Professor Lesley Abrams: List of publications

This paper focuses on the mobile and predatory groups of the ninth and early tenth centuries that contemporary sources called ‘armies’. To what extent did they try to recreate the religious beliefs and practice of the Scandinavian homelands? Could a religious life be led away from home and on the road, detached from the fixed landscapes of cult, assembly, and burial that characterised lived religion at home? Starting with the premise that the armies did have a religious life, combining belief and practice, this paper tries to tease out a more rounded view of the armies by adding this dimension to our understanding of them as social entities. It suggests that, although in some cases exposure to Christian actors and institutions led to a formal conversion to Christianity, being away and immersed in the precarious environment of war also had the potential to intensify vikings’ attachment to their traditional religious life, creating a series of ‘micro-paganisms’ shaped locally by their overseas experience. By offering a speculative sketch of ‘pagan’ religious protocols, I hope to draw attention to the interest of the religious dynamics of Scandinavian armies at this transitional stage between mobility and permanence.

Speaking very generally, there were three kinds of conversion to Christianity in a Scandinavian context outside the homelands in the Viking Age. Iceland, Greenland and Rus’ experienced religious change without interacting with a pre-existing population of resident Christians. In contrast, the migrant settlers in Britain, Ireland and Normandy were surrounded by Christians, and while some of the religious establishments in the region went out of business, others survived to participate in the process. A third kind of conversion, which might be called ‘diplomatic’, belongs to the interactive dynamics of viking activity (using ‘vikings’ in the strict sense of aggressive mobile...

While the beginnings of Christianity in Greenland are very poorly recorded, the settlement has played a prominent role in the discussion of paganism, the conversion, and early Christianity in the Viking world, thanks to the sagas in which Greenlanders feature. In particular, the range of religious practice that is reflected in the literary representations of the past is very striking; the rituals of the seeress, Thorbjorg, the Christian practice of Eric's wife, Thjodhild, and Gudrid's pilgrimage to Rome and profession as a nun offer contrasting perceptions of lived religion in the late Viking Age. While the absence of other relevant sources relating to Greenland is clearly a disadvantage, it leaves us free to question entrenched assumptions about the early religious life of the community. While, as elsewhere, the conversion to Christianity in Greenland would have had a practical impact, ranging from the creation of political and economic alliances to changes in social custom (including burial and memorialization), I argue in this paper that Greenland might have been somewhat different from other Scandinavian communities overseas. Discussing and drawing on the written and material record, I propose that we might gain from resisting the narrative of Christian convention, which requires sudden, dramatic, and emphatic change, in favor of a different understanding of religious practice. If we entertain the possibility that some societies may have had more room for religious diversity than Christian sources would allow, it could be argued that the early community of Greenland, instead of conforming to Christian stereotype, experienced an extended period of diversity; a mixed society encompassing traditional religious practice and a largely domestic Christianity could have continued for some time until Christianity gained a sufficient degree of institutionalization to impose a more conventional Christian way of life.

This volume is a collection of 30 papers on the broad subject of the Scandinavian expansion westwards to Britain, Ireland and the North Atlantic, with a particular emphasis on settlement. The volume has been prepared in tribute to the work of Barbara E. Crawford on this subject, and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of her seminal book, Scandinavian Scotland. Reflecting Dr Crawford's interests, the papers cover a range of disciplines, and are arranged into four main sections: History and Cultural Contacts; The Church and the Cult of Saints; Archaeology, Material Culture and Settlement; Place-Names and Language. The combination provides a variety of new perspectives both on the Viking expansion and on Scandinavia's continued contacts across the North Sea in the post-Viking period. Contributors include: Lesley Abrams, Haki Antonsson, Beverley Ballin Smith, James Barrett, Paul Bibire, Nicholas Brooks, Dauvit Broun, Margaret Cormac, Neil Curtis, Clare Downham, Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Ian Fisher, Katherine Forsyth, Peder Gammeltoft, Sarah Jane Gibbon, Mark Hall, Hans Emil Liden, Christopher Lowe, Joanne McKenzie, Christopher Morris, Elizabeth Okasha, Elizabeth Ridel, Liv Schei, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Brian Smith, Steffen Stumann Hansen, Frans Arne Stylegård, Simon Taylor, William Thomson, Gareth Williams, Doreen Waugh and Alex Woolf.