Diaspora and Identity in the Viking Age

Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age emed_333 17..38 L A This article investigates the implications of the recent application of the term ‘diaspora’ to the overseas settlements of the Viking Age and offers a speculative assessment, based on literary, historical, archaeological, sculptural and onomastic evidence, of how the concept might contribute to our understanding of the cultural dynamics of the period. This exploratory look at connectivity in the ‘viking world’ considers the respective roles of the Scandinavian homelands and overseas settlements in the interplay of cultural forces from the ninth to the eleventh century. It has become commonplace in recent years to refer to the arc of settlements established in the ninth and tenth centuries by emigration from Scandinavia as a diaspora. ‘Diaspora’ has become an established term of art and is now routinely used as a synonym for the overseas settlements in the North Atlantic, Britain, Ireland, western Europe, and the east, often without gloss or explanation. Given the speed and enthusiasm with which this term from the social sciences has entered the lexicon of the Viking-Age specialist, it seems appropriate to pause and consider whether its adoption is simply a fashionable updating of old vocabulary, or whether ‘diaspora’ might be a portable analytical tool that can bring something constructive to our thinking about the diffusion of people and ideas in the period.   The term was pioneered by Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham, through the Viking Identities Network (VIN), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Diasporas, Migration, and Identities strategic initiative. Two workshops, on ‘Myth and Cultural Memory in the Viking Diaspora’, and ‘Gender, Material Culture and Identity in the Viking Diaspora’, took place in . On the origins of VIN, see J. Jesch, ‘Myth and Cultural Memory in the Viking Diaspora’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia  (), pp. –. Papers from the project are being published in successive issues of that journal. I am grateful to Judith Jesch for sending me a copy of her unpublished paper, ‘Writing the Settlement of Iceland: Migration, Diaspora, and Icelandic Identities’. I should like to thank the participants at Fordham University’s ‘New Directions in Medieval Scandinavian Studies’ conference in March , whose response encouraged me to pursue this theme, as well as seminar participants at the Universities of Gothenburg and Stockholm and the Early Medieval Europe   () – ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA , USA 18 Lesley Abrams An investigation along these lines runs immediately into problems of terminology. Older terms for immigrant societies established overseas, such as ‘colonial’ or ‘provincial’, come with unwelcome and distracting baggage; but no simple and uncompromised label for something originating in one place and exported to another, altered by the process of displacement but still defined by its origins, has taken their place in post-colonial discourse. Some scholars have chosen to use ‘viking’ for anyone or anything of Scandinavian origin during this period; but others prefer to limit its application more strictly to ship-based raiders (although strictness is in fact impossible). ‘Norse’ has, for some, too linguistic a meaning; and it risks confusion with ‘Norwegian’, for which it sometimes acts as a synonym. ‘Scandinavian’ is ambiguous, as it could refer simply to the homelands of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, excluding the overseas settlements; furthermore, like ‘pan-Scandinavian’, it has undesirable and misleading essentialist overtones, as we shall see. For want of a better term, however, I will use ‘Scandinavian’ to refer to this culture in its most inclusive sense. Thanks primarily to Iceland’s exceptional role in its preservation, transmission, and celebration, the settlement established there from  has attracted the most attention in the study of the dispersal of people from Scandinavia and their cultural life outside the homelands. On the other hand, research concentrating on the overseas settlements established by conquest and migration in existing societies in the Christian west, and on the nature of the interactions between immigrants from Scandinavia and local populations, brings home the degree to which the Scandinavian experience varied, even within the same kingdom, depending on the circumstances of settlement. Contributing variables would have included the nature of the host society (where, for example, was it on the spectrum from rigidly hierarchical to relatively egalitarian?); the nature of its church (was it compromised by the fallout of conquest or settlement, or did it continue to operate much as before?); and the nature of the Scandinavian presence itself (had it been established by military takeover, or by something slower and less dramatic?). In the end, the Scandinavian element contributed by the immigrants in Ireland, Scotland, England, Normandy, and the kingdom of the Rus was overtaken by local cultures, leaving only the North Atlantic settlements speaking Old Norse and subscribing to a Scandinavian identity. As a result, the phenomenon of cultural interplay between Scandinavian incomers and established populations, and the settlements  Institute of Historical Research in London, who have helped me to shape it further. All imprudent observations, inaccuracies, or confusions are of course my own responsibility. Upper-case Vikings can imply something akin to an ethnic identity, so the lower-case spelling has been preferred here. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 19 themselves more generally, have been treated as largely the same. This is misleading: the histories of the impact of immigrant groups on their neighbours and the experience of their own cultural transformations are eloquently different. This diversity, on the other hand, leaves open a larger question: what did these settlements have in common? To what extent did a shared identity link them to the homelands? Questions such as these have prompted this investigation of whether the concept of diaspora might provide a way forward. Until recently, most would have associated ‘diaspora’ with the experience of the Jews, whose story of mass deportation and exile more or less owned the term. Social scientists in the late twentieth century, however, faced first with the exodus from Africa and then the need to theorize an increasingly global society, transferred the word to a broader stage, and a diaspora craze ensued. Purists may have hoped to limit its application, but everything that moves or spreads across the globe now seems to merit the label. To choose just one publication from thousands, a recent Encyclopedia of Diasporas has , pages on memoirs in the Chinese diaspora, dance in the African diaspora, film and the South Asian diaspora, and much, much more. Universities across the world host research projects or degree programmes ranging from Diasporas in Roman Britain to the contemporary Eritrean virtual diaspora created through cyberspace. In the hands of social theorists, ‘diaspora’ seeks to describe a world where the insecurities, risks, and adversities of the global age motivate immigrant groups to be ‘simultaneously ethnic and transnational, local and cosmopolitan’: in other words, to want to belong to two places at once. A bottom-line definition of a diaspora in current usage might be: any community that has emigrated and remains culturally visible in the receiving nation. Robin Cohen’s Global Diasporas offers a consolidated list of characteristics which can be summarized as follows:        I am pursuing a book-length study of these settlements. It will be obvious that the thoughts presented here rest on extensive scholarship in many different fields. Full footnotes on each subject treated would overbalance this short article; so, with apologies to the many scholars whose work has stimulated my thinking, references have been severely limited. At the first VIN conference, Joe Allard gave a paper entitled ‘“Diaspora?” I Think Not. Oral and Literary Considerations Drawn from the Greenland Adventures’, arguing that it was inappropriate to apply the term to the oral culture of the Viking Age. M. Ember, C.R. Ember and I. Skoggard (eds), Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World,  vols (New York, ). It can even reach beyond our solar system: ‘Diaspora’ is also a ‘single and multiplayer spacefighter combat-game set in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica universe’ <http://www.diasporagame.com/>, accessed March . R. Cohen, Global Diasporas. An Introduction, nd edn (London, ), p. . Cohen, Global Diasporas, p. . Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 20 Lesley Abrams . dispersal from an original homeland to two or more foreign regions; . expansion in search of work, in pursuit of trade, or to further colonial ambitions; . a collective memory and myth about the homeland, real or imagined; . an idealization of the homeland and a collective commitment to its thriving; . a movement to return to or at least maintain a connection with the homeland; . a strong ethnic group consciousness, maintained over time; . a troubled relationship with the host society; . a sense of empathy and co-responsibility with co-ethnic members in other countries; . the possibility of an enriched creative life in the host country. Cohen emphasizes that his list is of attributes, not requirements, and that diasporic communities need not exhibit all of these traits. Some apply quite readily to the Viking Age, others are more problematic. For a start, modern diasporas are perceived as self-consciously ethnic, and ethnicity has been treated by many of their observers as a relatively uncomplicated attribute. Leaving aside the question of whether some modern scholarship can be too reductionist on this subject, in the Viking Age such things were far from simple, and we prefer to refer not to genetic identity but to culture – a basket of attributes including language, religion, dress and art, all of it constructed. The cautious historian will also worry in principle about the casual transfer of modern models to the past. Radically different technology, if nothing else, has transformed the nature of communications in the modern era and with it the character of connectivity. Another obvious difference is that, compared with the disadvantaged circumstances of many modern migrants, Scandinavians overseas in the Viking Age often enjoyed the significant edge that predation, conquest, or trade could provide. These are daunting obstacles, perhaps fatally so. The most obvious practical difficulty in applying Cohen’s diaspora paradigm, however, is inequality of information. It is very difficult to conceptualize society in the Viking Age, because our evidence is both slight and complicated. What historical sources we do have were written by outsiders or are much later in date than the period they purport to describe, and they are therefore untrustworthy to an unknown degree. Literary sources are particularly tricky, because they provide very detailed pictures of Viking-Age society in action – but from the pens of thirteenth-century and later saga-writers whose agendas were not always historically helpful. Material culture is contemporary and plentiful, but it offers its own problems of interpretation. These are not  The problem has not escaped Cohen: Global Diasporas, pp. –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 21 negligible concerns. I would nevertheless like to propose that the concept of diaspora offers a new way of thinking hypothetically about Scandinavians overseas and has the potential to reconfigure our understanding of the dynamics of the Viking Age. In the absence of the detailed information available to students of modern diasporas, we can start instead with a hypothetical, speculative, model of Viking-Age society that takes in the Scandinavian homelands and the overseas settlements: . A series of elite courts, royal or at least lordly, existed across the viking world, sharing a culture based not just on language and origins but on ongoing contacts and competitive interplay and imitation. Interaction between these groups could occur across large distances, facilitated by the exceptional development of waterborne travel. . Regional interaction took place between these royal or elite centres and their immediate localities, the transfer of cultural values having a trickle-down effect in the region. Elite centres, often separated by substantial distances, therefore shared more cultural elements than centres and their hinterlands. . Individuals could identify themselves in different ways in different contexts, tapping a number of affiliations and overlapping identities. Three items on Cohen’s list refer to homeland. How does this apply to the Viking Age? Just as the range of destinations of traders, armies, and settlers was vast, Scandinavia’s size meant that there were also many starting points, and therefore (potentially) many different conceptualizations of home. The extent to which Scandinavia was a single cultural unit in the Viking Age is highly contentious. Scholars’ views seem to depend to some degree on what discipline they work in. Literature, with an audience linked by language, encourages its scholars to think in terms of one broad cultural zone: the Old Norse world. Historians (whether twelfth- or twenty-first-century) use texts that derive from the national – you could even say texts that created the national; medieval writers were trained by the Bible to think in terms of tribes, peoples and genealogies. Historians therefore stress the sub-units of national identity – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – although single unified kingdoms did not develop until late in the period. Archaeologists have had some investment in national stories too, but their pursuit of parallels across distance has highlighted homogeneity, formulating an overarching pan-Scandinavian culture with implications of unifying agency. Now, however, there is a new emphasis in archaeology on regionality and local differentiation.  Søren Sindbaek, for example, has applied complex network theory to Viking-Age trade and exchange: ‘The Small World of the Vikings: Networks in Early Medieval Communication and Exchange’, Norwegian Archaeological Review  (), pp. –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 22 Lesley Abrams The nature of the relationship between material culture and group identity is, of course, one of archaeology’s longest-running debates, and the concept of a single Scandinavian culture has recently been a particular target of criticism. Fredrik Svanberg’s Decolonizing the Viking Age accused the founding fathers of Scandinavian archaeology of constructing a spurious past, a ‘systematized Viking Age’, which they imposed on what was actually a ‘world of many cultures, realities, and lifeways’. Przemyslaw Urbanczyk’s article, ‘Deconstructing the “Nordic Civilization”’, also challenged the ‘dominating concept or myth of a pan-Scandinavian cultural unity’ and objected to the pernicious effect of its appeal to ‘ancient glory’. This line of argument rests particularly on the variety of burial practice across Scandinavia, increasingly demonstrated by excavation. Svanberg’s maps distinguished between very small regions in southern Scandinavia on the basis of grave type and contents, for example. Neil Price has also stressed ‘diversity in death’, pointing out that ‘after more than a century of excavations there can remain no doubt whatever that we cannot speak of a standard orthodoxy of burial practice common to the whole Norse world’. The idea of a single Scandinavian burial custom has nonetheless been damagingly persistent in British archaeology. Furthermore, we need to remember that heterogeneity in burial rite is the end result of a potentially even greater difference of custom, representing a whole parade of varied practices, themselves potentially emblematic of diverse beliefs. The work of Anders Andrén and others has usefully drawn attention to the proliferation of archaeological evidence for diversity of ritual practice in Scandinavian pre-Christian religion, both across regions and over time. There is no doubt that the realities of burial and cult practice flatly contradict any idea of a single funerary and ritual tradition in Scandinavia. Pan-Scandinavian material culture and supra-regional traditions have nevertheless captured the limelight in studies of the Viking Age, and,      F. Svanberg, Decolonizing the Viking Age,  vols (Stockholm, ), II, pp. , . In Gripla  (), pp. –, at p. , and ‘What Was “Kaupang in Skiringssal?” Comments on Dagfinn Skre (ed.): Kaupang in Skiringssal. Kaupang Excavation Project Publication Series, Vol. , Aarhus University Press, Århus ()’, Norwegian Archaeological Review  (), pp. –, at p. . His criticisms were rebutted in the same volume (on pp. –) by Dagfinn Skre: ‘Dark Age Towns: The Kaupang Case. Reply to Przemyslaw Urbańczyk’. ‘Dying and the Dead: Viking Age Mortuary Behaviour’, in N. Price and S. Brink (eds), The Viking World (London and New York, ), pp. –, at p. . Against this misconception, Dawn Hadley has recently pointed out that funerary displays in England could signal Scandinavian identity in a variety of ways: ‘Warriors, Heroes and Companions: Negotiating Masculinity in Viking-Age England’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History  (), pp. –. A. Andrén, ‘Behind Heathendom: Archaeological Studies of Old Norse Religion’, Scottish Archaeological Journal  (), pp. –; A. Andrén, K. Jennbert and C. Raudvere (eds), Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. Origins, Changes, and Interactions (Lund, ). Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 23 especially once the stage is widened beyond the homelands, it is easy to see why. The most obvious shared cultural elements are of course language and the use of the runic alphabet, both spread extensively by Scandinavians abroad: runic inscriptions decorate a brooch from western Scotland, a wooden plane from Dublin, and an amulet from the Russian site of Staraja Ladoga, for example. Almost identical unornamented runic grave-markers are found as far afield as Häggesled in Västergötland, Sweden, and Berezanj in Ukraine. Oval brooches, sometimes treated as the most characteristic Scandinavian cultural marker outside the homelands (there are well over , extant), have been found in Iceland, Ireland, England, Scotland, Normandy, Russia and Ukraine. Thor’s hammers are similarly widespread: from Greenland etched on a spindlewhorl, as pendants in Norfolk (nine finds from the county at the latest count), and attached to a neck ring found in occupational levels in Gorodishche, Russia. Male figurines clasping forked beards and female figures with plaited hair and skirts sweeping up behind (interpreted as valkyries) are found in a variety of media, across the homelands and in almost every overseas settlement zone. So are representations of the story of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer. The widespread appearance of this shared material culture is very striking, and some of it – the valkyries, bearded figurines, and Sigurds at least – must surely show that traditional mythological narratives were widely known and circulated wherever Norsespeakers were to be found. Meanwhile, an axe from Vladimir-Susdal, Russia, a sketch on a stone fragment from Tanberg, Norway, and a lost piece of sculpture from Kirby Hill, Yorkshire, England, seem to show not only a shared knowledge of the story of Sigurd but the identical way of representing the moment of the dragon Fafnir’s death. In these three examples, a sword pierces the beast without human agency. As far afield      Illustrated in A. Ritchie, Viking Scotland (London, ), p. ; M.P. Barnes, J.R. Hagland and R.I. Page (eds), The Runic Inscriptions of Viking Age Dublin (Dublin, ), pp. –; W. Duczko, Viking Rus. Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe (Leiden, ), Fig. . H. Jungner and E. Svärdstrom (eds), Västergötlands runinskrifter,  vols, Sveriges runinskrifter  (Stockholm –), I, pp. – (no. ), illustrated in II, pl. ; Duczko, Viking Rus, Fig. . A classic study is I. Jansson, Ovala Spännbucklor: en studie av vikingatida standardsmycken med utgångspunkt från Björkö-fynden (Uppsala ). For recent finds in England, see J. Kershaw, ‘Culture and Gender in the Danelaw: Scandinavian and Anglo-Scandinavian Brooches’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia  (), pp. –, at pp. –. The Greenlandic example is illustrated in L. Abrams, ‘Early Religious Practice in the Greenland Settlement’, JONA (Journal of the North Atlantic), special vol. , pp. –, at p. ; for the Norfolk finds, I am indebted to Tim Pestell for the latest information; the Gorodishche Thor’s hammer is discussed in M.A. Brisbane (ed.), The Archaeology of Novgorod, Russia (Lincoln, ), p.  (illustrated on p. ). R.N Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England (London, ), pp. –, illustrated on p. . Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 24 Lesley Abrams as Russia, southern Norway, and North Yorkshire, we can find not just the same element of the same story, but apparently the same means of representing it. While Scandinavia exhibited great diversity in burial and ritual practice, other material evidence therefore suggests that something common and unifying did in fact exist across the wider region. Full recognition of the variety of funerary and religious ritual cannot easily dispose of the reality of these supra-regional traditions. How they were sustained is a matter for speculation. Presumably courts and their retinues – hotspots of culture – received and disseminated objects and ideas by means of the routine comings and goings of envoys on diplomatic errands, poets on the make, women getting married, young men doing time as retainers, hostages, merchants, and elite craftsmen looking for commissions; gifts and other status objects and ornaments would have been on display in these inner circles, essential elements of the theatre of self-representation. Not all courts were equal of course. In the Saga of Gunnlaugr Ormstungu, when the poet offered his verses to Sigtryggr, the Scandinavian ruler of Dublin, the king was not entirely sure what the appropriate payment should be. Courts were competitive and aspirational places, and it is likely that anxieties about getting things wrong, or being left behind, characterized these small societies. Even the sons of Scandinavian lords in tenth-century Yorkshire could have travelled to centres of power like York and Dublin for a time and acquired some life-changing experience before taking over the management of their family estates. Other political, social, and economic interactions would have routinely kept established local lords engaged with the wider world. Through these contacts, culture could flow back to rural society. Much the same point could be made about towns, whose role as centres of all kinds of exchange has long been stressed. A palette of conventional images and traditional art styles helped with the visual transmission of this cultural repertoire. Decoration could manifest identity almost anywhere, and, as long as you retained your possessions and the ability to acquire more through trade or craft, you could carry it with you wherever you went, on ornamental metalwork, weapons, leather accessories, wooden objects, and textiles. These things could be brought from Scandinavia, but they were also manufactured overseas: a mould of a valkyrie figure has been excavated from   This is not to devalue Svanberg’s other cogent observations (on the undesirable tyranny of ‘national’ histories and evolutionary assumptions, for example, or on the usefulness of the ‘reconstruction of microcosms’): Decolonizing, summarized on pp. – and –. Gunnlaugs Saga Ormstungu, ed. P.G. Foote and trans. R. Quirk (London, ), pp. –; I owe this suggestion to Alex Woolf. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 25 tenth-century layers at Staraja Ladoga. Much organic material has of course been lost, and with it an important record of cultural affiliation and display. Surviving images on stone, metal, and textile nevertheless provide the earliest evidence for story cycles which were not written down as narratives until very much later. This physical representation presumably complemented a lively oral transmission. Most strikingly, Norsespeakers developed a distinctive poetic form, skaldic verse, which was intricately technical and very difficult to compose and decipher. The origins of this poetry are debated, but it is generally agreed that it first appeared during the age of the settlements: the Norwegian skald Bragi the Old in the second half of the ninth century is the first known poet whose work has been preserved. Regardless of where the impetus to compose in this manner came from, and what the dróttkvæt metre owes to other poetic influences (issues best left to literary scholars), it is clear that skaldic poetry was shared by a far-flung Norse-speaking elite – not just in the homelands but in Iceland, England, and Scotland, possibly in Ireland and the kingdom of the Rus, maybe even in Normandy. It was transmitted by means of an acrolect – the most prestigious social dialect of a language – which transformed and fixed speech patterns into verse convention. The dróttkvæt meter, being extremely restrictive and prescribed, could arguably have spread more easily than something looser and more flexible, and its form may have made it more readily shareable across a scattered cohort of composers and audience. It was an elitist genre which, tapping a common language and ideology and a shared ‘universe of meaning’, linked cultural hubs. Cohen’s modern diasporas exhibit ‘a collective memory and myth about the homeland’, ‘a strong ethnic group consciousness’, and ‘a sense of empathy . . . with co-ethnic members in other countries’. Arguably, distinctive decoration and ornament, traditional stories, and the refined skills of skaldic verse helped to create and maintain a group consciousness and sense of connection that linked together, for a time, the elite groups of the Viking Age. The role of religion is worth considering in this connection. Conversion to Christianity brought Denmark, Norway and Sweden increasingly into the European sphere, while in the overseas settlements it eased the process of assimilation. Before conversion, however, some at least of the Scandinavians abroad still identified with the religion of their origins    I am grateful to Alexander Musin for information about this object. D. Whaley, ‘Skaldic Poetry’, in R. McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford, ), pp. –. J. Jesch, ‘Eagles, Ravens and Wolves: Beasts of Battle, Symbols of Victory and Death’, in J. Jesch (ed.), The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century. An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, ), pp. –, esp. pp.  and – (quoting P.M. Sørensen on a slightly different context). Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 26 Lesley Abrams (although we have far too little information to be able to say what that identification entailed). Unless or until they change their religion, migrants require access to the supernatural in ways that transcend place and regional affiliation and minimize the effects of their displacement. Modern research demonstrates how adaptive diasporic societies can be in this regard. Muslim immigrants to Canada from the Ethiopian city of Harar, for example, have developed an Islam which has been stripped of cultural specifics such as saints’ cults and designed to appeal to a multinational congregation. This has produced a homogenized or essentialized Islamic practice very different from that at home. This adaptive process proves very suggestive when we come to think about the impact of foreign campaigning and migration on Scandinavian paganism, before the conversions to Christianity. Viking armies probably acquired fighting men from many different locations. Preliminary isotope analysis of the mass-grave sites at Ridgeway Hill, Dorset, and St John’s College, Oxford, suggests recruitment patterns along those lines. As armies coalesced, they needed a collective identity, and a common means of relating to the supernatural and enacting the relationship between man and the divine would have been a useful, if not essential, bonding element. It is difficult to imagine, given what (little) we know about Viking-Age social and religious structures, that significantly heterogeneous practices could have been sustained within a fighting unit. The Roman army provides an interesting comparison. Its make-up was extremely cosmopolitan, but an official religious life was imposed on the army through a calendar of prescribed gods and rituals in Latin, a standardization which consolidated its identity; on the other hand, individuals or units could also follow other gods of their choice. The official religion of the Roman army was of course sustained by a kind and degree of centralized power not found in the Viking Age, but the existence of a ‘group’ religion alongside more personal practices is thought-provoking. The impact of social forces on viking bands and other military groupings outside the homelands is largely unknown, but a kind of essentialized Scandinavian religion, focused on elements in common, could arguably have evolved in response to the new configurations and interactions of life away from home: an emphasis on particular gods (such as the cult of Oðin, with its particular associations with warriors and death – and poetry) is one obvious possible result.    S. Vertovec, ‘Religion and Diaspora’, in P. Antes, A.W. Geertz and R.W. Warne (eds), New Approaches to the Study of Religion,  vols (Berlin, ), II, pp. –, at p. . Neither site has yet been published. Preliminary information is available online from Oxford Archaeology (Ridgeway Hill) and Thames Valley Archaeology (St John’s College, Oxford). M. Beard, J. North and S. Price (eds), Religions of Rome,  vols (Cambridge, ), I, pp. –. I was very lucky to be able to discuss this question with Simon Price in October . Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 27 Conventional maps of the Viking Age, with their differently coloured arrows springing from locations anachronistically labelled ‘Norway’, ‘Denmark’ and ‘Sweden’ and piercing designated targets in the west and east, encode a simple story: people, nationally defined, spread relentlessly outwards from Scandinavia. The implication is that they never returned, and that their paths never crossed. The next stage is imagined as follows: Iceland remained true to Scandinavian culture, but wherever there was a pre-existing, resident, population, the pockets of migrants faded away and disappeared as they assimilated into England, Scotland, Ireland, etc. This story is problematic for many reasons. Firstly, unified national entities had not yet developed in most of these target destinations. The process is presented as one-way, a simplification which ignores the impact that Scandinavians overseas had on one another, not to mention any backwash to the homelands. It also neglects the significant synergies in the armies and in the settlements as immigrants interacted with their host societies, producing hybrid cultural forms, some with an enduring afterlife. And finally, the story that produced maps of this sort has been manipulated by later generations. To take just one example of this last objection, at the very end of the tenth century the churchman Dudo of Saint-Quentin was commissioned by the duke of Normandy to write a history of the duchy. Dudo described the triumphal takeover by the viking Rollo of a ‘desert’ land, empty after many years of warfare, which was ceded in  by the Frankish king Charles the Simple. According to Dudo, Rollo and his army of Daci/Dani – though admittedly varied in their origins – were united in a single identity by the process of conquest. Dudo’s story is difficult to refute, as it has almost overpowered all others. Some distortions, however, can and have been convincingly identified: it is clear that the region was not empty when granted to Rollo; that the county came under viking control in several stages; and that Rollo’s Danish origins may have been an instrument to associate him and his followers with the Roman province of Dacia and the Goths, and, through their ancestor Antenor, with Troy. Other (also problematic) sources claim that the founder of Normandy was Norwegian. The fact that Dudo wrote when Duke Richard II and the Danish king, Svein Forkbeard, had negotiated    De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum, ed. J. Lair (Caen, ); Dudo of St Quentin. History of the Normans, trans. E. Christiansen (Woodbridge, ). The bibliography on this subject is extensive. A substantial recent contribution is P. Bauduin, La première Normandie (Xe–XIe siècles. Sur les frontières de la haute Normandie: identité et construction d’une principauté, nd edn (Caen, ). Such as the Historia Norvegiae, written in the second half of the twelfth century: Historia Norwegie, ed. I. Ekrem and L.B. Mortensen and trans. P. Fisher (Copenhagen, ), pp. – and –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 28 Lesley Abrams a treaty, and when predatory Danish fleets were officially welcomed in Norman ports, may have made a primordial association with Denmark even more desirable. Place