life to the archaeological finds. The boat collection continues to grow and reveals how the wooden vessels of today still show visible evidence of having viking forefathers – it has not been necessary to change the basic principles of boat construction in a thousand years! The book provides an overview of the various boat types in the collection. Leveringstid kan forekomme.

 The Viking Ships Museum Boats
By Max Vinner
Vikingeskibsmuseet 2002
ISBN 978-87-85180-48-3.
Price: €20