Scandinavia in the Middle Ages 900-1550: Between Two Oceans is a collaborative work by Kirsi Salonen (University of Bergen) and Kurt Villads Jensen (University of Stockholm). This unusual pairing of Finnish and Danish scholars across the Nordic capitals positions them perfectly to tackle a region often fragmented by national historiographies. They explicitly aim to treat Scandinavia as a cohesive whole, moving beyond the traditionally nationally-oriented approach to the medieval period.
The authors employ a very broad definition of Scandinavia, integrating the traditional peninsula nations with a wide maritime periphery: Finland, Iceland, Greenland, the western Baltic shores, and the North Atlantic archipelagos of the Faroes, Shetland, and Orkney. This wide lens offers specific points of interest for readers, such as Iceland’s unique path or the dual secular/ecclesiastical governance of the North Atlantic islands. This expansive geography underpins the book’s central argument, articulated in the introduction, which stresses the pivotal and shifting importance of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to the entire region, as stressed in the book's subtitle, “Between Two Oceans.” The authors emphasize the significance of seaborne connections, detailing the rise of the Hanseatic League and the Crusades in the Baltic region, while also exploring developments in the Atlantic.
The authors aim for clarity and have written the book as a textbook for students and a guide for general readers. While they acknowledge that Medieval Scandinavia had earlier roots, they begin their narrative around the year 900. This starting point coincides with a period of “remarkable and dynamic expansion” across Western Europe, including Scandinavia (2), highlighting their view that the region should be understood as part of a larger, interconnected European world. This approach is not a novelty in Scandinavian historiography; for example, the well-known textbook Nordens historia by Harald Gustafsson had the subtitle en europeisk region under 1200 år (“1200 years in a European region”). Nevertheless, it gives the narrative a clear structure and direction.
The book organizes the Middle Ages into three distinct phases: Formation (900-1200), Consolidation and Restructuring (1200-1400), and Power in Crisis (1400-1550). These periods are structured to provide a comparative overview, with each phase dedicating chapters to politics, religion, economic development, and culture. The authors’ periodization deviates from traditional timelines. By starting the first phase in 900, they consciously avoid the term “Viking Age” with its strong ideological connotations. Around 1200, the first shift takes place, with “a military and technological revolution” (2). Their second major division around 1400 emphasizes the importance of the Kalmar Union, which began in 1397. The authors acknowledge that all historical periodization is subjective, but they chose this structure to highlight the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the Middle Ages.
The first section focuses on demographic growth, the early spread of Christianity, and the rise of Scandinavian monarchies. The shift to the next phase around 1200 is justified by changes in religion and military modernization. The second section details the strengthening of monarchies, the church, and the legal system. The final part covers the history of the Kalmar Union and its eventual decline, alongside the arrival of the Lutheran Reformation.
The book’s three parts link closely to the timeline of the Church, which in the Scandinavian context also aligns with the formation of the state. Political and ecclesiastical development form the outline of the book, which can be divided into a system of growth, consolidation and fall. This is emphasized by chapter titles throughout the narrative. To explain the difference between the state structures of the first and second periods, the authors use the concepts “territorial state” and “administrative state,” which are based on a more general European framework, like so much else in this book. These evolve into the “dynastic state” of the Kalmar Union and its successors. An ecclesiastical parallel to the territorial state would be the “missionary church,” but that term is mostly avoided. Also, no significant break is made around 1200, when it comes to ecclesiastical history. Rather, in the first chapter, the development of ecclesiastical institutions is traced very thoroughly, even if that sometimes stretches the narrative into the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.
The history of the economy is fitted into the temporal framework, as the agricultural economy is central to the first part, but urbanisation and the development of the monetary economy are more central to the second part. In the third part, the perspective shifts, and the international economy takes centre stage, presumably due to the influence of the Hanseatic league in this period. Trade history thus brings a disjunctive key to the book, as the last period must be regarded as a part of continuing expansion, rather than the decline associated with the political and ecclesiastical grand narrative of the third section.
When it comes to cultural developments, the tripartite division also serves as an important structural component, with the key break based on art history, between Romanesque and Gothic arts and architecture around 1200. This does not work equally well for all topics, as the saga literature, which is mostly from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or even later, is fitted in with “traditional literature” in the first part. This precludes any discussion of Romance influence on the Sagas, that could have utilised recent scholarly debates on the Saga literature and its origins.
However, what is lost in the treatment of the Saga literature is gained in an emphasis on “cultural universalism” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as the focus is on other types of literature, which were more in tune with contemporary European models. This enables the authors to state that most of the worldly literature of that period had a foreign origin (216), but would that have been less true if the Sagas were also considered? That seems like a missed opportunity for an interesting debate. In this section, there is a useful discussion of education in this period, with emphasis on the universities and higher education, which Scandinavian students partook of and brought back to their homelands.
The book shows how different groups had an important role in shaping society. The authors identify problems associated with any position in society; for example, they point out that the twelfth century was a dangerous time for kings in Norway, with violent death being the norm (28). In the second section, there is an actual murder mystery in the chapter “Killing Kings” (133), which starts on a description of how King Erik V of Denmark was murdered in a barn by seven disguised assailants. Life could be hard, even for people in the highest echelons of society, which is illustrated in the fate of Queen Ingeborg of Denmark who lost 13 children, but finally had a healthy son, whom she then dropped by mistake from a wagon, resulting in his death (154). Her unfortunate fate had dire consequences for the kingdom of Denmark, as the lack of direct heirs to the throne then led to civil strife as Denmark was pawned away to Holsteinian counts (156-57).
Another elite social group that receives particular attention is the students, a small minority of the people, who had an opportunity to follow a different path in life from most of the population. Scandinavian students went to study at universities in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford, and later in Prague, which received numerous Scandinavian students from the fourteenth century. The growth in university education is the topic of an interesting discussion, but it culminated with the foundation of the Nordic universities in Copenhagen and Uppsala in the late fifteenth century.
However, the focus of the book is not only on elites. Ethnic minorities such as the Sámi are mentioned in the book on numerous occasions. Although not the centrepiece of any discussion, the reader is made aware of their existence. There is an intriguing anecdote about two Margarets, the queen of the Kalmar Union and a Sámi woman of the same name who approached her about the possibility of converting her people to Christianity. The result was a peaceful mission, which formed a contrast with most of the interaction with the Sámi in this period, during which there seems to have been a notable paranoia towards these Northern neighbours of the Scandinavians. The Sámi were wrongly believed to have exterminated the Christian colonies in Greenland, due to a geographic misunderstanding about a land connection between northern Scandinavia and Greenland. In 1457 King Christian I complained that his lands were threatened by hundreds of thousands of Sámi, a highly implausible claim, as is lucidly pointed out by the authors (231).
Scandinavia in the Middle Ages serves its purpose well, as a concise and lucidly written introduction on the history of the northernmost region of Europe in the Middle Ages, which nevertheless manages to contain diverse material, as indicated above. The perspective is on connections between Scandinavia and other lands: how Scandinavia became a part of a wider world. At the end of the narrative, the authors cautiously note that many institutions characteristic of modern Scandinavian societies developed well after the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they also demonstrate that the Middle Ages can be regarded as a truly formative period in the history of Scandinavia.