Dressing the Dead: Gender, Identity, and Adornment in Viking Age Iceland (original) (raw)
Social Structures and Identity in Early Iceland
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 2010
Iceland differed from other Norse colonies as it lacked social structures found elsewhere, but also because the Icelanders established their own complex social structures. This article examines aspects of these social structures to determine how they contributed to a new Icelandic identity. The emergence of these social structures may be attributed to factors such as new patterns of social liability that may have developed in response to the unusually scattered population. The settlement pattern may have contributed to the significance of the role of law in early Iceland: a legal framework was required to manage the settlers’ claims and rights to the land. There emerged in Iceland a sense of what defined the settlers, its basis being the law and ‘legal attachment’. The uniqueness of Iceland’s social structures was intertwined with the landnám itself. It was the unsettled land that gave the Icelanders the freedom to create their society.
Ulff-Moller The Origin of the Book of Settlement and Celtic Christianity in IcelandSMSR 2016 2.pdf
Many Icelandic settlers emigrated from the Viking colonies in the British Isles, where they had become acquainted with Christianity in the Celtic or Irish form. The purpose of this paper is first, to observe vestiges of this Christianity, as it appears in the Landnámabók and possibly in archaeology. Second, my aim is to observe the validity of the book as a historical document, by establishing an older core dating to the beginning of the 11th century, to which later compilers added orally transmitted information. About 100 settlers and their immediate descendants were unrelated to other families, which support an earlier date. The lack of internal evidence invalidates the idea that Ari wrote the book in the 12th century,
Viking Age Iceland: A Feuding Society
Viking Age Iceland: A Feuding Society, 2001
Yet, as Jesse Byock reveals in this deeply fascinating and important history, the society founded by Norsemen in Iceland was far from this picture. It was, in fact, an independent, almost republican Free State, without warlords or kings. Honour was crucial in a world which sounds almost Utopian today. In Jesse Byock’s words, it was like ‘a great village’: a self governing community of settlers, who adapted to Iceland’s harsh climate and landscape, creating their own society. Combining history and anthropology, this remarkable study explores in rich detail all aspects of Viking Age life: feasting, farming and battling with the elements, the power of chieftains and the church, marriage, the role of women and kinship. It shows us how law courts, which favoured compromise over violence, often prevented disputes over land, livestock or insults from becoming ‘blood feud’. In Iceland we can see a prototype democracy in action, which thrived for 300 years until it came under the control of the King of Norway in the 1260s. This was a unique time in history, which has long perplexed historians and archaeologists, and which provides us today with fundamental insights into sometimes forgotten aspects of western society. By interweaving his own original and innovative research with masterly interpretations of the Old Icelandic Sagas, Jesse Byock brilliantly brings it to life. Publisher: Penguin History, Penguin Books ISBN: 9780140291155
Medieval Archaeology, 2019
In 1938, a woman’s burial was uncovered by road builders at Ketilsstaðir in north-eastern Iceland. Recently, her physical remains and associated funerary goods were re-examined by an international, interdisciplinary team and formed the basis for an exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland in 2015. This paper focuses on the items of dress that accompanied the woman — born in the British Isles, but who migrated to Iceland at a very young age — to gain insights into the ways her cultural identity was expressed at the time of her death. Here we explore the roles played by material culture in signaling her identity, and the technologies and trade networks through which she was connected, visually, to Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the Viking world at large. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Medieval Archaeology on June 18, 2019, available at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/85KSUjTRteGNwPAUjc7z/full?target=10.1080/00766097.2019.1589816