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The Cambridge History of Scandinavia #1
The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume 1: Prehistory to 1520
The various countries and communities that constitute present-day Scandinavia consider themselves as integral parts of that larger region. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Greenland share a common geographic, historic and socio-cultural distinctness that differs from the rest of Europe. This "distinctness" provides the rationale for compiling a comprehensive and comparative history of Scandinavia. The first volume in the series will be followed by two others.
892 pages, Hardcover
First published November 3, 2003
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April 14, 2020If you've never seen a person attempt to manipulate an umbrella, a double espresso (hot), a wallet, and The Cambridge History of Scandinavia in the face of the human traffic pouring down a flight of stairs eager to board the London train then you've missed your chance. For I was that juggler. No doubt you're wondering how impressive my biceps are after reading one handed an eight hundred page hardback book, more sensibly maybe you are sympathetic about the strained tendons in my wrist, or perhaps you simply ask why.
Why. As if anyone could resist the allure of that light blue dust-jacket and the opportunity to plug a Scandinavian sized hole in their knowledge of Medieval Europe?
That in a way is the problem with this volume - covering the beginning of geological time down to 1520 - an arbitrary date but the book had to end at some point - it is essentially the Cambridge History of Medieval Scandinavia with some prehistory tacked on. So at its best it is eight hundred pages of unadulterated early Scandinavian history, while at its worst it falls painfully between a multitude of stools. The prehistory is sketchy, and apparently inaccurate in places. The chapter order unhelpful at the end of the book leaving me wondering for chapter how Queen Margareta managed to inherit all three Scandinavian kingdoms and I'm still unclear how the Mecklenburgers got their shot at ruling Scandinavia also, or perhaps I wasn't paying attention as I read that bit. The text, as you probably have to expect with many authors, only three of whom died before publication, is awkwardly unintegrated. There are no family trees, nor did I find the maps particularly helpful, neither , as far as I could tell, did the selection of black and white plates completely match up with places or art works discussed in the text.
I wondered at times if somebody-else had been the editor if the result would have been greatly different or if there was a sense of obligation involved here - that certain topics had to dealt with in a certain way irrespective of whether the sources supported such an approach.
The flip side is that there are eight hundred pages of early Scandinavian history. Of course it is as bizarre and unlikely as the Viking Kingdom of Dublin and York, uniting things that were best left forever separate. Look at the bibliography at the end of the volume - rich in works published in Scandinavian languages, a few works in German, one or two in English. This is the historiographical equivalent of the Danelaw. A Scandinavian bridgehead in the midst of English language scholarship.
Yes, the downsides are considerable. The Scandinavian aspect is maybe too strictly interpreted so that one is left wondering about all this peripheral territories and polities that our Scandinavian kingdoms are interacting with but which hang shadow-like about the text: Estonia, the Teutonic Knights, the Hanseatic league, the Dukes of Holstein , Scotland, and even the fish-eating English whose direct trading with Iceland seems to have had a catastrophic effect upon the economy of Norway , particularly with the arrival of the Franciscans & Dominicans, soon after their orders were founded, which indicates how far the region was closely integrated into Western Europe. The coverage of the earlier eras is sketchy. Greenland it seems to me got more coverage than the Faroe islands . And discussing the conflict between Bishops and the State in 12th century Scandinavia (p.354) without reference to the European context of the investiture conflict made as little sense as studying Henry II and Thomas Becket's head to head without taking the reform Papacy into account, then again that is precisely what we did too, back in the day, down in our English history silo.
The upside, as the bibliography suggests, is that this volume is probably as near an indispensable introduction to the whole of Medieval Scandinavia as can be bought in the English language. And as you may have noticed, finding a book about the Vikings is no problem, finding a book in English about what happened after the Vikings in Scandinavia without access to a university library is a near hopeless task.
Points that I was particularly interested in (and that I may well expand upon as time goes by) were the nature of pre-Norwegian Iceland - less a republic of equals more a society dominated by the hereditary wealthy Chieftains whose divisions were later to be exploited by the Kings of Norway leading to the establishment of a monarchy over the Island (and by the way Snorri Sturluson was murdered! Murdered! Being the greatest writer of your generation doesn't keep you safe from crime apparently). The inter-dependant rise of the Church and 'national' monarchies in Scandinavia (though perhaps no surprise if I had born The Conversion of Europe in mind). The Viking raids as spin offs by the losers in the process of territorial consolidation in Scandinavia & slightly more entertainingly that a good number of Viking settlers driven out of Ireland went to Normandy and presumably among their descendants a few may have returned to Ireland with Strongbow in the twelfth Century - in which case there may be a case for claiming that eventually Ireland was conquered by the Irish. The relationship between patterns of settlement and soil conditions leading to individual farmsteads in Norway but villages in Denmark and most of Sweden. The interpretation of King Sigurd's crusade as more of a Viking-style raid for plunder and fame than anything else . The century long civil wars in Norway which were eventually won by the flock of Birchlegs due to their guerilla warfare techniques.
