The North Atlantic Viking diaspora in the medieval period has been of increasing interest to scholars, yet is an area that remains poorly understood. Through the lens of kinship relations, this book broadens understanding of the subject by testing the Norse North Atlantic against the modern sociological concept of diaspora. Using different theoretical approaches to social memory, social networks, oral history, migration and diaspora, the study draws upon the disciplines of history, anthropology and archaeology to interrogate a wide range of primary material, including medieval Icelandic textual sources like ÃÂslendingabók, Landnámabók, the ÃÂslendingasögur and the law codes, Grágás. By focussing primarily on Iceland as the locus of Norse diasporic memorialisation and the Icelandic Family Sagas (ÃÂslendingasögur) as repositories of social memory, it takes a fresh look at the role of kinship relations in the social processes of migration, settlement and the creation of identity. Divided into two sections, the first part of the book investigates the functioning of kinship relations across the Norse colonies of the West (Iceland, Greenland and Vínland), whilst the second part looks at the settlements in the East (mainland Scandinavia, Ireland and the British Isles). Focusing principally on the functioning of social memory - both remembering and forgetting - and its implications for the Icelandersâe(tm) conception of the Norse North Atlantic. The book argues that, in spite of strongly emerging individual identities across the Norse North Atlantic colonies, especially in Iceland, there were overarching cultural and familial affiliations that are reflected in the manner in which the maintenance and honouring of kinship relations transcended political boundaries. In so doing the book provides the first full study, using a multi-disciplinary approach, to establish the Norse North Atlantic as a socially functioning, viable, kinshipâeÂbased diaspora.

The Viking Diaspora presents the early medieval migrations of people, language and culture from mainland Scandinavia to new homes in the British Isles, the North Atlantic, the Baltic and the East as a form of ‘diaspora’. It discusses the ways in which migrants from Russia in the east to Greenland in the west were conscious of being connected not only to the people and traditions of their homelands, but also to other migrants of Scandinavian origin in many other locations. Rather than the movements of armies, this book concentrates on the movements of people and the shared heritage and culture that connected them. This on-going contact throughout half a millennium can be traced in the laws, literatures, material culture and even environment of the various regions of the Viking diaspora. Judith Jesch considers all of these connections, and highlights in detail significant forms of cultural contact including gender, beliefs and identities. Beginning with an overview of Vikings and the Viking Age, the nature of the evidence available, and a full exploration of the concept of ‘diaspora’, the book then provides a detailed demonstration of the appropriateness of the term to the world peopled by Scandinavians. This book is the first to explain Scandinavian expansion using this model, and presents the Viking Age in a new and exciting way for students of Vikings and medieval history.

The Viking Diaspora presents the early medieval migrations of people, language and culture from mainland Scandinavia to new homes in the British Isles, the North Atlantic, the Baltic and the East as a form of ‘diaspora’. It discusses the ways in which migrants from Russia in the east to Greenland in the west were conscious of being connected not only to the people and traditions of their homelands, but also to other migrants of Scandinavian origin in many other locations. Rather than the movements of armies, this book concentrates on the movements of people and the shared heritage and culture that connected them. This on-going contact throughout half a millennium can be traced in the laws, literatures, material culture and even environment of the various regions of the Viking diaspora. Judith Jesch considers all of these connections, and highlights in detail significant forms of cultural contact including gender, beliefs and identities. Beginning with an overview of Vikings and the Viking Age, the nature of the evidence available, and a full exploration of the concept of ‘diaspora’, the book then provides a detailed demonstration of the appropriateness of the term to the world peopled by Scandinavians. This book is the first to explain Scandinavian expansion using this model, and presents the Viking Age in a new and exciting way for students of Vikings and medieval history.

Markers of identity define human groups: who belongs and who is excluded. These markers are often overt – language, material culture, patterns of behaviour – and are carefully nurtured between generations; other times they can be invisible, intangible, or unconscious. Such markers of identity also travel, and can be curated, distilled, or reworked in new lands and in new cultural environments. It has always been thus: markers of identity are often central to the ties that bind dispersed, diasporic communities across lands and through time. This book brings together research that discusses a very wide range of scholarly approaches, periods, and places – from the Viking diaspora in the north Atlantic, and Anglo-Saxon treasure hoards, to what DNA can and cannot reveal about human identity, to modern, multicultural Martinique, East London, and urban Africa, and the effect of the absence of geopolitical identity, of statelessness, among the Roma and Palestinians – to better understand how markers of identity contribute to the impact of diasporas. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Illustrating the fascinating intersections of online media and new kinship, this book presents a study of the increasing numbers of single women and lesbian couples reproducing by using donor sperm. It explores how they connect with each other online, develop intimate digital communities and, most importantly, locate their children’s hitherto unknown biological half-siblings, throughout the world. The author discusses how these new families - consisting of only mothers - engage in extended families involving large numbers of ‘donor siblings’. The new families challenge previous understandings of kinship, and provide illustrations of how norms of gender, sexuality and family are challenged, negotiated and maintained in contemporary times. A crucial study of contemporary formations of family, gender and race, Mediated Kinship discusses the racial aspects of the world’s largest sperm bank exporting Danish sperm (termed ‘Viking sperm’), and explores the narratives of whiteness and imagined racial superiority that circulate among mothers, as well as the racialisations accompanying commercial online sperm sales. By analysing contemporary families of donor-conceived children in the context of legislation, reproduction technologies and online media, the book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in race and ethnicity, whiteness, gender, sexuality, kinship and the sociology of the family.

