Resumo de The Norsemen In The Viking Age

The Norsemen in the Viking Age is a broad-ranging scholarly
overview, offering sketches of Nordic people in Viking times less firmly
framed than usual. Christiansen takes a largely descriptive approach, avoiding
speculation or any attempt to impose an overarching theoretical framework. He
uses later literary sources, but is careful to set them in their contexts and recognize
their limitations; his preference is for archaeological evidence and
contemporary poetry and inscriptions. The result has a piecemeal feel to it,
but is also straightforward and easy to read.

The introduction considers the problems with definitions of Viking,
settling for the years between 750 and 1050 regardless of any unifying
principle or theme. There are chapters on individuals (gender, servitude,
poets, beserkers, effeminacy, outlaws, suicide), families (birth
control, names, feuds, land, military households, dynasties), communities and
associations (settlements and their role in defence and economic cooperation,
lords and big men), districts and territories (which were not just waiting to fulfill their destiny through incorporation into states), and
peoples (debates over nations and ethnicity).

Different ecologies fixed territorial groupings for
peoples living between the North Sea and the spinal mountains of the Scandinavian Peninsula: deep fjords, steep slopes,
diminished arable, shorter growing seasons and heavier snows sharpened
competition between the farmers who had already settled the Norwegian coast as
far north as the Lofoten islands in Roman times and earlier. Here, territories
began as a long string of chiefdoms known collectively as Nor-vegr, the North Route, and
therefore studied as the kingdom
of Norway in embryo.

Then come chapters on politics (the many kinds of kingship that have been
proposed, chiefs, freeholders and assemblies), war (where ships, horses, and
spades were key), work (focusing on agriculture and the different kinds of
farming regimes), and emigration (with colonization taking a variety of forms
in different locations and political circumstances).

Military dominance was impossible to sustain in the
face of the well-organized manpower at the disposal of Wessex kings
and some Irish rulers and Continental magnates; negotiation, alliance and
conversion to Christianity were attractive alternatives, and frequently
offered. Guthrum got more by surrendering to king Alfred in 878 than by
occupying his kingdom earlier in the year: great presents, recognition as a
king and the peaceful occupation of wherever he wanted to settle outside Wessex.

And there are chapters on the past (sagas and verse, myths, lineages, and
genealogies), the present (ethics, law, cults and gods, imitations and
communications), and the future (hopes, fears, death, and notions of an
afterlife).

The origin-myths of tribes and peoples form a special
category to our way of thinking, a bridge from myth towards, if not into
history, but that is not how they seem in oral cultures which do not separate
things in this way. ... Even the wonderful Gotland
genesis in Guta saga, which incorporates all an ethnologist or social anthropologists,
could want of archaic thought, is couched in the language of the thirteenth -
fourteenth century, and will hardly do as a relic of the Viking-age. The
dominance of myth in ideas about the past among the Norse must be taken on
credit, as a strong probability, rather than the richly-documented field of
research which is sometimes the meat of well-attended conferences.

A postscript surveys modern research into the Vikings: the old
schools of archaeology, anthropology, philology (including runology,
skaldic studies, and toponymics), and folklore; new methods such as
palaeoclimatology, palaeobiology, and genetics; and new
philosophies such as processualism, post-processualism, the archaeology
of gender, and postmodernism.

Christiansen himself draws onthese, and on psychology, anthropology,
political theory, and a range of other disciplines, but he is critical, often
acerbically so, of the wilder theorizing. Of claims for the existence of secret warrior societies, blood-brotherhood, and
suchlike: These fantasies have sucked blood from anthropology and still
walk upright, independent of evidence. Or, of sacred kingship theories: there is no evidence whatever that any king was ever sacrificed either
among or by the Nordic peoples.

There is no shortage of books on the Vikings, but the popular ones are often
of a romanticizing bent and the scholarly ones narrow in focus. The
Norsemen in the Viking Age is fully referenced and Christiansen displays a
magisterial command of both sources and secondary literature, but he never gets
bogged down. Scholars and lay readers alike should read him for a lively, broad-ranging,
and solidly grounded survey of the Viking Age.

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