names reflecting land-taking in the Pays de Caux and the Cotentin reveal that Norse personal names (Tocqueville’s Toki and Quettetot’s Ketill, for example) are matched by names from other settlement regions, including Ireland and England (such as Dicuil and Osulf of Digulleville and Oseville). The settlement of Normandy has nevertheless been represented on maps by a single arrow from Denmark. Inevitably, connections between home and abroad motivated by trade, predation, and what we now call economic migration are too interconnected to be separately mapped; and it may be too ambitious to expect interactions between those overseas in the Viking Age to be represented in map form. But it is important not to forget that while Scandinavians abroad interacted intensively with local societies in many different ways, their activities also stimulated, and at times depended on, contact with other, far-flung, Scandinavian populations. The pre-eminence of trade as a force in Viking-Age society has long been recognized. Networks of trust built on a high level of family and clan solidarity were essential to successful trading, as luxury goods and more mundane commodities were carried from place to place. The men and women who left Thor’s hammers and oval brooches along the Russian rivers might now be classified as a trade diaspora or enclave economy, maximizing the exploitation of economic opportunity through family and community links. Towns were multicultural, places of all kinds of exchange, and trading populations moved ideas and fashions around as well as objects (and themselves). Finds from tenth-century York and Dublin stress the expanding horizons of the towns and the maintenance of (among others) a Scandinavian connection. In elite political circles as much as in trade, lines of contact seem to have been humming. Norwegian royal exiles of the late tenth and early eleventh century, Olaf Tryggvason, Olaf Haraldsson and Harald Hardraada, spent time in the courts of the Scandinavian rulers of Kiev, for example; Olaf Haraldsson also visited the ducal court at Rouen; Godred Crovan, king of the Western Isles, and two sons of the Orkney     Gesta Normannorum ducum, ed. and trans. E. van Houts,  vols (Oxford, –), II, pp. – (Bk V.). E. Ridel, Les vikings et les mots (Paris, ), pp. –. Cohen, Global Diasporas, pp. –. Articles in Medieval Dublin, published yearly since  and edited by S. Duffy, contain the most up-to-date archaeological results; for York, see R.A. Hall et al. (eds), Aspects of AngloScandinavian York, The Archaeology of York / (); for Norwich’s Scandinavian connections, see B. Ayers, ‘The Growth of an Urban Landscape: Recent Research in Early Medieval Norwich’, EME  (), –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 29 jarl, Thorfinn, invaded England in  with Harald Hardraada; Rus rulers turned to Norway, Denmark and Sweden for brides. We can assume that royal women and their entourages were particular vectors of cultural connection, and that news, stories, objects, skills, and new ideas and tastes spread with them as much as through other diplomatic embassies. On the military side, external wars may have kept men (and even women and children) on the road for many years, but at least some of them went home, as runestones attest. Thorsteinn of Bjudby had sailed to England, his stone proclaims, but he died at home in Sweden; Ragnvald of Ed in Uppland boasted that he had been in Grikland (Byzantium) and was leader of the army. As time passed, overseas societies would have had different things to offer to the homelands. Contacts and influence were of course never restricted to polities with a Scandinavian connection, however, and when centralized kingdoms began to emerge in Scandinavia, they borrowed extensively from western technologies of power to implement state-formation. England provided the models for the first explicitly royal coinages of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Some of the early churchmen of Scandinavia’s converted rulers were English, arguably (though not necessarily) from regions with a Scandinavian past; others came from Germany. Material evidence reflects the cultural impact of this traffic. Signe Horn Fuglesang has suggested that the Ringerike style, widespread across Scandinavia from the late tenth century, began in Denmark under the influence of both Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian art. It was then exported as a marker of Scandinavian identity, to be found, for example, on grave-slabs from St Paul’s, London, and Otley, Yorkshire. Cecilia Ljung has pointed to some sites in Sweden (Hov, in Östergötland, for example) where funerary monuments significantly resemble English stone sculpture associated with the court of Cnut, who ruled Denmark and England together from  until his death in . She has suggested that they could have belonged to people in his circle in England who had     Sö  and U : S.B.F. Jansson, Swedish Vikings in England: The Evidence of the Rune Stones, Dorothea Coke Lecture (London, ), p. ; J. Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age. The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse (Woodbridge, ), pp. –, esp. pp.  and . L. Abrams, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia’, Anglo-Saxon England  (), pp. –; M. Gelting, ‘Elusive Bishops: Remembering, Forgetting, and Remaking the History of the Early Danish Church’, in S. Gilsdorf (ed.), The Bishop: Power and Piety at the First Millennium (Münster, ), pp. –. S.H. Fuglesang, Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style. A Phase of th Century Scandinavian Art (Odense, ), esp. pp. –. Fuglesang, Some Aspects of the Ringerike Style, pp. –; D. Tweddle, M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle (eds), South-East England, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture  (Oxford, ), pp. –; E. Coatsworth (ed.), Western Yorkshire, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture  (Oxford, ), pp. –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 30 Lesley Abrams returned to Sweden, or to local men who had served in the Þingalið or were relatives of people with English connections. The degree of contact and connection at the lower end of the social scale is naturally most difficult to assess. For one thing, the volume and duration of emigration from Scandinavia to the overseas settlements has proved difficult to judge, since written sources focused almost exclusively on raiding activity or political conquest. Scientific analyses should prove increasingly useful, as methodologies become more refined. Meanwhile, interpretations of some types of evidence – place names, for example, or ornamental metalwork – have lately become more sympathetic to the reality of substantial migration, although there is no consensus on the issue. It was possible twenty years ago for one reliable scholar to observe that, towns aside, there were hardly any material indicators of Scandinavian culture in those parts of England which had been under viking rule in the late ninth and tenth centuries, a situation which supported a model of elite takeover rather than one of significant migration. Since then, thanks to the widespread use of metal-detecting, many hundreds of brooches, strap-ends, and horse-fittings of Scandinavian manufacture and Scandinavian style have been unearthed. In  the British government piloted the Portable Antiquities Scheme to cope with the recording of this avalanche of detector-finds, and coverage has since been extended to most of England and Wales. In  only thirty ornamental brooches from north-eastern England and East Anglia were known: recently Jane Kershaw compiled a database of over , and numbers continue to rise. Metal-detecting has already led to a revolution in artefact studies in the countries where it is legal (especially England and Denmark), and it has the potential to rewrite narratives of the settlement period. Kershaw, for example, has argued from the brooch evidence that significant numbers of migrants came from southern Scandinavia to eastern England, that contact continued to be lively throughout the tenth century, and that a sizeable number of brooches arrived in England on women’s clothing, not as objects of trade.    