Jón Viðar Sigurðsson is Professor of History at the University of Oslo, where he has worked since 1995. For over three decades now he has been a significant scholar in the social, cultural, and political history of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, whose work on issues such as power, networks, and friendship has had a substantial impact on the study of medieval Scandinavia and its texts; Anglophone readers are most likely to know hisChieftains and Power in the Icelandic Commonwealth (1999) and more recently Viking Friendship (2017). It is very fitting, therefore, that Jón Viðar should now receive a festschrift in the Brepols series “The North Atlantic World,” well edited and organized by Ben Allport, Rosalind Bonté, and Hans Jacob Orning.
In their introduction, the three editors present an affectionate biographical portrait of Jón Viðar (emphasizing the importance of both Iceland and Norway in his personal and professional life) and an overview of his major publications and research fields. The fifteen chapters that follow are grouped into three sections (five essays in each), on “Sociopolitical Networks,” “Legal and Material Networks,” and “Literary Networks.”
The first section, on “Sociopolitical Networks,” opens with a chapter by Kim Esmark and Lars Hermanson that takes some of Jón Viðar’s theses about power dynamics in the medieval north and applies them to twelfth-century Danish politics. After that, Ben Allport supplies an exceptionally useful chapter on the potential application of “social network analysis” to saga studies (pros and cons, methods and challenges), taking Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar as his test case. Fiona Edmonds and Sarah E. Thomas, focusing on Furness Abbey in Cumbria, explore the complex ecclesiastical politics and relations existing between Norway, the Isle of Man, and northern England between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Auður Magnúsdóttir, in another highly valuable chapter, shows how what she calls the “realistic sagas” (sagas of Icelanders, kings’ sagas, and contemporary sagas) have more to reveal on the issue of male/female friendship than might previously have been thought, while the chivalric sagas are also a rich resource on the topic. Randi B. Wærdahl completes this first section with a study of elite women’s participation in political circles in Norway in the period c. 1250-1320.
The second section, on “Legal and Material Networks,” begins with Svein H. Gullbekk testing Jón Viðar Sigurðsson’s hypothesis that in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries German silver coins entered Scandinavia as a result of Scandinavian raiders and rulers levying tolls at the mouth of the Rhine and the Elbe; as part of this investigation, the chapter supplies a very valuable review of current knowledge and understanding of the flow of coinage from Germany to Scandinavia. Helgi Þorláksson’s chapter that follows is outstanding and highly stimulating, as he addresses the economic relations between Iceland and Norway from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and argues that wadmal cloth was the central commodity at stake, important for the Norwegian kings’ attempts to make money out of Iceland. Már Jónsson examines the late thirteenth-century legal text Járnsíða, reviewing the history of its scholarship and exploring its sources and intertextual affiliations. Lena Rohrbach considers textuality and materiality in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscripts within the framework of “actor-network theory” and “polysystem theory,” arguing that books should be regarded as actors in social networks. Finally, Noëlle L. W. Streeton casts light on the pigments available for painting and sculpture in the medieval north, expertly surveying the materials traded into northern Europe and exploring questions of demand and usage.
The third and final section, on “Literary Networks,” starts with Karl G. Johansson exploring the parallels between the story of Haraldr hárfagri and Snæfríðr and a similar story concerning Charlemagne; this enables him to address broader questions of transmission and connections between medieval Latin sources and Norse vernacular ones. Rosalind Bonté reviews accounts of the conversion of Iceland in Old Norse prose sources, demonstrating how they reveal an evolving conception and articulation of Icelandic identity. Alex Woolf looks at questions of kinship and authority, examining cognatic and agnatic lines of descent and power in Norway and Iceland, and arguing that the nature of Iceland’s settlement led by necessity to a less agnatic (that is, male-line-only) system than elsewhere in early medieval Europe. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe provides an authoritative introduction to the Icelandic annals known as Gottskálksanáll, compiled in Glaumbær in Skagafjörður in the late sixteenth century, and explores their contents, provenance, and affiliations. Anne Eriksen considers early modern networks of learning and ideas of the “greatness of the north” through an examination of the compilatory works of the historian Johannes Lilienskiold (c. 1655-1703).
The volume ends with a bibliography of the published works of Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and a helpful index. Overall, this is a high-quality collection of essays, well worthy of the scholar being honoured, and one that achieves a greater unity of theme than many volumes of this nature. Medieval Iceland and Norway dominate, rightly so, but other parts of the early northern world also receive attention. There is much here to learn from and enjoy, and the editors’ and contributors’ debt to, and affection for, the honorand are also likely to have the effect of sending the reader eagerly back to the works of Jón Viðar himself.