Where the Middle Ages Begin
The chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth was very real for medieval women, and still is in many Third World countries. In Medieval Catholic Western Europe, including Scandinavia, these risks, and the absence of medically schooled persons who could give efficient help, led many women to turn to the saints for intercession.
What do we know about women’s role in these societies? What did women do and how numerous were they? And did they pay the same role in Viking-Age proto-towns as in more developed medieval urban communities?
The games we play today are of course not entirely the same as those played a thousand years ago,
In historical sources the Karelians appear in the 12th century although archaeological excavations suggest that the amalgamation of groups of Baltic Finns, centered on the Karelian Isthmus, that came together from east and west respectively to form them originated in the late Iron Age and early Viking Age.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the differences between shoemakers in late medieval Bergen and Stockholm on one hand, and the differences between the archaeological finds of shoes in the two towns on the other hand.
An account of reception and farewell rituals at the royal court of Norway in 1302 is described in detail and analyzed through the use of ritual studies.
Scandinavian and Sicilian girls eagerly await the arrival of Saint Lucy on 13 December.
The ‘Saga of Ingvar the Far-Traveller’ is based on a reliable fact, justified by about 25 runic inscriptions which date to the first half of the eleventh century, that a military expedition, led by Ingvar, went from Sweden to Eastern Europe, then moved to the South or to the South-West and perished there.
Although the winters could be long and harsh in medieval Sweden, the people still found time to have fun and games.
Archaeologists in Sweden have uncovered the site where hundreds of people may have been killed in a brutal massacre.
Legal texts are aimed at maintaining order and defining what is legal in a given society. In the Middle Ages they often take the form of descriptions of situations and cases representing the conditions for the application of various rules.
On the 2nd July 1350 in the city of Visby, a man named Diderik was burnt at the stake.
What is the relationship between the Viking Age magnate farms and local place names? What of the numerous Rune stones, burial mounds, surface finds, and ancient monuments? Are they also tied to subsequent names? Can they help us place farms and other sites?
This article will only examine one of these legends, namely the ‘Hildr legend’ in the context of two of these stones, lärbro stora hammars and stenkyrka smiss . An attempt will be made to place the images in a larger context than has been done before, and by doing so to strenghten the probability that they were indeed intended to refer to the original Hildr legend.
The thesis of this study is that her task was to start a great work of reform in the church, beginning with the personal conversion of the individuals responsible for the wellbeing of the community and gradually involving all Christians. She intended this reform to prepare society for the second coming of Christ.
The present-day small village of Roma on Gotland in the Baltic Sea was the physical and symbolic centre of the island in the Iron Age and into Medieval times.
Why did the rulers travel! One reason was purely financial: the economy demanded a constant movement of the household. Once the food supplies in one place of abode had been eaten up it was easier to move to a new residence than to transport provisions overlong distances. Mobility contributed to the proper utilization of the produce of manors.
A quick glance at the regnal list of fifteenth-century Sweden shows that members of the nobility were at each others’ throats more or less all the time, especially from the 1430s and onwards.
If we are to believe any number of histories, spiritual life in medieval Scandinavia, and especially the conversion to Christianity, is readily summarized: paganism collapsed against Christian conversion efforts in dramatic fashion at a meeting of the Alþing, or when a missionary bore hot iron, or an exiled king had a deep religious experience, or when a pagan revolt was finally overcome, and so on.
This paper was part of a series on Canon Law and Medieval Marriage.
Nineteenth-century romanticism had a special interest in both the medieval world and primitive, untainted rural culture. As the nineteenth century progressed and turned into the early twentieth, the Danes fell more and more under the nostalgic spell, tending to look upon the Icelanders through increasingly romantic and patronizing eyes
Even if the various Orders of Knighthood reached Scandinavia somewhat later than most of the Christian civilization they soon became important religious institutions in Scandinavian societies in the same way as they already were in the rest of western Europe.
The study of burial practices and the treatment of the dead has long been used to gain an understanding of the cultures of the past, particularly by anthropologists.
Tacitus’s two important treatises, vital as sources for our knowledge of the life of the Anglo-Saxons, represent a people who know their limits and stick to them.
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