The study of medieval Scandinavian art is a labored endeavor. Despite the region’s modern adjunction with northern Europe, it was considered peripheral to--even Othered from--the Continent for quite some time. As the editors of The Medieval Scandinavian Art Reader note in their introduction, the “late temporal formation of Christian art” (22) creates complications in measuring it against changes and developments in European art. The region’s slow and lapsing adoption of a Christian-style monarchy, comparatively delayed adoption of a manuscript tradition, and relatively relaxed Reformation impart distinctions that leave it culturally displaced from more traditionally studied regions. Even the terminology used to describe the medieval Scandinavian past can be perplexing, as some words are attached to regionally determined archaeological traditions and others may be encoded with cultural sentiments that are not carried across the globe. For example, the “Late Iron Age” discussed by Scandinavian scholars dates from the equivalent of late Antiquity across the early and high Middle Ages for academics in other countries; or, more perilously, the term “Nordic” is charged with nationalist sentiments in the United States but carries a more even-handed connotation within Scandinavian scholarship. Further, reliable academic sources written in English can be arduous to locate.
Such complications render the task of delineating Scandinavia’s unique circumstances (and immensely important interconnections with the medieval globe) to those outside of the field a precarious undertaking. Still, contributors to this volume have committed substantial labor to addressing these problems, each of which is outlined in its positively nuanced introduction, and the newly interested can find appropriately scaled considerations of many of the field’s major ideas across its twenty chapters.
Nancy Wicker’s “Cross-cultural Interaction in Animal-style and Figurative Art of the Vikings” opens the region’s most remembered historical moment for readers. An art historian of great polyvalence, Wicker’s publications have moved through the Scandinavian Migration and Early Medieval periods to interrogate crafts production and the roles of women in such; the sheer geographic reach and Scandinavian objects and their valence as artistic catalysts; the sensory effects of jewelry; and runic literacy, among other topics. Her interests in humanizing Viking art--that is to say, uncovering how objects served as channels or access points for individual and communal interrelations--are sketched across each page. Beginning with an eleventh-century Dynna runestone, she points to a material pathway between a polytheist past and a hesitant, but oncoming Christian future. The stone, which depicts a Christian Nativity scene in low-relief carving composed of painted contour lines, was sponsored by a mother named Gunnvor and commemorates her daughter, Astrid. The intermingling of Christian narratives and a pre-Christian mode of representation, here, is not unusual: numerous runestones have been found with Christian content, and Wicker makes note that the runic letters carved into their surfaces were not an exclusively polytheistic writing system. What is edifying about this runestone, however, is that it foregrounds that women were artistic patrons during the Viking Age. It also demonstrates that habits of making memory manifest through objects--which often accompany oral traditions like those practiced by the pre-Christian Norsemen--could endure alongside the adoption of new spiritual habits.
Moving forward, Wicker demonstrates the breadth of the region’s visual and material vocabularies. The schematized, un-placeable animal form of a silver-gilt pendant from Vårby, Huddinge, Södermanland, Sweden emblematizes a medium that is prominent in scholarly inquiry; less attention, Wicker notes, has been paid to wood and osseous materials. Asserting their cultural importance, she includes the captivating León cylinder, which was carved from deer antler, and the cart from the Oseberg burial, which was assembled from carved pieces of wood, as examples from the corpus that allude to much larger, but under-explored or otherwise absent material customs.
Each of these objects, regardless of what comprises their forms, gestures toward a long-standing focus on representations of beasts in Viking-Age art. Wicker does not doubt their referential capacity; however, she suggests that fixating on animal imagery may create a barrier to reading the period’s material remains with the sympathy that art historians use to expose new dimensions of the past. Apropos her research, she turns to the most central subject of art-historical inquiry, the human figure, to underscore that deeper understandings of Viking-Age communities may be uncovered by meditating on what such representations can tell us about the people of the past. In doing so, she plants the volume firmly within the present, as new archaeological finds indicate that interests in depicting the human form were much wider during the period than previously thought. Further, she emboldens readers to remain invested in the subject at hand by encouraging them to participate in an active scholarly project.