The Vikings provides a concise but comprehensive introduction to the complex world of the early medieval Scandinavians. In the space of less than 300 years, from the mid-eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries CE, people from what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark left their homelands in unprecedented numbers to travel across the Eurasian world. Over the last half-century, archaeology and its related disciplines have radically altered our understanding of this period. The Vikings explores why we now perceive them as a cosmopolitan mix of traders and warriors, craftsworkers and poets, explorers, and settlers. It details how, over the course of the Viking Age, their small-scale rural, tribal societies gradually became urbanised monarchies firmly emplaced on the stage of literate, Christian Europe. In the process, they transformed the cultures of the North, created the modern Nordic nation-states, and left a far-flung diaspora with legacies that still resonate today. Written by leading experts in the period and exploring the society, economy, identity and world-views of the early medieval Scandinavian peoples, and their unique religious beliefs that are still of enduring interest a millennium later, this book presents students with an unrivalled guide through this widely studied and fascinating subject, revealing the fundamental impacts of the Vikings in shaping the later course of European history.

"To a faithful friend, straight are the roads and short."—Odin, from the Hávamál (c. 1000) Friendship was the most important social bond in Iceland and Norway during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. Far more significantly than kinship ties, it defined relations between chieftains, and between chieftains and householders. In Viking Friendship, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson explores the various ways in which friendship tied Icelandic and Norwegian societies together, its role in power struggles and ending conflicts, and how it shaped religious beliefs and practices both before and after the introduction of Christianity. Drawing on a wide range of Icelandic sagas and other sources, Sigurðsson details how loyalties between friends were established and maintained. The key elements of Viking friendship, he shows, were protection and generosity, which was most often expressed through gift giving and feasting. In a society without institutions that could guarantee support and security, these were crucial means of structuring mutual assistance. As a political force, friendship was essential in the decentralized Free State period in Iceland’s history (from its settlement about 800 until it came under Norwegian control in the years 1262–1264) as local chieftains vied for power and peace. In Norway, where authority was more centralized, kings attempted to use friendship to secure the loyalty of their subjects. The strong reciprocal demands of Viking friendship also informed the relationship that individuals had both with the Old Norse gods and, after 1000, with Christianity’s God and saints. Addressing such other aspects as the possibility of friendship between women and the relationship between friendship and kinship, Sigurðsson concludes by tracing the decline of friendship as the fundamental social bond in Iceland as a consequence of Norwegian rule.

Early Human Kinship brings together original studies from leading figures in the biological sciences, social anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics to provide a major breakthrough in the debate over human evolution and the nature of society. A major new collaboration between specialists across the range of the human sciences including evolutionary biology and psychology; social/cultural anthropology; archaeology and linguistics Provides a ground-breaking set of original studies offering a new perspective on early human history Debates fundamental questions about early human society: Was there a connection between the beginnings of language and the beginnings of organized 'kinship and marriage'? How far did evolutionary selection favor gender and generation as principles for regulating social relations? Sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in conjunction with the British Academy

This book explores multiple burials, the presence of more than one individual within a grave, within the Viking Age mortuary landscape throughout Scandinavia and the lands of their westward diaspora. Even though a number of spectacular examples have captured the imagination of professionals and the public alike, multiple burials have not been the subject of dedicated and systematic archaeological investigation. By adopting a perspective grounded in relationality and an analysis that centres on three types of beings—humans, animals and things—this book explores the ways in which each being entered into entangled relationships with the other, thereby mutually constituting the nature of their existence in Viking Age minds. For the first time, the corpus of Viking Age multiple burials located across the lands of the Western Scandinavian diaspora and their counterparts in the urban trading centres of Kaupang (Norway) and Hedeby (formerly Denmark) is synthesised into a single study, firmly situating the multiple burial rite within the wider suite of normative burial practices observed across the Viking World. The book meaningfully engages with a developing discourse in the Scandinavian tradition increasingly revealing the fluidity of being across human, animal and thing bodies in Iron Age mentalities and material culture. Ultimately, it poses the question: are humans, animals, and things similar forms of bodies and beings in the Viking World? This book will appeal to students and researchers of death and burial in the Viking World.

Viking Mediologies is a study of pre-modern multimedia rooted in the embodied poetic practice of Viking Age skalds. Prior study of the skaldic tradition has focused on authorship—distinctions of poetic style, historical contexts, and attention to the oeuvres of the skalds whose names are preserved in the written tradition. Kate Heslop reconsiders these not as texts but as pieces in a pre-modern media landscape, focusing on poetry’s medial capacity to embody memory, visuality, and sound. Mobile, hybrid, diasporic social formations—bands of raiders and traders, petty kingdoms, colonial expeditions—achieved new prominence in the Viking Age. Skalds offered the leaders of these groups something uniquely valuable. With their complicated poetry, they claimed to be able to capture shared contingent meanings and re-mediate them in named, memorable, reproducible works. The commemorative poetry in kviðuháttr remembers histories of ruin and loss. Skaldic ekphrasis discloses and reproduces the presence of the gods. Dróttkvætt encomium evokes for the leader’s retinue the soundscape of battle. As writing arrived in Scandinavia in the wake of Christianization, the media landscape shifted. In the poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, skalds adjusted to the demands of a literate audience, while the historical and poetological texts of the Icelandic High Middle Ages opened a dialogue between Latin Christian ideas of mediation and local traditions. In the Second Grammatical Treatise, for example, the literate technology of the grid is used to analyze the complex resonances of dróttkvætt as the output of a syllable-spewing hurdy-gurdy—a poetry machine. Offering both new readings of both canonical works such as Ynglingatal, Ragnarsdrápa, and Háttatal, and examinations of lesser-known texts like Glymdrápa, Líknarbraut, and Sturla Þórðarson’s Hákonarkviða, Viking Mediologies explores the powers and limits of poetic mediation.