Equally the book left open mysteries - how did Norway survive a century of intermittent civil wars? Why did Norway withdraw from ruling over the Isle of Man and the inner Hebrides in 1266 when the ability of the Kings of Scotland to maintain power that far west was to remain limited for centuries to come? The latter I suppose at least is simply politics.
Finland
One of the question raised early in the volume was what languages the earliest inhabitants of Scandinavia spoke, which strikes me as a good example of how unanswerable certain questions can be. Much of Finland was apparently settled during this period, with tribes from the South moving northwards practising slash and burn agricultural techniques. Curiously not much seems to be known about the Christianisation of the country - generally in early Medieval Europe this is the one topic that we know most about, since away from the Mediterranean world the Church was the font of literacy. There is also a debate over whether Finland was won by Sweden through violence or conversion - there doesn't seem to be enough evidence to be certain either way . Construction of castles and fortress in the south-east of the country was significant in attempts to control the trade with Novgorod. The Bishops serving in Finland were nearly all Swedes during this period, which might suggest that the local church simply wasn't producing enough high calibre candidates, then again the episcopacy in Scandinavia was dominated by the nobility so this may simply indicate the lower status of Finnish Chiefly families rather than a weak Finnish church.
Sweden
We know virtually nothing about Sweden in the centuries after the end of the western Roman Empire except that Goths and Anglo-Saxons both claimed that their ancestors came from there. It was late to form a unitary kingdom and the circumstances of how Finland ended up inside its territory remain debatable. The rise of Stockholm seems to be mostly due to a monarch arbitrarily making it the only legal entrepôt for foreign trade in central Sweden (p.333). In Scandinavia it was customary for tithes to be divided into four parts - one for the bishop, one for the parish priest, one for the parish church, and one for the poor who live down the lane. Amusingly the Church in Sweden kept hold of the portion for the poor on the grounds that tithes should not be given to lay people (p.454), the span from that attitude to St Francis of Assisi gives some sense of the diversity of the medieval church. Despite Sweden's considerable coastline the entire country was blockaded several times by the Hanseatic league (although the book doesn't indicate the level of success of this practice). Sweden in the person of St.Birgitta provided the region with its second most popular local saint after Norway's St.Olaf , and she inspired a local monastic tradition - although both saints are defined as 'cold' as opposed to 'warm' charismatic types of saints.
Norway
The chapters on Norway's political history I felt were best, but maybe the narrative moved me more.
At a point one of the authors gave the impression that the earliest historians were consciously or unconsciously using history as a means of creating the country that they wanted to live in - the national historian creates the nation. I think there is a good deal of that in historiography The Making of the English Working Class strikes me as a particular example of this - creating the tradition that you would want to find. Then again given the nature of source material perhaps accepting the past as it was is an impossible task. Norway is slightly better served in that, according to one of the authors here, thanks to English influences at the time of the conversion to Christianity there are more writings surviving from a Norwegian context. The period of the civil wars was preceded by a long period of peace - obtained because successful kings led raiding expeditions overseas - King Sigurd's crusade at the beginning of the twelfth century seen here as one of those. However in the absence of external raiding the aristocrats fell on each other to struggle for resources in fighting that dragged on for around a hundred years (p.372). Inheritance to the Kingship was still a flexible business. Both legitimate and illegitimate sons were viewed as acceptable king-candidates - the upper levels of society still at this point probably functionally polygamous, and as the fighting dragged on even the grandsons of a king in the absence of a more reasonable person could make an acceptable figurehead for a faction. Given the huge proportion of land held by the Church, bishops were deeply involved in the conflicts of the period. The factions were known as 'flocks' the eventual winners were the Birkibeiner or Birchlegs who won out over the Baglar or Croziers. The kingdom of Norway did well out of the creation of new Archbishoprics in Scandinavia which gave the Norwegian church authority over bishops in Iceland, Greenland and the Orkneys, something which the Kings used to leverage their own authority over those areas.
Denmark
In the chapter on the Iron Age (the entire Iron Age is dealt with in thirty-four pages) the argument is made that soil exhaustion caused hungry Germanic tribes-people to flock south and battle with the Roman Republic, which I suppose has been the tradition since at least Tacitus, however it is a point of view that does leave me wondering why waves of invaders didn't continue to pour out of the north on a periodic basis. Denmark is an early starter in forming a Kingdom. And in common with the rest of Europe east of the Elbe, the aftermath of the Black Death saw the development of serfdom.