In the following chapter, “Early Medieval Metalwork in the Viking World,” Unn Pedersen presents a thought-provoking view of an array of objects, as well as the workshops and production methods that brought them into being. As the numerous styles that have been assigned to the visual trends of the period--Oseberg, Borre, Jellinge, Mammen, Ringerike, and Urnes (named for the corresponding locations at which they were first uncovered)--are explored, the expanse and multifaceted nature of manufacturing such items is given striking cogency. Pedersen begins with waste from the production process and, later, turns to the prevalence of mold-making to produce (smaller) copies of prestigious objects, for example. She also departs from survey trends of relying on masterworks to explicate the creative tendencies of a culture, instead introducing the reader to elite and prosaic objects alike. An elaborate golden spur from Rød, Rygge, Norway, which likely dressed the horse of an elite individual, demonstrates the rich political symbology that precious affectations could carry; it is directly juxtaposed with less refined objects. Here, Pedersen looks to a series of brooches cast in copper alloys, which depict elongated beasts that are nearly entrapped within delicate tendrils of ornament. These adornments are increasingly understood to have been worn by a wide consumer base, rather than elite patrons, and their inclusion produces a vision of how common persons may have visually articulated their identities to one another.
Pedersen’s tone and sophisticated mode of moving back and forth between objects, as well as the traces remaining from their manufacture, spark exceptional intrigue. They prevent readers from making limited assumptions about the desirability, availability, and geographic reach of metalwork. Following Wicker, the chapter strongly reaffirms that scholarly interrogations can be enriched by ontological and ethnological questions that accept, and push beyond, the realms of stylistic interrogation.
As the volume turns toward architecture, Christianity, and the cultural shifts that occurred as Scandinavia conjoined with Continental Europe, are amplified. Contributors contextualize structures within--or alongside--European material currents or, as in Øystein Ekroll’s contribution, draw attention to the implementation of European aesthetic elements as attempts to keep up with international developments. Of poignance is Line M. Bonde’s “The Romanesque and the Danish Rural Masonry Architecture, c. 1100-1250,” which features an outstanding example of the volume’s many useful elements. On page 138, one finds a fact box with a header that reads “The ‘Romanesque’ as Style and Periodization.” Found throughout each chapter, these fact-box inclusions define important terms, clarify unique cultural departures between Scandinavia and more traditionally studied regions, and prevent the reader from becoming intellectually disoriented. This particular fact box explains how period-style naming conventions can sublimate the unique expressions of Scandinavian art and architecture, which do not temporally match those of England and the Continent--a discrepancy that can confuse those who may have internalized the tripartite segmenting of the Middle Ages that typically plays out in survey texts. Here and elsewhere throughout the book, temporal and cultural coherence are readily made through an implementation that, while not unusual for comparable volumes, anticipates a reader’s needs with great precision.
Wooden sculpture and paintings are given ample space, and a standout chapter from Elisabeth Andersen and Kaja Kollandsrud must not be overlooked. Titled “Mary and Child Enthroned and Enshrined c. 1100-1350,” it examines fragments of medieval tabernacle shrines that were once present in nearly every church. Considering the multimedial and mutable nature of these objects, the authors explore how the variable positioning of their features--as opened or closed, for example--may have heightened the imagistic experiences that enhanced, or authenticated, the beliefs of the faithful. Delicate prose allows readers to gently place a foot into the analogical relations between medieval art and spirituality, which is in turn guided by a trip into the shallow ends of reception-and-response theory. Statements such as “the opening of the wings of the tabernacle revealing the splendor of the golden interior would be the highlight as when the priest performed the ‘tearing of the veil’ on feast days. The staggered expectation is released when the doors open” (222) begin to unfold the reality of the object’s impressions upon an anticipating beholder. Were this not effective in captivating the reader, the authors’ emphasis on the corresponding chromatic effects that result from such movement would cement their investment. Pointing to theories of light and color that were popularized in the Middle Ages--e.g., Aristotle’s Meteorologica--Andersen and Kollandsrud draw out the interrelations between artistic production and scientific and philosophical discourses. Soon after, the importance of these strategies, which will be comfortable for specialists but potentially new territory for intended readers, is validated: “The medieval image is more than an illustration of a textual argument. Text and image complement each other as keys to unlock meanings beyond the restricted formats of both these mediums.” (225-226). By explicitly rejecting a narrow model for understanding the role of images in the medieval past, the authors launch readers toward phenomenological and intermedial inquiry.
