(Magic) Staffs in the Viking Age

(Magic) Staffs in the Viking Age PDF Author: Leszek Gardeła
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783902575777
Category : Staffs (Sticks, canes, etc.)
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description

(Magic) Staffs in the Viking Age

(Magic) Staffs in the Viking Age PDF Author: Leszek Gardeła
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783902575777
Category : Staffs (Sticks, canes, etc.)
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description


Women and Weapons in the Viking World

Women and Weapons in the Viking World PDF Author: Leszek Gardela
Publisher: Casemate
ISBN: 1636240690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
“Invigorating . . . Gardeła reappraises the connections between women and violence in an early-medieval society that has left few texts to guide us.” —Studies in Late Antiquity This book sets out to investigate the idea of “the armed woman” in the Viking Age through a comprehensive and cross-cultural approach and weaves a nuanced picture of women’s lives in the Viking world. The Viking Age (c. AD 750–1050) is conventionally portrayed as a tumultuous time when hordes of fierce warriors from Scandinavia wreaked havoc across the European continent and when Norse merchants traveled to distant corners of the world in pursuit of slaves, silver and exotic commodities. Until fairly recently, Norse society during this pivotal period in world history has been characterized as male-dominated, with women’s roles dismissed or substantially downplayed. There is, however, ample textual and archaeological evidence to suggest that many of the most spectacular achievements of Viking Age Scandinavians—in craftsmanship, exploration, cross-cultural trade, warfare and other spheres of life—would not have been possible without the active involvement of women, and that, both within the walls of the household and in the wider public arena, women’s voices were heard, respected and followed. Lavishly illustrated, this pioneering book explores the stories of the female warrior and women’s links with the martial sphere of life in the Viking Age, using literature and archaeological evidence from Scandinavia and the wider Viking world to examine the motivations and circumstances that led women to engage in armed conflict.

The Norse Sorceress

The Norse Sorceress PDF Author: Leszek Gardeła
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 178925955X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Old Norse literature abounds with descriptions of magic acts that allow ritual specialists of various kinds to manipulate the world around them, see into the future or the distant past, change weather conditions, influence the outcomes of battles, and more. While magic practitioners are known under myriad terms, the most iconic of them is the völva. As the central figure of the famous mythological poem Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Völva), the völva commands both respect and fear. In non-mythological texts similar women are portrayed as crucial albeit somewhat peculiar members of society. Always veiled in mystery, the völur and their kind have captured the academic and popular imagination for centuries. Bringing together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, this volume aims to provide new insights into the reality of magic and its agents in the Viking world, beyond the pages of medieval texts. It explores new trajectories for the study of past mentalities, beliefs, and rituals as well as the tools employed in these practices and the individuals who wielded them. In doing so, the volume engages with several topical issues of Viking Age research, including the complex entanglements of mind and materiality, the cultural attitudes to animals and the natural world, and the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. By addressing these complex themes, it offers a nuanced image of the völva and related magic workers in their cultural context. The volume is intended for a broad, diverse, and international audience, including experts in the field of Viking and Old Norse studies but also various non-professional history enthusiasts. The Norse Sorceress: Mind and Materiality in the Viking World is a key output of the project Tanken bag Tingene (Thoughts behind Things) conducted at the National Museum of Denmark from 2020 to 2023 and funded by the Krogager Foundation.

The Vikings Reimagined

The Vikings Reimagined PDF Author: Tom Birkett
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Vikings Reimagined explores the changing perception of Norse and Viking cultures across different cultural forms, and the complex legacy of the Vikings in the present day. Bringing together experts in literature, history and heritage engagement, this highly interdisciplinary collection aims to reconsider the impact of the discipline of Old Norse Viking Studies outside the academy and to broaden our understanding of the ways in which the material and textual remains of the Viking Age are given new meanings in the present. The diverse collection draws attention to the many roles that the Vikings play across contemporary culture: from the importance of Viking tourism, to the role of Norse sub-cultures in the formation of local and international identities. Together these collected essays challenge the academy to rethink its engagement with popular reiterations of the Vikings and to reassess the position afforded to ‘reception’ within the discipline.

