Introduction: New Approaches to the Study of the Viking Age Settlement across the North Atlantic

2014 ◽  
Vol 2018 (sp7) ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Douglas Price
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic

Sailing Directions of the North Atlantic Viking Age (from about the year 860 to 1400)

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Søren Thirslund
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Sea ◽  
Fresh Water ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
The North ◽  
The World ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
New Settlements

As long as man has ventured to go to sea, sailing directions have existed. Man's survival depended upon knowing the best fishing and hunting places and how to find these were secrets, told only to family or friends.Later, sailing directions covered areas in the world where trade or new settlements had begun and, as early as 500 years B.C., some of these sailing directions were written down. They covered the Mediterranean Sea and part of western Europe and they were called PERIPLUS meaning ‘sailing around’. They contained almost the same information as sailing directions today, namely: harbours, anchorages, currents, possibilities for fresh water, provisions and other supplies.

Fish Trade in Medieval North Atlantic Societies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Val Dufeu
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Environmental Models ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Fish Trade ◽  
Written Sources

Val Dufeu here reconstructs settlement patterns of fishing communities in Viking Age Iceland and proposes socio-economic and environmental models relevant to any study of the Vikings or the North Atlantic. She integrates written sources, geoarchaeological data, and zooarchaeological data to examine how fishing propelled political change in the North Atlantic. The evolution of survival fishing to internal fish markets to overseas fish trade mirrors wider social changes in the Vikings’ world.

Vaðmál and Cloth Currency in Viking and Medieval Iceland

2018 ◽  
pp. 251-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michèle Hayeur Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Museum Collections ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
The North ◽  
Commodity Money ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The Way

In medieval Iceland, apparently alone among the North Atlantic Norse colonies, cloth evolved into a highly standardized form of currency within a broader-based commodity-money system imported from Norway. Within the Icelandic economy, the production of currency cloth (vaðmál or vöruvaðmál) was legally regulated and was used within Iceland to pay debts, taxes, and tithes. This chapter presents the first detailed analyses of over 1,000 archaeological textiles stored in Icelandic museum collections. The way in which this ‘legal cloth’ was woven and constructed provides insights into the emergence of standardized cloth currency and its use across Iceland. Analyses challenge the assumption that organic forms of commodity-currency are unavailable to archaeologists studying early economic systems. Cloth currency, produced chiefly by women, emerged around the end of the Viking Age. It was central to the Icelandic economy until the mid 1500s, after which its role progressively declined as Iceland entered into the increasingly globalized trade networks of the early modern industrialized world.

The Discovery of an Early Bearing-Dial – Further Investigations

1993 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Thirslund
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
First Person ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Supportive Evidence ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic

The first part of the above title was used in the Journal in 1953 for a paper by Captain Carl V. Solver. His special interest was to discover how the Norse navigators of the Viking age found their way across the North Atlantic. He was the first person to interpret the small wooden disc shown in Fig. i as a fragment of an early bearing-dial and investigations since his paper was published provide considerable supportive evidence. At the time, there was some strong opposition to his views, but he persisted with his theory and wrote a book, Vestervejen. This formed a basis for other researchers to carry his work further and, as a result, there have been many international contributions over some 40 years. The archaeological find from southern Greenland seems to show that the Norse navigator used the path of the Sun's shadow during the day as the basis of a compass.

Intergroup Communication: Scandinavia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tore Kristiansen
Keyword(s):  
North Atlantic ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
North Atlantic Ocean ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Viking Age ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Intergroup Communication ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
The Baltic

In a broad sense, Scandinavia consists of the five sovereign states of Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean, with an autonomous status within the Danish state), Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland (including the Åland islands in the Baltic Sea, with an autonomous status within the Finnish state). Historically, the dominating powers in the area have been Denmark and Sweden. Linguistically, the westward dominance of Denmark resulted in Danish having a strong influence on the language situations in Norway, the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland; and as a consequence of the historical eastward dominance by Sweden, Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. In a narrow sense, Scandinavia consists of Denmark (without the North Atlantic territories), Sweden, and Norway. Scandinavian languages normally comprise Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. The crucial point about the Scandinavian languages is that they are, to a high degree, mutually intelligible. Intergroup communication—in the sense of communication between national groups—is possible, by and large, when native speakers of Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian speak their own language in interaction with a “neighbor.” The three languages are often referred to as neighboring languages, and the intergroup communication they allow for has been called “semi-communication.” It is “receptive multilingualism” according to the principle, which also functions in communication between speakers/listeners of neighboring dialects: “speak your own language and understand the language of your neighbor.” This has been the way most intergroup communication has functioned in “narrow Scandinavia” at all levels of society; it still is, but today, English takes over as a lingua franca among younger generations (who are strong in English compared to earlier generations), especially when Danish is involved (because many changes in the phonology of modern Danish have distanced that language from Norwegian and Swedish). In contrast, linguistic differences inhibit mutual intelligibility when any of the other languages in the area are involved—with the exception of some degree of mutual intelligibility between Icelandic and Faeroese (although more in writing than speech). It is true that Icelandic and Faroese are North Germanic languages, just like Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, but due to much historical change in the latter three (away from the common Old Norse language of the Viking Age), mutual intelligibility has not been a reality for centuries. Greenlandic is an Eskimo-Aleutic language. Finnish and Sámi both belong to the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, but are not mutually intelligible. In “broad Scandinavia,” the three Scandinavian languages have been the basic means of intergroup communication, in particular at the level of official institutional-based cooperation; but not surprisingly, the tendency is even stronger for non-native speakers (than for native speakers) of a Scandinavian language to prefer English as a lingua franca in inter-Nordic communication. The numbers of users of each of these languages can be given only as approximations (the estimations given here include users scattered within broadly defined Scandinavia, e.g. Faeroese-speaking people living in Copenhagen, Finnish-speaking people living in Sweden, etc.): Swedish, 9.5 million; Danish, 5.5 million; Finnish, 5.5 million; Norwegian, 5 million; Icelandic, 300,000, Faroese 60,000, Greenlandic 55,000, and Sámi 25,000.

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