Department of Historical Studies

Foreigners and Outside Influences in Medieval Norway results from an international conference held in Bergen, Norway, in March 2016, entitled ‘Multidisciplinary approaches to improving our understanding of immigration and mobility in pre-modern Scandinavia (1000-1900)’. The articles in this volume discuss different aspects of immigration and foreign influences in medieval Norway, from the viewpoint of different academic disciplines. The book will give the reader an insight into how the population of medieval Norway interacted with the surrounding world, how and by whom it was influenced, and how the population was composed.
If you're interested in this book, please go to the Archaeopress website where it can be downloaded free of charge or you can purchase a printed copy:  http://www.archaeopress.com/ArchaeopressShop/Public/displayProductDetail.asp?id={64115350-6376-44C9-A890-A7A2202DF4C1}

OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421101
This book discusses the 1st-11th century developments that led to the formation of the three Scandinavian kingdoms in the Viking Age. Wide-ranging studies of communication routes, regional identities, judicial territories, and royal sites and graves trace a complex trajectory of rulership in these pagan Germanic societies. In the fi nal section, new light is shed on the pinnacle and demise of the Norwegian kingdom in the 13th-14th centuries.

The book seeks to revitalise the somewhat stagnant scholarly debate on Germanic rulership in the first millennium AD. A series of comprehensive chapters combines literary evidence on Scandinavia’s polities, kings, and other rulers with archaeological, documentary, toponymical, and linguistic evidence. The picture that emerges is one of surprisingly stable rulership institutions, sites, and myths, while control of them was contested between individuals, dynasties, and polities. While in the early centuries, Scandinavia was integrated in Germanic Europe, profound societal and cultural changes in 6th-century Scandinavia and the Christianisation of Continental and English kingdoms set northern kingship on a different path. The pagan heroic warrior ethos, essential to kingship, was developed and refined; only to recur overseas embodied in 9th–10th-century Vikings. Three chapters on a hitherto unknown masonry royal manor at Avaldsnes in western Norway, excavated 2017, concludes this volume with discussions of the late-medieval peak of Norwegian kingship and it’s eventual downfall in the late 14th century. This book’s discussions and results are relevant to all scholars and students of 1st-millenium Germanic kingship, polities, and societies.
FREE DOWNLOAD HERE:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421101