Tracing Textile Production from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages

Tracing Textile Production from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages PDF Author: Ingvild Øye
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789257794
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book concerns textile production at the fringes of north-western Europe - areas in western Norway and the North Atlantic in the expanding, dynamic and transformative period from the early Viking Age into the Middle Ages. Textiles constitute one of the basic needs in human life - to protect and keep the body warm but also to show social status and affiliations. Textiles had a wide spectrum of use areas and qualities, fine and coarse in various contexts, and in the Viking Age not least related to the production of sails - all essential for the development and character of the period. So, what were the tools and textiles like, who made them, who used them and who exposed them? By tracing textile production from the remains of tools and textiles in varied landscapes and settings - Viking Age graves and in situ workplaces from the whole period - and combining this with textual information, many layers of information are exposed about technology and qualities as well as gender, gender roles, social relations, power and networks. By combining tools, textiles and texts in various settings, this book aims to contextualize dispersed archaeological finds of tools and textiles to uncover patterns across larger areas and in a long-term perspective of half a millennium.

The Vikings

The Vikings PDF Author: Neil Price
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429632819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Vikings provides a concise but comprehensive introduction to the complex world of the early medieval Scandinavians. In the space of less than 300 years, from the mid-eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries CE, people from what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark left their homelands in unprecedented numbers to travel across the Eurasian world. Over the last half-century, archaeology and its related disciplines have radically altered our understanding of this period. The Vikings explores why we now perceive them as a cosmopolitan mix of traders and warriors, craftsworkers and poets, explorers, and settlers. It details how, over the course of the Viking Age, their small-scale rural, tribal societies gradually became urbanised monarchies firmly emplaced on the stage of literate, Christian Europe. In the process, they transformed the cultures of the North, created the modern Nordic nation-states, and left a far-flung diaspora with legacies that still resonate today. Written by leading experts in the period and exploring the society, economy, identity and world-views of the early medieval Scandinavian peoples, and their unique religious beliefs that are still of enduring interest a millennium later, this book presents students with an unrivalled guide through this widely studied and fascinating subject, revealing the fundamental impacts of the Vikings in shaping the later course of European history.

Vikings Across Boundaries

Vikings Across Boundaries PDF Author: Hanne Lovise Aannestad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000204707
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book 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.

Children of Ash and Elm

Children of Ash and Elm PDF Author: Neil Price
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 629

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Book Description
The definitive history of the Vikings -- from arts and culture to politics and cosmology -- by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise The Viking Age -- from 750 to 1050 -- saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture. Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.

Re-imagining Periphery

Re-imagining Periphery PDF Author: Charlotta Hillerdal
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789254531
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This edited volume delves into the current state of Iron Age and Early Medieval research in the North. Over the last two decades of archaeological explorations, theoretical vanguards, and introduction of new methodological strategies, together with a growing amount of critical studies in archaeology taking their stance from a multidisciplinary perspective, have dramatically changed our understanding of Northern Iron Age societies. The profound effect of 6th century climatic events on social structures in Northern Europe, a reintegration of written sources and archaeological material, genetic and isotopic studies entirely reinterpreting previously excavated grave material, are but a few examples of such land winnings. The aim of this book is to provide an intense and cohesive focus on the characteristics of contemporary Iron Age research; explored under the subheadings of field and methodology, settlement and spatiality, text and translation, and interaction and impact. Gathering the work of leading, established researchers and field archaeologists based throughout northern Europe and in the frontline of this new emerging image, this volume provides a collective summary of our current understandings of the Iron Age and Early Medieval Era in the North. It also facilitates a renewed interaction between academia and the ever-growing field of infrastructural archaeology, by integrating cutting edge fieldwork and developing field methods in the corpus of Iron Age and Early Medieval studies. In this book, many hypotheses are pushed forward from their expected outcomes, and analytical work is not afraid of taking risks, thus advancing the field of Iron Age research, and also, hopefully, inspiring to a continued creation of new knowledge.

The Viking Way

The Viking Way PDF Author: Neil S. Price
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN: 9781842172605
Category : Archaeology and religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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 Sámi 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.