The A to Z of the Vikings 33 docx

Located on the River Ouse, York was the principal town of northern England and administrative capital of the kingdom of Northumbria in the Viking Age.. Following this, the town was under

precise relationship between Ynglingatal, Historia Norwegiae, the Book of the Icelanders, and Ynglinga Saga is unclear.

YNGLINGATAL Ninth-century poem composed by the Norwegian

Thjodolf (þjódólfr) of Hvin for King Rögnvald the Highly-Honored

(heiðumhæri) of Vestfold in southeastern Norway This poem was the

main source for Snorri Sturluson’s Ynglinga Saga, in which it is

pre-served Some 27 ancestors of Rögnvald are listed in the poem, with

descriptions of their deaths and burial places, linking the king with the legendary Yngling dynasty of Gamla Uppsala in Sweden YNGVARR INN VÍD– FÖRLA See INGVAR THE FAR-TRAVELED YORK (ON Jórvík) The Old Norse name for this town appears to be

a corruption of Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic, itself in turn a corruption of Latin Eboracum Located on the River Ouse, York was the principal

town of northern England and administrative capital of the kingdom

of Northumbria in the Viking Age The Romans had established a

fort in York around 71 AD and by 314 the town was a bishop’s see However, little is known about York in the post-Roman/early Anglian period from written sources, apart from its location within the

king-dom of Deira, stretching from the Humber to the River Tees During

the seventh and eighth centuries, a little more is known thanks to the

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, although

these details are principally the names of kings and bishops In 735, York was raised to the status of an archiepiscopal see There is little archaeological evidence for settlement within the town walls during the early Anglo-Saxon period

The Great Army captured York in 866–867 Following this, the

town was under Danish control but nothing is known about this rule

until the Viking leader, Halfdan, apparently assumed direct control

in 875, when his army settled in Northumbria, “plowing and

provid-ing for themselves” accordprovid-ing to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The

first definite Scandinavian king of York was Guthfrith, whose death

on 24 August 895 was recorded by The Chronicle of Æthelweard, and

who appears to have become king at some point between 880

and 885 Guthfrith was converted to Christianity c 883 Coins from

York provide the names of two kings who appear to have ruled York

298 • YNGLINGATAL

shortly after Guthfrith: Cnut and Siefrid; and the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle records that Æthelwold, the nephew of King Alfred the

Great, revolted against his cousin, Edward the Elder, after Alfred’s

death and was accepted as king of Northumbria by the Danish army

in 899 He was later also acknowledged as leader by the Vikings in Essex before being killed by Edward the Elder’s army

In the first half of the 10th century, there was a three-way strug-gle for control of the town between the English, the Dublin Norse, and the Anglo-Scandinavian population of Northumbria In 909, Edward the Elder of England campaigned throughout Northum-bria, and the town submitted to his sister, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, in 918 However, coins from York suggest that a

Hiberno-Norse leader, Ragnald, may have ruled the town for a

pe-riod around the year 914 or earlier Shortly afterward York became

the joint capital of a Norse kingdom centered on Dublin and York,

following the recapture of the town by Ragnald in 919 (923

ac-cording to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) However, King Athelstan

of England then captured York from the Norse in 927, driving out its king, Guthfrith, and it took Olaf Guthfrithsson of Dublin some

11 years to reassert Norse control over the town Olaf seems to have enjoyed the support of Wulfstan (d 955), the Archbishop of

York, who accompanied him on his campaigns in the Five Bor-oughs in 940 However, just five years later, in 944, the English

had recaptured the town once again, and two Scandinavian kings

of York, Olaf Cúarán and Ragnald Guthfrithsson, were expelled

on this occasion The most famous Scandinavian king of York was

Erik Blood-Ax, who defeated Irish and English rivals for the town

in 948, once more with the support of Archbishop Wulfstan Erik was deserted by the Northumbrians shortly afterward, and paid compensation to the English king, Eadred, for their disloyalty However, Olaf Cúarán returned to York in 949 and ruled there un-til 952, when Erik Blood-Ax regained the town He struggled to control York for a further two years, before being driven out of the

town by the Northumbrians in 954 Egil’s Saga contains a

de-scription of a meeting between Erik and his archenemy, Egill Skallagrimsson, in the town

The town’s fortunes appear to have been revived following the Scandinavian settlement of Northumbria This Anglo-Scandinavian

