Introduction to Nordic Cultures is an innovative, interdisciplinary introduction to Nordic history, cultures and societies from medieval times to today. The textbook spans the whole Nordic region, covering historical periods from the Viking Age to modern society, and engages with a range of subjects: from runic inscriptions on iron rings and stone monuments, via eighteenth-century scientists, Ibsen’s dramas and turn-of-the-century travel, to twentieth-century health films and the welfare state, nature ideology, Greenlandic literature, Nordic Noir, migration, ‘new’ Scandinavians, and stereotypes of the Nordic. The chapters provide fundamental knowledge and insights into the history and structures of Nordic societies, while constructing critical analyses around specific case studies that help build an informed picture of how societies grow and of the interplay between history, politics, culture, geography and people. Introduction to Nordic Cultures is a tool for understanding issues related to the Nordic region as a whole, offering the reader engaging and stimulating ways of discovering a variety of cultural expressions, historical developments and local preoccupations. The textbook is a valuable resource for undergraduate students of Scandinavian and Nordic studies, as well as students of European history, culture, literature and linguistics.

With its focus on the popular television genre of Nordic noir, this book examines subtle and explicit manifestations of geopolitics in crime series from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as the impact of such programmes on how northern Europe is viewed around the world. Drawing on a diverse set of literature, from screen studies to critical International Relations, Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir addresses the fraught geopolitical content of Nordic television series, as well as how Nordic noir as a genre travels the globe. With empirical chapters focusing on the interlinked concepts of the body, the border, and the nation-state, this book interrogates the various ways in which northern European states grapple with challenges wrought by globalisation, neoliberalism, and climate change. Reflecting the current global fascination with all things Nordic, this text examines the light and dark sides of the region as seen through the television screen, demonstrating that series such as Occupied, Trapped, and The Bridge have much to teach us about world politics. This book will be of interest to those interested in geopolitics, national identity, and the politics of popular culture in: Scandinavian studies, media/screen studies, IR/political science, human/cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and communication.

The Northern peripheries of Europe, which are covered by this book, are associated with remoteness, the frontier, isolated communities, colonialism and resource extraction. Recently, huge projects in petroleum and hydropower have been located there, and the region has become better known as an attractive tourist destination. Although these spaces are perceived as being marginal, they are inhabited and linked into globalization and international agendas. This book examines how people live in such remote spaces in an emerging global world of connectivity, interdependency, mobility and non-linear dynamics. The various case studies examine a wide range of experiences, ranging from tourists and local settlers to those who migrate for labour in old or new industries, or to pursue the hybrid urban/rural life of the periphery. In this book, mobility and place come together. The analyses demonstrate how mobility and place mutually constitute each other and how specific relationships between the two aspects are crucial in the making of societies. The authors study attempts to reinvent places, together with connections and the opening of 'new scapes' in order to sustain businesses, municipalities and people's livelihood.

"The first volume presents new archaeological and ecological data and analyses on the relation between human subsistence and survival, and the natural history of North-Western Europe throughout the period 10000-6000 BC. The volume contains contributions from ecological oriented archaeologists and from the natural sciences, throwing new light on the physical and biotic/ecological conditions of relevance to the earliest settlement. Main themes are human subsistence, subsistence technology, ecology and food availability pertaining to the first humans, and demographic patterns among humans linked to the accessibility of different landscapes"--Provided by publisher.

Presents the history, culture, lifestyle, and hardships of the Sami people of Northern Europe, and provides information about the climate and environment within their territory.

New to This Edition --

The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a “wilderness”, where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying population groups. The book takes a past-present-future perspective that illustrates the paths to institutional emergence, change or persistence over time. It also illustrates how institutions may themselves drive changes, through a focus on resource use cases in northern Europe. This volume demonstrates that understanding “northern” issues is less about understanding sets of geophysical, climatological or environmental conditions than about understanding social and institutional structures. Understanding these trajectories into the future is seen as a key way of understanding what responses to future change may be likely and what the institutions are that will shape, limit or enable our responses to climate change. This book will be of great use to scholars and graduates in the fields of Arctic and northern-region politics, and to researchers of resource use and climate change with a focus on vulnerability, social vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

This volume explores technology and communication of the early settlements of Northern Europe. The articles will discuss case studies and present overviews from the early and middle Mesolithic of Northern Europe. Special emphasis will be put on the spatial and temporal transmission of knowledge and culture. This subject addresses themes such as the transmission of specialised knowledge, the generative transmission of knowledge, the understanding of technology as somatic or incorporated culture in human society and the role of pedagogies and teaching in cultural sustainment and transformation. Other papers will discuss the relation between demography and technological developments, as well as the natural and cultural context for the transmission of culture. The understanding of the transmission of technology is, again, closely interrelated to the nature and efficiency of social networks of contact and their social and physical framework. Ultimately these question addresses one of the fundamental issues of our time - how to understand and cope with radical changes. This book provides new and different answers to this great problem of our time.

This title was first published in 2000: This is a full-scale integrated synthesis of the origins, spread and effects of monasticism in Scandinavia, and along the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. Beginning with a review of the geography and communications by land and, especially, by sea, of the region, the author goes on to describe early monasticism among the Frisians ,Saxons and the Danes, then in Norway and Sweden, Saxony, Slesvig and Ribe, and finally Pomerania and the southern and eastern Baltic littoral. Throughout the book he stresses the place of abbeys and convents within their local surroundings, as centres of conversion, recruitment and redistribution of wealth. He traces the intellectual, literary and liturgical connections between monastic centres and neighbouring cathedral towns and royal strongholds, and the means by which orders or congregations maintained discipline from the centre. He also describes the leaders who emerged from convent, abbey or congregation to command local and regional political and cultural life, and the ways in which monastic centres influenced popular devotion.