Perhaps I might conclude that this is book neither good nor bad, but unavoidable for those interested in Medieval Scandinavia.
Why. As if anyone could resist the allure of that light blue dust-jacket and the opportunity to plug a Scandinavian sized hole in their knowledge of Medieval Europe?
That in a way is the problem with this volume - covering the beginning of geological time down to 1520 - an arbitrary date but the book had to end at some point - it is essentially the Cambridge History of Medieval Scandinavia with some prehistory tacked on. So at its best it is eight hundred pages of unadulterated early Scandinavian history, while at its worst it falls painfully between a multitude of stools. The prehistory is sketchy, and apparently inaccurate in places. The chapter order unhelpful at the end of the book leaving me wondering for chapter how Queen Margareta managed to inherit all three Scandinavian kingdoms and I'm still unclear how the Mecklenburgers got their shot at ruling Scandinavia also, or perhaps I wasn't paying attention as I read that bit. The text, as you probably have to expect with many authors, only three of whom died before publication, is awkwardly unintegrated. There are no family trees, nor did I find the maps particularly helpful, neither , as far as I could tell, did the selection of black and white plates completely match up with places or art works discussed in the text.
I wondered at times if somebody-else had been the editor if the result would have been greatly different or if there was a sense of obligation involved here - that certain topics had to dealt with in a certain way irrespective of whether the sources supported such an approach.
The flip side is that there are eight hundred pages of early Scandinavian history. Of course it is as bizarre and unlikely as the Viking Kingdom of Dublin and York, uniting things that were best left forever separate. Look at the bibliography at the end of the volume - rich in works published in Scandinavian languages, a few works in German, one or two in English. This is the historiographical equivalent of the Danelaw. A Scandinavian bridgehead in the midst of English language scholarship.
Yes, the downsides are considerable. The Scandinavian aspect is maybe too strictly interpreted so that one is left wondering about all this peripheral territories and polities that our Scandinavian kingdoms are interacting with but which hang shadow-like about the text: Estonia, the Teutonic Knights, the Hanseatic league, the Dukes of Holstein , Scotland, and even the fish-eating English whose direct trading with Iceland seems to have had a catastrophic effect upon the economy of Norway , particularly with the arrival of the Franciscans & Dominicans, soon after their orders were founded, which indicates how far the region was closely integrated into Western Europe. The coverage of the earlier eras is sketchy. Greenland it seems to me got more coverage than the Faroe islands . And discussing the conflict between Bishops and the State in 12th century Scandinavia (p.354) without reference to the European context of the investiture conflict made as little sense as studying Henry II and Thomas Becket's head to head without taking the reform Papacy into account, then again that is precisely what we did too, back in the day, down in our English history silo.
The upside, as the bibliography suggests, is that this volume is probably as near an indispensable introduction to the whole of Medieval Scandinavia as can be bought in the English language. And as you may have noticed, finding a book about the Vikings is no problem, finding a book in English about what happened after the Vikings in Scandinavia without access to a university library is a near hopeless task.
Points that I was particularly interested in (and that I may well expand upon as time goes by) were the nature of pre-Norwegian Iceland - less a republic of equals more a society dominated by the hereditary wealthy Chieftains whose divisions were later to be exploited by the Kings of Norway leading to the establishment of a monarchy over the Island (and by the way Snorri Sturluson was murdered! Murdered! Being the greatest writer of your generation doesn't keep you safe from crime apparently). The inter-dependant rise of the Church and 'national' monarchies in Scandinavia (though perhaps no surprise if I had born The Conversion of Europe in mind). The Viking raids as spin offs by the losers in the process of territorial consolidation in Scandinavia & slightly more entertainingly that a good number of Viking settlers driven out of Ireland went to Normandy and presumably among their descendants a few may have returned to Ireland with Strongbow in the twelfth Century - in which case there may be a case for claiming that eventually Ireland was conquered by the Irish. The relationship between patterns of settlement and soil conditions leading to individual farmsteads in Norway but villages in Denmark and most of Sweden. The interpretation of King Sigurd's crusade as more of a Viking-style raid for plunder and fame than anything else . The century long civil wars in Norway which were eventually won by the flock of Birchlegs due to their guerilla warfare techniques.
Equally the book left open mysteries - how did Norway survive a century of intermittent civil wars? Why did Norway withdraw from ruling over the Isle of Man and the inner Hebrides in 1266 when the ability of the Kings of Scotland to maintain power that far west was to remain limited for centuries to come? The latter I suppose at least is simply politics.