Rognald Heiseldal Bergesen’s chapter, “The Sami Drum of Anders Poulsen/Paul-Ande,” is an essential chapter, as it provides a view into the contacts and tensions between Northern Indigenous communities, Christianity, and the Scandinavian state apparatus. Venturing into the seventeenth century, he focuses on the account of an Indigenous man, Paul-Ande, who had been accused of performing witchcraft. An ornamented drum--a tool of great importance to spiritual practices of the Sami community--was central to the allegations, and the court demanded that Paul-Ande explain its iconography during the trial. Resulting from this interrogation is the most thoroughly recorded textual evidence of its kind, and the only known account to have come directly from the maker of such an object. Paul-Ande identified each humanoid, animal-like, and symbolic form as a figure from Sami and Christian belief systems (some of which were pre-Reformation leavings), and the author lists these within the chapter but remains careful about their accuracy. By outlining that the potentially deadly outcome of the trial may have forced Palu-Ande to augment his narrative in favor of the Church, a signal that historical sources must be approached with tact and consideration is waved before readers. More precisely, it is implicitly conveyed that colonial agendas like those affecting the Sami can force Indigenous communities to conceal their truths for survival. Regardless of self-preservation efforts, the outcome can remain tragic, as was the case with Paul-Ande: before a higher court could determine his punishment, the governor of Finnmark paid to have him murdered and his drum was seized by the Danish state. The content of the chapter is heavy and sensitive. Importantly, though, the fact boxes spread throughout it help to pull the reader away from the assumption that the Sami are a culture of the past by discussing them in present tense. Additionally, a map of Sápmi, the region inhabited by the Sami people, is provided on page 395. Displaying 920 Sami place names, but lacking national borders, it introduces readers to decolonial strategies for defining a community’s relationship with geography.
A chapter by Noëlle L. W. Streeton, “The Making of Medieval Heritage in Norway,” addresses the epistemological problems surrounding the construction of the medieval Scandinavian past (with obvious emphasis on Norwegian intellectual endeavors). Tracing a scholarly fixation on the importing and patronage of artistic goods from the Hanseatic region as supplants for an assumed loss of craftspersons during the Black Death, Streeton creates a vignette of misconceptions that have contributed to the wider “story” of medieval Scandinavian art. She then confirms that the methods of technical art historians have been integral to disrupting the obtuse narratives that have been laid over the medieval past. Citing Unn Plahter, Erla B. Hohler, Nigel Moran, and Anne Wichstrøm (among other scholars), Streeton explores how researchers have unveiled hidden details, old repairs, and other forms of reworking on altar frontals. Such details allude to the presence of craftspersons working either in situ or in workshops that served certain regions within the bounds of Norway. In turn, the chapter intimates that art-historical research is a living discipline--an ongoing process of consideration and reconsideration.
Streeton’s historiographic contribution is valuable for understanding the problems faced by institutions within Scandinavia--e.g., museums and universities, which assemble and re-present many of the narratives that shape public memory of the past--though it may not carry the same potency with readers based outside of the region. Stang and Tillery, however, demonstrate that they are cognizant of this issue early on. The majority of the volume’s contributors are located in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and the editors’ candor about the perceptive disjuncture between them and readers across the sea is measured, honest, and realistic: “we must also recognize that our own training and national identities inform our interpretations of the past. Such cultural differences are especially acute in reading multivalent contemporary Viking imagery: Scandinavians donning Viking helmets at football games do not invoke the same racialized Viking iconography as marshalled by conservatism and right-wing radicalism in the United States in recent years” (26). It would be unreasonable to expect any singular publication to encompass every issue within a field, let alone to approach them from every direction. This book is quite impressive, and the editors are surprisingly modest about its accomplishments. But it must be asserted that now that a foundational volume has been published, accessible conversations that address the volatile misappropriation of the medieval Scandinavian past, as well as digestible models for art-historical intervention in such movements, will be critical for future projects of comparison.
Specialists will appreciate the sensitivities that contributors bring to The Medieval Scandinavian Art Reader, and particularly their attention to, and solvents for, the difficulties of situating the subject at hand within the more traditional expanses of art history. The features that make this possible--accessible language, remarkable images (some of which have been provided by the contributors themselves), fact boxes that provide immediate clarification for unfamiliar concepts, key terms, and cultural distinctions, as well as rich bibliographies and “Further Reading” sections that foot each chapter--are most beneficial for non-specialists and students who are curious about the far North. For this audience, the volume will serve as a stimulating entry point that connects otherwise disparate luminations of knowledge into a traceable constellation. For those more enmeshed in the field, it will prove to be a lucid pedagogical resource.