'Hiberno-Norwegians' and 'Anglo-Danes': Anachronistic Ethnicities in Viking Age England

Early Medieval Europe, 2003

Dísablót. Сборник статей коллег и учеников к юбилею Елены Александровны Мельниковой, Москва 2021, 29-40, 2021

Based on this examination of how the term ‘viking’ was actually used and understood by those, who used the word in their native language from its first known occurence c. 700 AD onwards, some conclusions may be drawn. 1) Until at least the end of the 18th century the term ‘viking’ or ‘wicing’ was never associated with any form of specific ethnicity. Hence, we find the word used about persons of all colours, ethnicities and religious persuations known at the time by those who used the word in their native languages. While Old English ‘wicing’ had gone out of use already in the 11th century, we can also observe that Norse ‘viking’ gradually went out of use in all other Scandinavian languages before the end of the Middle Ages apart from Icelandic. Here it was still used as it had been for centuries at least until the mid-17th century if not later. Thus, we find ‘viking’ used to denote those Barbary Pirates from North Africa, who in 1627 landed in Iceland to take slaves. 2) The early dissappearance of the word ‘viking’, especially in the South Scandinavian languages, no doubt facilitated its sudden reappearance in precisely these languages now infused with explicit Scandinavian ethnicity. This was the result of the belated arrival of Romanticism in Scandinavia in 1800, when a new generation of naïve, self-taught would-be scholars went off on a search for the phantasmal ‘national spirit’ (Volksgeist) thought to define the history and destinity of every single ‘nation’. This ‘national spirit’ Scandinavian romantics found in Nordic mythology as it appeared in Norse literature. There they soon stumbled on the word ‘viking’ as suitable marker of the Scandinavian ‘national spirit’. Hence ‘viking’ began to be used profusely in the writings of these romantics to denote Scandinavians to the extent that from the 1820s the Scandinavian ‘national spirit’ turned into a ‘viking spirit’. Thus the ‘Scandinavian viking’ was born as an example of an early ‘alternative fact’ soon followed by the invention of a ‘viking age’. Since then, we have lived in an echo chamber where nobody doubts the historical reality of the ‘Scandinavian viking’ even though he never existed in the so-called ‘Viking Age’.

Uses the account of Ohthere and runic inscriptions to demonstrate that at least some members of the Scandinavian aristocracy had a sense of belonging to supra-regional entities.

The ‘Viking Age’ is well established in popular perception as a period of dramatic change in European history. The range of viking activities from North America to the Middle East has excited the interest of many commentators. Vikings are variously regarded as blood thirsty barbarians or civilised entrepreneurs; founders of nations or anarchic enemies. But how cohesive was the identity of the ‘Vikings’ and how did they see themselves? In recent years the answer to this question has been evaluated from a range of perspectives. Established paradigms (often situated within a nationalist framework of thought) have come under greater scrutiny and new ideas have entered the debate. This paper will review some trends in the historiography of viking ethnicities and cultural identities in the period 800–1000 AD. This overview also highlights the value of comparative analysis of human migrations to the field of Viking Studies.

Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2008

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2011

Scandinavian Studies, 2020

The term ”Viking” appears in Anglo-Saxon or Norse sources in the so-called Viking Age. Here it simply denotes pirates, no more, no less. It had no geographic or ethnic connotations that linked it to Scandinavia or Scandinavians. By contrast, in these sources we find it used anywhere about anyone who to an Anglo-Saxon or a Scandiniavian appeared as a pirate. Therefore we find it used about Israelites crossing the Red Sea; Muslims in Galleys* encountering Norwegian crusaders in the Mediterranean; Caucasian pirates encountering the famous Swedish Ingvar-Expedition, and Estonian and Baltic pirates attacking Scandinavians in the Baltic Sea. Thus the term was never used to denote Scandinavians as such. Therefore, if we wish to maintain Viking-Age studies on a scholarly level, we must stop acting as an appendix to the tourist industry by using the term Viking as if it was synonymous with Scandinavian and Scandinavians. *in fact the only type of ship that based on a contemporary source may be labeled a “Viking ship”. I have uploaded a new OCR-version of the text because I noticed that the pagination did fit the printed version.