C. Ljung, ‘Early Christian Grave Monuments and the th-Century Context of the Monument Marker hvalf ’, in papers from the th International Symposium on Runes and Runic Inscriptions,  <http://www.khm.uio.no/forskning/publikasjoner/runenews/th-symp/preprint/ ljung.pdf>, accessed July . L. Abrams and D.N. Parsons, ‘Place-Names and the History of Scandinavian Settlement in England’, in J. Hines, A. Lane, and M. Redknap (eds), Land, Sea and Home. Proceedings of a Conference on Viking-Period Settlement (Leeds, ), pp. –; M. Townend, ‘Scandinavian Place-Names in England’, in J. Carroll and D.N. Parsons (eds), Perceptions of Place, English Place-Name Society (forthcoming). ‘Culture and Gender in the Danelaw: Scandinavian and Anglo-Scandinavian Brooches, – ’; D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (); ‘Culture and Gender in the Danelaw’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 31 Studies of other dress accessories reveal different patterns of cultural interplay. Ringed pins, for example, were developed in Ireland from a native male dress-fastener and appear to have been adopted quite quickly by the Scandinavian population there, possibly as soon as settlement began around the middle of the ninth century. They have become emblematic of the activities of the ‘Hiberno-Norse’ after their Dublin setback in  and their subsequent involvements in the Irish Sea and North Atlantic; they have been found in England, northern Britain, Ireland, and other areas of Scandinavian activity as far apart as l’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, and Staraja Ladoga in Russia. The Viking-Age ringed pin was a classic product of Scandinavian ‘settler society’, produced in Ireland by Scandinavian outsiders adopting and adapting a native form of dress to create something new. Ringed pins, presumably on their wearers’ cloaks, then travelled to other Scandinavian settlements and to the homelands, where local copies were produced and worn for some time after. Some pins manufactured in Scandinavia may in their turn have made the return journey, ending up in the furnished graves of Scandinavian settlements in northern Britain or as stray finds in England. This kind of inventiveness can be seen to have characterized Scandinavians’ activities abroad in the economic sphere as well. Permian rings imported to Denmark from the east seem to have inspired the creation in Ireland around  of broad-band arm-rings. These were economic tools – a new means of storing and circulating wealth – which had no precedent in the Irish material record. Production seems to have centred on Dublin, and there are  known examples of broad-band arm-rings of Irish provenance, some complete but the majority found as hacksilver fragments ( from Britain in total). Broad-band arm-rings served the booming Irish economy, facilitating the movement of goods and changing the way in which commodities were acquired and exchanged. In contrast, the twenty-one finds of broad-band arm-rings in Scandinavia are almost all intact, a circumstance which could suggest that outside Ireland they acted less as economic tools and more as markers of status. Based on a model imported from the east and adapted to local use by the Scandinavian community in Ireland, they were probably exploited by Irish and Scandinavian trading agents alike; but they were not absorbed    T. Fanning, Viking-Age Ringed Pins from Dublin (Dublin, ); esp. p. . J. Sheehan, ‘Early Viking Age Silver Hoards from Ireland and their Scandinavian Elements’, in H.B. Clarke, M. Ní Mhaonaigh and R. Ó Floinn (eds), Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age (Dublin, ), pp. –, esp. pp. –; Fanning, Viking-Age Ringed Pins, p. . J. Sheehan, ‘The Huxley Hoard and Hiberno-Scandinavian Arm-Rings’, in J. GrahamCampbell and R. Philpott (eds), The Huxley Viking Hoard. Scandinavian Settlement in the North West (Liverpool, ), pp. –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 32 Lesley Abrams into long-term Irish practice, and they seem to have played a different role when transferred to the homelands. Another invention or adaptation was the motif-piece, a fragment of bone, stone, antler, or wood on which working drawings or artisans’ exercises were incised. Apparently invented as an artistic tool in previking Ireland to help materialize complicated designs, motif-pieces have been found in Viking-Age levels on sites such as Dublin, York, London and Gorodishche. They are not, however, found in Scandinavia itself until after the establishment of a generation of urban centres c.. The find-spots say something about the important role played by towns in the diffusion of style; but the fact that motif-pieces first appear in Viking-Age contexts abroad, not at home, is particularly noteworthy. Did the Scandinavians overseas lack the skills of craftsmen at home, having therefore to work out how to reproduce their designs without expert input, or how to transfer them from one medium to another? Or was it that Scandinavian patrons commissioned works from Irish craftsmen who were unfamiliar with the art form or style and needed to learn it from an expert practitioner or a model? If the latter, we could be catching a glimpse of the dissemination of Scandinavian culture from its carriers into a wider world. Some of the Irish pieces, like a stone fragment from Killaloe or a slate from Dublin, are culturally bilingual: the decoration of the first mixes Irish and Scandinavian influences; the latter has Ringerike and Irish ornament on opposite sides. While my point is that channels between home and abroad remained open, it is striking how analysis of different categories of material evidence – motif-pieces, sculpture, coins, dress accessories, other metalwork, pottery – brings out the diversity of patterns of interaction between the overseas settlements and locations in the homelands. Scholars continue to disagree about the processes which brought foreign objects to Scandinavia during the Viking Age: loot, trade, tribute, and gift-giving have all been proposed. Clearly no one explanation can (or should) fit the different types of material, nor all periods and regions – in fact, the ebbs and flows can serve to illuminate or at least suggest otherwise undocumented changes in the nature as well as the frequency of contact and response. Connections clearly varied from region to region and over time, motivated by different circumstances. There are few English coins in Scandinavia before the coinage reforms of King Edgar c., for example, but many other Insular finds of the ninth and early tenth centuries – especially ecclesiastical metalwork and dress accessories – show that return   U. O’Meadhra, Early Christian, Viking and Romanesque Art Motif-Pieces from Ireland,  vols (Stockholm,  and ), esp. II, pp. –. J. Graham-Campbell, Viking Artefacts. A Select Catalogue (London, ), pp. – (nos  and ). Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 33 traffic to the homelands (especially from northern Britain and Ireland) began much earlier. Egon Wamers has seen the large amount of Insular jewellery in Norway as representing ‘a steady flow of goods from west to east’ from the beginning of the Viking Age. Finds from Hedeby have led to the conclusion that Anglo-Saxon brooches were incorporated into Danish dress in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. In the early eleventh century, Cnut’s joint reign of England and Denmark and his shorter-lived control of Norway introduced many new and different opportunities for cultural exchange. John Sheehan has judged that the Scandinavian settlements of Ireland contributed more to Norway’s silver-working tradition than vice versa. Penannular brooches, which were characteristic of male dress in Ireland and northern Britain in the pre-viking period, illustrate his point. The appearance of new varieties there after  has led to the suggestion that Scandinavian craftsmen, perhaps in the Hiberno-Scandinavian towns, may have adopted the form and adapted the ornament more to their own taste; certainly, many furnished graves in ninth- and early tenth-century cemeteries in Ireland and the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland include examples of both pre- and post-viking types in combination with traditional Scandinavian burial assemblages. Meanwhile, approximately twenty-two brooches manufactured in the Insular world have been found in women’s graves in western Norway, first appearing c., soon after the first recorded raids on Britain and Ireland. Often described simply as souvenirs, these brooches have also been interpreted as symbols adopted by ninth-century Norwegian raiding groups with the aim of displaying regional alliances. The brooches could also have acted as        M. Blackburn and K. Jonsson, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Element of Northern European Coin Finds’, in M.A.S. Blackburn and D.M. Metcalf (eds), Viking-Age Coinage in the Northern Lands, BAR Int. ser.  (i) (), pp. –, esp. pp. –; ‘Insular’ refers to the cultural zone which included England, Ireland and northern Britain. E. Wamers, ‘Insular Finds in Viking Age Scandinavia and the State Formation of Norway’, in Clarke et al. (eds), Ireland and Scandinavia, pp. –, esp. p. . V. Hilberg, ‘Hedeby in Wulfstan’s Days: A Danish Emporium of the Viking Age between East and West’, in A. Englert and A. Trakadas (eds), Wulfstan’s Voyage. The Baltic Sea Region in the Early Viking Age as Seen from Shipboard (Roskilde, ), pp. –, at pp. –. A. Pedersen, ‘Anglo-Danish Contacts across the North Sea in the Eleventh Century: A Survey of the Danish Archaeological Evidence’, in J. Adams and K. Holman (eds), Scandinavia and Europe –. Contact, Conflict, and Coexistence (Turnhout, ), pp. –; E. Roesdahl, ‘Denmark–England in the Eleventh Century: The Growing Archaeological Evidence for Contacts across the North Sea’, Beretning fra tværfaglige vikingesymposium  (), pp. –. Sheehan, ‘Early Viking Age Silver Hoards’, esp. p. . Sheehan, ‘Early Viking Age Silver Hoards’, pp. –. Z.T. Glørstad, ‘Sign of the Times? The Transfer and Transformation of Irish Penannular Brooches in Viking-Age Norway’, Norwegian Archaeological Review (forthcoming). I am grateful to the author for a copy of this article in advance of publication. See also J. GrahamCampbell, ‘Western Penannular Brooches and their Viking Age Copies in Norway: A New Classification’, in J. Knirk (ed.), Proceedings of the Tenth Viking Congress (Oslo, ), pp. –, and Wamers, ‘Insular Finds’. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 34 Lesley Abrams explicit references to the foreign source of the special wealth and status in Norway of raiding families. Towards the end of the ninth century, local copies of Insular types began to be produced. Some  of these are now known from Norway, almost exclusively from well-equipped men’s, not women’s, graves. These locally produced brooches were frequently made of different material – often copper alloy or iron, not silver – and bear very different ornamentation from the imported types: the early ones are plain or decorated with Borre-style ornament. Citing these artefacts, Zanette Glørstad has recently argued that for about a century after  men in certain parts of Norway adopted a foreign form of dress – a cloak fastened by a brooch – which had been imported from the Insular world, and that a particular type of penannular brooch served to demonstrate local links with the Irish Sea zone, making a deliberate reference to the region of the brooches’ origin. The absence of an Insular dress accessory with a floruit of –, the polyhedral ringed pin, could reflect a retraction of contact in the second half of the tenth century, or at least a change in its expression. Certain types of penannular brooch derived from Insular models were also popular in Sweden during the middle and late tenth century and have also been found in Russia. Just as trade is not the only explanation for the presence of foreign objects in the homelands, so aesthetic taste is unlikely to have been the only motivation for changes in dress. Scandinavian communities abroad were clearly never hermetically sealed from their host societies, and the metalwork evidence demonstrates how they took on and adapted local forms. Yet even as the assimilation process was underway, Scandinavian culture could continue to play a visible and active role: there were other options besides simply going native. Depending on the circumstances, Scandinavian culture could be deployed in new ways, not simply shuffled off and exchanged wholesale for a local identity. Admittedly, the Scandinavian settlements embraced this kind of cultural transnationalism with markedly different levels of enthusiasm: Normandy and England seem to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. Kershaw has observed that women’s dress accessories show how cultural display of Scandinavian identity remained important in eastern England, even after independent Scandinavian regimes lost power and the region became part of the kingdom of England. Although Scandinavian-style brooches were copied and slightly modified by English craftsmen in East Anglia, they remained confined to the region    Glørstad, ‘Sign of the Times?’. Fanning, Viking-Age Ringed Pins, p. . J. Graham-Campbell, ‘Western Influences on Penannular Brooches and Ringed Pins’, in G. Arwidsson (ed.), Birka II:. Systematische Analysen der Gräberfunde (Stockholm, ), pp. –, esp. p. . Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 35 and continued to reinforce the cultural affiliation of wearers there. Scandinavian personal names persisted even longer. Naming was not, of course, simply determined by genetic identity. Some English families gave Norse names to their children and vice versa. But the pattern across England is clear: in those areas which were not subject to Scandinavian settlement in the ninth and tenth centuries there are almost no Scandinavian personal names or place names with Norse elements by the time of Domesday Book’s extensive record. In those areas north and east of Watling Street that were for a time under Scandinavian rule, there are thousands. In Yorkshire the ratio of place names with -by (Norse for settlement or farm) combined with a personal name is : Scandinavian to English. Place names show that the stock of personal names, especially in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, was radically refreshed by an influx of Norse names: Orm of Ormesby and Uglubarðr of Ugglebarnby, for example. In , the ratio of Norse to English personal names recorded for Yorkshire in Domesday Book was still as much as :, and in Ryedale, an administrative unit of North Yorkshire, the ratio was even more emphatic: :. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Scandinavian names such as Thorketill and Stafnhildr were still to be found in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The Norman Conquest eventually transformed English naming practices, but names that were imported after  derived from a very small pool, whereas the documentary record in eastern England includes hundreds of linguistically Norse personal names, many of them found only once or twice, some of them not parallelled in Scandinavia. This strongly suggests that some of these names were coined in the Norse language on the English side of the North Sea. Personal names evidently constituted a fundamental aspect of regional identity. Scandinavian ones may have been retained in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire to emphasize different distinctions that changed over time. Initially expressing distance from the local English and subsequently from their West Saxon conquerors, the names then became embedded in the vernacular culture of the region. A distinctively Norse naming tradition therefore lasted in eastern England long after the language was lost and its community had merged with the indigenous population.      Kershaw, ‘Culture and Gender in the Danelaw’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, esp. pp. –. Abrams and Parsons, ‘Place-Names’, pp. –. D.N. Parsons, ‘Anna, Dot, Thorir . . . Counting Domesday Personal Names’, Nomina  (), pp. –, at pp. –; M. Townend, Scandinavian Culture in Eleventh-Century Yorkshire, The  Kirkdale Lecture (Kirkdale, ), pp. –. G. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (Copenhagen, ). Abrams and Parsons, ‘Place-Names’, pp. –; Townend, Scandinavian Culture, pp. –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 36 Lesley Abrams On the Isle of Man and in northern England a remarkable crossfertilization of native and Scandinavian elements is visible on stone sculpture. Although prior to and for most of this period the Scandinavian homelands (except for Gotland) had only small-scale traditions of ornamental carved stone, the visual vocabulary of many Manx and English monuments of the settlement period looks very Scandinavian. The exact floruit of the monuments is difficult to define due to intractable problems of dating, but there is no doubt that a sculptural revolution in northern England coincided with the early generations of settlers. Thanks to changing political and social forces, stone monuments lost their longstanding ecclesiastical monopoly and took on a role in aristocratic selfrepresentation. Novel forms (such as hogbacks) and unprecedented subject matter (armed warriors displaying the symbols of secular power) seem to reflect a new generation of patrons who were inspired to find original ways of monumentalizing their new identities. Native traditions were not lost, however, as many of the monuments drew on local English stone sculpture. They also absorbed other ‘foreign’ influences, from northern Britain and Ireland. These older traditions were not simply imitated but were creatively repackaged. Innovative features included the use of Scandinavian religious and mythological imagery, on its own or in combination with Christian equivalents. On a cross from Kirk Andreas on the Isle of Man, for example, Oðin is in the process of being devoured by the wolf Fenrir. This scene from the apocalyptic drama of Ragnarök would have resonated to creative effect with the accompanying symbols of Christ’s death and resurrection that decorate the remainder of the cross. The declaredly new style of these monuments seems to have referred very deliberately to Scandinavia, but they were not simply copies of artefacts from home, since stone carving, although not unknown, was apparently little practised in the native tradition of the immigrants (and surviving wooden parallels are later in date). Although carved crosses with a mythological theme form only a small proportion of the entire Viking-Age corpus of northern England, the new forms of ornament – especially the characteristic sinuous beasts – relate to Scandinavian art styles, even if they do not copy them exactly. The patrons of     It is incorrect to say that mainland Scandinavia entirely lacked carved stone, as is indicated by monuments as diverse as the well-known Sparlösa runestone of c. (Vg ; illustrated in S.B.F. Jansson, Runes in Sweden ([Stockholm], ), p. ) and the pre-viking (probably migration-period) gravklot (‘grave-orbs’) found on grave-fields in Sweden and western Norway. For an example of the latter, see B. Nerman, ‘Inglingehögens och Inglingeklotets ålder’, Fornvännen (), pp. –, illustrated on pp. –. I am greatly indebted to Per Widerström for information on and photographs of this neglected category of monuments. Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture. D.M. Wilson, The Vikings in the Isle of Man (Aarhus, ), pp. –. L. Kopar, Gods and Settlers: The Iconography of Norse Mythology in Anglo-Scandinavian Sculpture (forthcoming ). Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd Diaspora and identity in the Viking Age 37 these stone monuments adopted a native, English, medium through which to express themselves in an idiom distinctively different from what had gone before, and it seems therefore that for at least one generation in northern England and on the Isle of Man, traditional Scandinavian culture was drafted in to express a Christian message with a strikingly foreign accent. Even as late as c., a surviving fragmentary inscription in Roman and runic lettering on a sundial from Skelton, North Yorkshire, with Scandinavian-type formulae and vocabulary which is either Old Norse or strongly influenced by it, demonstrates that Scandinavians who assimilated to local Christian culture in at least this part of northern England could do so without losing their language. As we have seen, problems of terminology dog discussion of this cultural interplay. Calling this sculpture ‘Scandinavian’ is misleading on several counts: it invokes misguided suggestions of essentialist purity, for one thing, and it falsely implies a straightforward origin in, and transfer from, the homelands. On the other hand, the hyphenated identities such as Hiberno-Norse or Anglo-Scandinavian which are the usual alternative may usefully indicate hybridity and acknowledge multiple sources of influence, but they imply identities which are composed of only two, clear-cut, cultural forces. This risks simplifying a much more complicated situation. In addition, these terms are applied quite loosely and can be confusing, as they are used to encompass many different meanings. In referring to Anglo-Scandinavians, are we talking of an English population under a viking regime, of settlers of Scandinavian origin in England, of a mixed population of migrants and natives? Or of Scandinavians who have been in England and returned home with exotic new habits? All of these applications can be found in current scholarly writing. Does ‘AngloScandinavian’ mean Scandinavians in England who have adopted some elements of indigenous culture? Or native English who have adopted some elements of Scandinavian culture? While it may be difficult to distinguish these groups in the material record, not to mention in real life, they were not, at origin, the same. There is scope here for progress in refining our vocabulary to capture the complexities that characterize settler societies such as these. The late ninth and tenth centuries, when the settlements were forming, were a dynamic time for Scandinavian culture. A great deal of this activity took place overseas. Although our ignorance of what actually went on remains daunting, a range of evidence suggests that any implication that a monolithic or ‘essential’ Scandinavian identity moved out of the homelands like a storm and dissipated over time until its carriers  J. Lang (ed.), Northern Yorkshire, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture  (Oxford, ), pp. –. Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd 38 Lesley Abrams melted into their host societies misrepresents the case. Nor does the ‘ex-pat’ paradigm of migrants clinging to antiquated tradition exactly fit the circumstances. The model adopted here springs from the observation that active and creative overseas communities maintained links with one another while also channelling objects and ideas back to the homelands. Furthermore, for several centuries raiding, trading, and land-taking stimulated new ways of doing things with Scandinavian culture in new environments, and this sometimes involved stressing, not abandoning, Scandinavian ancestry and exploiting selective elements of Scandinavian culture; arguably, Scandinavian identity could therefore at times have been strengthened by the raiding or immigrant experience. Whether flaunted, adapted, disguised, or quickly rejected, Scandinavian culture was a dynamic factor in the history of assimilation. Attention has generally focused on the influence of big national players in Scandinavia’s journey to ‘Europeanization’, but this assessment of the homelands and overseas settlements as a linked diaspora would give the latter a greater role in the construction of Viking-Age culture, shifting them from the (literal and conceptual) periphery to the middle of the action. The cultural lives of the settlements had different histories, of course, and their inhabitants made very different choices about the role Scandinavian identity played in the process of their assimilation. But it left its mark everywhere, although in the end Scandinavian culture survived only in the North Atlantic – previously uninhabited of course – where Iceland’s role in its preservation and dissemination is very striking. These preliminary observations would benefit from chronological and regional refinement and from further consideration of the extensive literature on migrant and diasporic societies. Broadly speaking, however, we might already be able to speculate that for a period the dispersed Scandinavian communities of the Viking Age acted like a diaspora, retaining, synthesizing, and expressing a sense of collective identity and constructing a common cultural discourse, while new circumstances generated innovations and developments which flowed back and forth between them. ‘Diaspora’, then, is arguably not just a buzzword, nor simply a fashionable synonym, but an exploratory concept that offers a new perspective on the Viking Age. Its adoption should give the overseas settlements a greater cultural profile and a more significant role as agents of change, both in their new environments and back home. Balliol College, Oxford Early Medieval Europe   () ©  Blackwell Publishing Ltd