Vikings, Varangians, and Vinlanders: Globalizing Scandinavia From Antiquity to the Early…

Catalog description

The popular imagination has come to see the Vikings of the early medieval period as primarily raiders and pirates who exploited their maritime and warlike skills to cut a swath of terror across northwestern Europe between the late eighth and 11th centuries. Yet, this is only part of a far more complex picture, whose beginnings went back to ancient times and whose effects lasted into the early modern period. Scandinavian peoples were also skilled craftsmen, merchants, politicians, mercenaries, and explorers who established vast trade networks and settlements reaching deep into Russia, to the Islamic world, and westward to Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and beyond. The course will approach these issues by establishing a larger, unified global perspective on Scandinavian culture and history, beginning with Scandinavian interaction with the Roman world and its formative role in the larger development of European early medieval culture. We will examine how this development would culminate in the Viking Age and how, over time, Vikings would become important players in the Byzantine world and founders of the medieval Russian State, while also developing a “Norman” military culture that came to dominate England and the central Mediterranean. In time, the Viking settlement of Iceland became a springboard for further colonization in Greenland and the initial European “exploration” of the North American continent. Back in Europe, Viking culture would lay the foundations of the medieval and early modern states of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The course will take a broad, synthetic approach, treating art or material culture within a larger economic, political, and historical perspective. 27 Art History Art and History