In Austrvegr: The Role of the Eastern Baltic in Viking Age Communication across the Baltic Sea

In Austrvegr: The Role of the Eastern Baltic in Viking Age Communication across the Baltic Sea
Author: Marika Mägi
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004363815

Winner of the Early Slavic Studies Association 2018 Book Prize Marika Mägi’s book considers the cultural, mercantile and political interaction of the Viking Age (9th-11th century), focusing on the eastern coasts of the Baltic Sea. The majority of research on Viking activity in the East has so far concentrated on the modern-day lands of Russia, while the archaeology and Viking Age history of today’s small nation states along the eastern coasts of the Baltic Sea is little known to a global audience. This study looks at the area from a trans-regional perspective, combining archaeological evidence with written sources, and offering reflections on the many different factors of climate, topography, logistics, technology, politics and trade that shaped travel in this period. The work offers a nuanced vision of Eastern Viking expansion, in which the Eastern Baltic frequently acted as buffer zone between eastern and western powers. Winner of the Early Slavic Studies Association 2018 Book Prize for most outstanding recent scholarly monograph on pre-modern Slavdom. The work was described by the prize committee in the following terms: "The scope of this book is far broader than the title might suggest. It amounts to a substantial rethinking of the history of the eastern Baltic from the tenth to the thirteenth century, based on both archaelogical and written evidence. The author is by training an archaeologist, and she mounts a powerful criticism of historians who prioritise the written sources and then pick and choose from the archaeological evidence to suit their theories. This book foregrounds the archaeology, which is used to question and consider the written evidence. The author is also highly and rightly critical of the archaeological scholarship, for projecting back into the past the narrow concerns of the numerous nation states that now exist across the eastern and northern Baltic, or the Great Russian nationalist-materialist-imperialist interpretations of the Soviet period. The result is a detailed and fascinating account of the interactions of the worlds of Scandinavia and Rusʹ with the various peoples of the Baltic region, both Finno-Ugric and Baltic. The resulting picture of commercial, political, and cultural interaction across several cultures, and based on reading in a wide range of languages, is a tour-de-force."

The Baltic

The Baltic
Author: Michael North
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2015-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674426045

In this overview of the Baltic region from the Vikings to the European Union, Michael North presents the sea and the lands that surround it as a Nordic Mediterranean, a maritime zone of shared influence, with its own distinct patterns of trade, cultural exchange, and conflict. Covering over a thousand years in a part of the world where seas have been much more connective than land, The Baltic: A History transforms the way we think about a body of water too often ignored in studies of the world’s major waterways. The Baltic lands have been populated since prehistory by diverse linguistic groups: Balts, Slavs, Germans, and Finns. North traces how the various tribes, peoples, and states of the region have lived in peace and at war, as both global powers and pawns of foreign regimes, and as exceptionally creative interpreters of cultural movements from Christianity to Romanticism and Modernism. He examines the golden age of the Vikings, the Hanseatic League, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, and Peter the Great, and looks at the hard choices people had to make in the twentieth century as fascists, communists, and liberal democrats played out their ambitions on the region’s doorstep. With its vigorous trade in furs, fish, timber, amber, and grain and its strategic position as a thruway for oil and natural gas, the Baltic has been—and remains—one of the great economic and cultural crossroads of the world.

Circum-Baltic Languages

Circum-Baltic Languages
Author: Östen Dahl
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2001-12-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027297282

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.

The Baltic Story

The Baltic Story
Author: Caroline Boggis-Rolfe
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2019-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1445688514

The Baltic Story recounts the shared history of the countries around the Baltic, from the events of a thousand years ago to the present day.

The Discovery of the Baltic

The Discovery of the Baltic
Author: Nils Blomkvist
Publisher:
Total Pages: 798
Release: 2005
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

A study of Europeanization in the Baltic Rim 1075-1225 AD, comparing the indigenous civilisations to the prevailing western one. A new approach to the period's narrative sources brings real people's attitudes and daily toils to life in the midst of a change of epic dimensions.

The Baltic Sea Region

The Baltic Sea Region
Author: Witold Maciejewski
Publisher: Baltic University Press
Total Pages: 686
Release: 2002
Genre: Baltic Sea Region
ISBN: 9197357987

Viking Empires

Viking Empires
Author: Angelo Forte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2005-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521829922

Viking Empires, first published in 2005, is a definitive global history of the Viking World.

Maritime Societies of the Viking and Medieval World

Maritime Societies of the Viking and Medieval World
Author: James H. Barrett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317247973

This book is a study of communities that drew their identity and livelihood from their relationships with water during a pivotal time in the creation of the social, economic and political landscapes of northern Europe. It focuses on the Baltic, North and Irish Seas in the Viking Age (ad 1050–1200), with a few later examples (such as the Scottish Lordship of the Isles) included to help illuminate less well-documented earlier centuries. Individual chapters introduce maritime worlds ranging from the Isle of Man to Gotland — while also touching on the relationships between estate centres, towns, landing places and the sea in the more terrestrially oriented societies that surrounded northern Europe’s main spheres of maritime interaction. It is predominately an archaeological project, but draws no arbitrary lines between the fields of historical archaeology, history and literature. The volume explores the complex relationships between long-range interconnections and distinctive regional identities that are characteristic of maritime societies, seeking to understand communities that were brought into being by their relationships with the sea and who set waves in motion that altered distant shores.

Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings

Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings
Author: Jon Vidar Sigurdsson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501760483

In Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson returns to the Viking homeland, Scandinavia, highlighting such key aspects of Viking life as power and politics, social and kinship networks, gifts and feasting, religious beliefs, women's roles, social classes, and the Viking economy, which included farming, iron mining and metalworking, and trade. Drawing of the latest archeological research and on literary sources, namely the sagas, Sigurðsson depicts a complex and surprisingly peaceful society that belies the popular image of Norsemen as bloodthirsty barbarians. Instead, Vikings often acted out power struggles symbolically, with local chieftains competing with each other through displays of wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts, rather than arms. At home, conspicuous consumption was a Viking leader's most important virtue; the brutality associated with them was largely wreaked abroad. Sigurðsson's engaging history of the Vikings at home begins by highlighting political developments in the region, detailing how Danish kings assumed ascendency over the region and the ways in which Viking friendship reinforced regional peace. Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings then discusses the importance of religion, first pagan and (beginning around 1000 A.D.) Christianity; the central role that women played in politics and war; and how the enormous wealth brought back to Scandinavia affected the social fabric—shedding new light on Viking society.