YORK • 299

settlement was concentrated in the area to the south of the Roman fort, and, by around 1000, the town probably had a population of around 10,000–15,000 Excavations at York Minster between 1967–1973 have revealed that the Viking-Age cathedral church was not located directly underneath the present Minster, but that it must have been nearby as a 10th- to 11th-century graveyard was found,

along with decorated gravestones marking the burials No remains of

the hall of the Viking-Age kings of York have been found, but it is believed to have been located at King’s Square—a name first

recorded in the 13th century as Kuningesgard (from ON Konungs-garðr)—by one of the main gateways into the Roman fortress This

site was not used by the later earls of Northumbria or the Norman

rulers of York, and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Earl

Si-ward (d 1055) was buried in the church of St Olaf (dedicated to the

Scandinavian saint, Olaf Haraldsson) at Galmanho or Earlsburgh

“the earls’ residence.” Coinage issued by the Viking-Age kings of York provides the names of some kings not found in other documen-tary records, particularly in the shadowy 9th and early 10th centuries

It also reveals that around the year 1000, about 75 percent of the moneyers names were of Scandinavian origin, and by 1066, this fig-ure had reached 100 percent

Archaeological excavations have revealed that the trading contacts

of Viking York extended from Ireland to the Middle East, and that it

was an important center of production Many of the street names of York are derived from the various trading and craft activities that took place Evidence of glassmaking, textile manufacture, metal-work, amber and jet working, as well as wood-, bone-, leather-, and antler working have been found in the extensive excavations under-taken in the town since 1972 These were concentrated in the Cop-pergate area of York and are presented in the famous Jorvik Museum The excellent preservation conditions at 16–22 Coppergate allowed the recovery of wood, textiles, and other organic matter, and excavations revealed traces of 10th-century buildings built on regu-lar plots that are regu-largely the same as present-day property boundaries

in the area

After Erik Blood-Ax’s departure and subsequent murder on Stain-more, York was ruled in principle by Eadred, the king of England, and his successors However, the earls of Northumbria in reality

of-300 • YORK

ten exercised considerable independence York did not fall to another

Viking army until 1066, when Harald Hard-Ruler of Norway

launched his invasion of England and defeated York’s forces in the

Battle of Fulford in September 1066 His subsequent defeat and death in the Battle of Stamford Bridge, however, put an end to

Scan-dinavian control of the town After the Norman Conquest, there were further Scandinavian attempts to win the English throne, and York was targeted in the northern uprising of 1069 after the invasion of

Svein Estrithsson of Denmark However, despite further Danish

ex-peditions in 1070 and 1075, York remained in the hands of the kings

of England

YOUNGER EDDA See PROSE EDDA.

YOUNGER EDDA • 301

303

CONTENTS

A Dictionaries and Encyclopedias 312

III General Surveys of the Viking Age 316

V North Atlantic Colonies (Excluding the British Isles) 322

C Scotland (incl Northern and Western Isles and Isle of Man) 336

D Wales 341

B Frankia, Normandy, and Brittany 345

C Coins, Hoards, Jewelry, and Treasure 356

3 Family Sagas or Sagas of Icelanders 362

C Iceland, Greenland, and North America 375

XVII Selected Scandinavian-Language Sources 377

304 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are a huge number of books and articles about the Vikings and this selection is but a small drop in the ocean The interdisciplinary na-ture of the subject also means that scholarship on the Viking Age is very wide-ranging, encompassing among other things historical, archaeolog-ical, literary, textual, religious, and linguistic studies This bibliography focuses almost exclusively on English-language publications as it is pri-marily designed for those who cannot read the Scandinavian or other languages This, however, does unfortunately mean that the sections on Scandinavia and the European continent are rather underrepresented when compared to the British Isles and the North Atlantic, although some attempt to counter this has been made in section XVIII, which contains a selection of important works in the Scandinavian languages The bibliographies listed under I Reference Works will fill in some

of the inevitable gaps, and by consulting the bibliographies of the arti-cles and books that are included, students and researchers will also be able to find further references to particular topics Please note that works by Icelandic scholars are listed under their surnames rather than their forenames

Although its focus is primarily on the period after the end of the

Viking Age, the multiauthored Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia

is an invaluable source of reference for those seeking detailed information about Scandinavia and its North Atlantic colonies and con-tains bibliographies for each entry It is particularly useful for finding out more about individual literary and historical works produced in the Scandinavian world in the medieval period that, for reasons of space, it has not always been possible to include in this dictionary Readers of the

Scandinavian languages are also directed to the 22-volume Kulturhis-torisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder (section XVII), which, although

now somewhat dated, provides extremely useful summaries of

scholar-ship on various aspects of medieval Scandinavia Similarly, the Dictio-nary of Northern Mythology by Rudolf Simek provides a fairly

substantial account of the individual deities, mythological works, and religious practices of pagan Scandinavia, with select references for each entry Those looking for additional works on the Viking period in gen-eral are strongly recommended to consult Martin Syrett’s annotated

bib-liography, Scandinavian History in the Viking Age This was produced

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 305

for students in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and focuses on modern English-language scholarship, although not exclusively It is divided into five main sec-tions: textbooks, reference works, and written sources; political and so-cial history; the Viking expansion; religion; and archaeology Simon

Keynes’s bibliography of Anglo-Saxon England also contains

particu-larly useful sections on Scandinavian sources relating to England, the Danelaw, and the Danish kings of England

Section II, Primary Sources, contains only English translations, or editions with translations, of the most important sources for Viking-Age

Scandinavia Francis Tschan’s translation of Adam of Bremen’s History

of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen is perhaps one of the most

use-ful of these primary sources, containing as it does much information on Scandinavian geography, society, religious practices, and rulers that is not found elsewhere There are separate sections on religion and mythology (XII), literature (XIII), and runes (XVI) that contain sec-ondary works and scholarship relating to many of these primary sources In addition to this, the final section in this bibliography, Scan-dinavian-language sources, contains some of the most important editions of primary source material that is not available in English, in-cluding, for example, the corpus of runic inscriptions from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden

Peter Sawyer’s Age of the Vikings remains a seminal and essential

work some 30 years after the second edition was published It marked the birth of modern Viking studies through its questioning of many long-held assumptions about the period, such as the size of the Viking armies, the reliability of primary source material, and the reasons un-derlying the Viking expansion Although not all scholars agree with all

of Sawyer’s conclusions, much of what he wrote in Age of the Vikings and its sequel, Kings and Vikings, forms the basis of modern debate on

the period It is especially good for its critical discussion of key written sources and for using often-neglected numismatic evidence Else

Roes-dahl’s The Vikings gives a more up-to-date and less controversial

overview and pays more attention to the nature of Scandinavian society and to the archaeological evidence for the Vikings at home and abroad

The Viking World, edited by James Graham-Campbell, also provides a

good starting point for students, with lots of high-quality illustrations that bring the period to life It is divided into short thematic rather than

306 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

chronological sections and gives clear and basic introductions to sub-jects such as Viking ships, Viking art, and trade and towns

There are very few English-language monographs on Scandinavian history during the Viking Age, as opposed to Viking activity in the pe-riod, and much of the material in Section IV is therefore in the form of

specialized articles An exception is Birgit and Peter Sawyer’s Medieval Scandinavia, although as the longer time span of this volume

(800–1500) suggests, there is also a good deal of material that relates to the period after the end of the Viking Age A good political survey of the

Viking period by Niels Lund is available in volume 2 of The New Cam-bridge Medieval History and there is a separate short bibliography on

Scandinavia at the back of the volume, pp 913–14, which includes many Scandinavian-language sources Although not available at the time of writing, Cambridge University Press also has a multiauthored

Cambridge History of Scandinavia, by Knut Helle et al., scheduled for

publication in August 2003 Scandinavian-language surveys of the indi-vidual countries can be found in section XVII, and readers are

particu-larly referred to Peter Sawyer’s Da Danmark blev Danmark and När Sverige blev Sverige (updated Swedish version of The Making of Swe-den) and to Per Sveaas Andersen’s Samlingen av Norge og kristningen

av landet 800–1130.

In recent years, there has been a good deal of new archaeological work on the North Atlantic colonies established by the Vikings in the British Isles, the Faroe Isles, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as renewed

interest in the Viking discovery of North America c AD 1000 that

ac-companied the celebrations of the new milliennium in 2000 The

col-lection of articles in Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, edited by

William Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, accompanied by a large bibliog-raphy, is particularly good for its account of new archaeological work

in North America, Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Isles However, it also contains useful survey articles on Scandinavia, Finland, Frankia, and Britain and Ireland

Section VI, The British Isles, is the largest single section of the bibli-ography, reflecting both the diversity of the Viking experience in differ-ent parts of Britain and Ireland and the huge scholarly output in this area

Recent works to single out are the collections of papers found in Vikings and the Danelaw, Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in Eng-land in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, The Vikings in IreEng-land, and IreEng-land

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 307