Finland
One of the question raised early in the volume was what languages the earliest inhabitants of Scandinavia spoke, which strikes me as a good example of how unanswerable certain questions can be. Much of Finland was apparently settled during this period, with tribes from the South moving northwards practising slash and burn agricultural techniques. Curiously not much seems to be known about the Christianisation of the country - generally in early Medieval Europe this is the one topic that we know most about, since away from the Mediterranean world the Church was the font of literacy. There is also a debate over whether Finland was won by Sweden through violence or conversion - there doesn't seem to be enough evidence to be certain either way . Construction of castles and fortress in the south-east of the country was significant in attempts to control the trade with Novgorod. The Bishops serving in Finland were nearly all Swedes during this period, which might suggest that the local church simply wasn't producing enough high calibre candidates, then again the episcopacy in Scandinavia was dominated by the nobility so this may simply indicate the lower status of Finnish Chiefly families rather than a weak Finnish church.
Sweden
We know virtually nothing about Sweden in the centuries after the end of the western Roman Empire except that Goths and Anglo-Saxons both claimed that their ancestors came from there. It was late to form a unitary kingdom and the circumstances of how Finland ended up inside its territory remain debatable. The rise of Stockholm seems to be mostly due to a monarch arbitrarily making it the only legal entrepôt for foreign trade in central Sweden (p.333). In Scandinavia it was customary for tithes to be divided into four parts - one for the bishop, one for the parish priest, one for the parish church, and one for the poor who live down the lane. Amusingly the Church in Sweden kept hold of the portion for the poor on the grounds that tithes should not be given to lay people (p.454), the span from that attitude to St Francis of Assisi gives some sense of the diversity of the medieval church. Despite Sweden's considerable coastline the entire country was blockaded several times by the Hanseatic league (although the book doesn't indicate the level of success of this practice). Sweden in the person of St.Birgitta provided the region with its second most popular local saint after Norway's St.Olaf , and she inspired a local monastic tradition - although both saints are defined as 'cold' as opposed to 'warm' charismatic types of saints.
Norway
The chapters on Norway's political history I felt were best, but maybe the narrative moved me more.
At a point one of the authors gave the impression that the earliest historians were consciously or unconsciously using history as a means of creating the country that they wanted to live in - the national historian creates the nation. I think there is a good deal of that in historiography The Making of the English Working Class strikes me as a particular example of this - creating the tradition that you would want to find. Then again given the nature of source material perhaps accepting the past as it was is an impossible task. Norway is slightly better served in that, according to one of the authors here, thanks to English influences at the time of the conversion to Christianity there are more writings surviving from a Norwegian context. The period of the civil wars was preceded by a long period of peace - obtained because successful kings led raiding expeditions overseas - King Sigurd's crusade at the beginning of the twelfth century seen here as one of those. However in the absence of external raiding the aristocrats fell on each other to struggle for resources in fighting that dragged on for around a hundred years (p.372). Inheritance to the Kingship was still a flexible business. Both legitimate and illegitimate sons were viewed as acceptable king-candidates - the upper levels of society still at this point probably functionally polygamous, and as the fighting dragged on even the grandsons of a king in the absence of a more reasonable person could make an acceptable figurehead for a faction. Given the huge proportion of land held by the Church, bishops were deeply involved in the conflicts of the period. The factions were known as 'flocks' the eventual winners were the Birkibeiner or Birchlegs who won out over the Baglar or Croziers. The kingdom of Norway did well out of the creation of new Archbishoprics in Scandinavia which gave the Norwegian church authority over bishops in Iceland, Greenland and the Orkneys, something which the Kings used to leverage their own authority over those areas.
Denmark
In the chapter on the Iron Age (the entire Iron Age is dealt with in thirty-four pages) the argument is made that soil exhaustion caused hungry Germanic tribes-people to flock south and battle with the Roman Republic, which I suppose has been the tradition since at least Tacitus, however it is a point of view that does leave me wondering why waves of invaders didn't continue to pour out of the north on a periodic basis. Denmark is an early starter in forming a Kingdom. And in common with the rest of Europe east of the Elbe, the aftermath of the Black Death saw the development of serfdom.
Perhaps I might conclude that this is book neither good nor bad, but unavoidable for those interested in Medieval Scandinavia.
September 7, 2019
Cambridge histories are generally great summaries of the recent advances of historical scholarship in their respective fields of specialty. This one is no exception. It's not for all kinds of readers, that is for sure, but for even those who are not historians or students of history, it might be a difficult, but albeit rewarding reading experience that introduces one to history in its fullness.
May 20, 2018
Great opening book to the history of the Scandinavia in the period
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews