Review of Lukas G. Grzybowski, The Christianization of Scandinavia in the Viking Era: Religious Change in Adam of Bremen’s Work (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
This book discusses Adam of Bremen's perceptions and interpretation of the Christianization of Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages. The views the chronicler presents in the Gesta Hammaburgensis constitute the central element of this analysis. By departing from the historiography—both the older view of the Gesta as trustworthy, and the recent view of the work as unreliable and biased—this book focuses instead on the Christianization of Scandinavia as an authorial concept. What follows is a reevaluation of the Gesta's significance both to its medieval audience and the modern historian.
Bridges to Eternity: A Re-Examination of the Adoption of Christianity in Viking-Age Sweden
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2016
This paper reconsiders the nature of Christian conversion in Viking-Age Sweden and traditional assumptions of a centre-periphery model that places Viking and medieval Scandinavia on the periphery of Christian Europe. Notions of Scandinavians as barbarians lingered and tainted outsiders’ perception of them even after conversion, as seen in early medieval texts which portray Scandinavians’ Christian beliefs and practices as trivial or unsophisticated. The Swedish Viking-Age runestones provide evidence that challenges the assumption that Christianity was passively appropriated to Scandinavia from Europe. Instead, the runic material helps demonstrate the Scandinavians’ originality and sophisticated understanding of the new religion by exposing how they adopted and incorporated Christian beliefs and practices into their uniquely Scandinavian context. Scandinavians’ adoption and application of Christian concepts, such as the development of Purgatory and its association with bridges and Christian deeds, to their monuments in order to accommodate the new religion is particularly examined.
CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM IN ADAM OF BREMEN'S NARRATIVE
Brepols Publishers, 2011
The History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen is a historical narrative written by Adam of Bremen, the magister of the cathedral school, in c. 1072-76. The text consisting of four books is well-known to students of Ottonian and early Salian Germany and Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia, and a great number of German and Scandinavian historians have discussed various aspects of this text and the evidence that it provides. 14 The narrative belongs to the genre of gesta episcoporum (the deeds of bishops) and in this respect is distinct from texts describing the deeds of kings or the history of gentes. 15 The author has identified himself personally with the archbishopric and its history -especially when he describes its mission, legatio gentium, and narrates its relations with neighboring bishoprics as well as Saxon dukes. 16 Such self-identification is especially important, since Adam's historical account differs from other works of this genre in that it presents the history of a missionary archbishopric oriented outwards towards northern lands as much as inwards. This specific institutional context left a recognizable imprint on the text, and in the past fifty years a number of scholars have emphasized the importance of the northern mission of Hamburg-Bremen in terms of the structure of this narrative and for the institutional identity of its author. 17 Thus, it is this 'missionary Christian identity' that the narrator conveys to his readers. Direct addresses to the reader make it clear that it was the clergy of the archbishopric, and especially in Bremen, that * I would like to thank Hans-Werner Goetz for his helpful comments on this paper.
Proceedings of the 7th CER Comparative European Research Conference-International Scientific Conference for Ph. D. Students of EU Countries, 2017
Adam of Bremen was one of the most important chronicles of the eleventh century. He wrote a chronicle Gesta Hamburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum. This work is full of information. Many of them are about northern Europe, Iceland, Greenland and the mysterious Vinland. However, the question is what is true, what has been taken from other sources, what content has survived to our time. This paper presents criticism of the source in the context of Vinland. On individual examples, we explain what elements of the chronicler's description were taken, and what might be original. In addition, we try to answer a question about the multiple processing and borrowings of one source content by other documents. Finally, we hypothesize that the work of Adam of Bremen contributed to the creation of Vinland's vision in the written sagas.
Parergon, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 203-205, 2018
This large edited book consists of thirty-seven chapters and three introductions, and covers a broad range of historical and cultural receptions of pre-Christian Scandinavian myths and legends from the Christian Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. It is an immensely learned and useful resource, though not best suited to being read in toto, but rather to dip into to look for information on specific topics, geographical regions, or eras. More than sixty illustrations magnify the impact of the scholarship considerably. Editor Margaret Clunies Ross’s introduction situates the large-scale research project, initially conceived by Jónas Kristjánsson (1924– 2014), and later led by Bergur Thorgeirsson, which will result in two other sets of published outputs (four volumes of Histories and Structures and two of Sources, textual and archaeological) apart from the two-volume set of which this volume is the first. The reflexive nature of the project is clear. Clunies Ross notes that ‘it is now recognized, more perhaps than it was in former times, that research itself is subject to changes in cultural values and assumptions, and that research is itself a kind of reception, just as artistic creativity is’ (p. xxv).