If I have chosen the title of my paper to refer to Eleanor Searle’s book Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, it is not that I believe that work to reflect current consensus on Norman society in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Searle’s book is replete with interesting observations on the functioning of kinship as a political instrument during those centuries, but she ultimately fails in her attempt to demonstrate that the Normans were in this respect somehow different from their – supposedly more ‘feudal’ – Frankish neighbours. What interests me here is the basic assumption at the root of her hypothesis, viz. that Scandinavian society in the so-called Viking Age was essentially structured by kinship solidarities. It is noteworthy that Searle only adduces a couple of specific references in support of this assumption. Her case rests just as much upon general notions of the structure of ‘early Germanic societies’, and ultimately it presupposes that the kin-based nature of early Scandinavian society is common knowledge.

Historiographically speaking, Searle seems to be right on this point. If not in positive terms, through the assertion of Viking Age Scandinavian society as being based upon kinship structures, then at least negatively, by historians taking for granted that Scandinavia can be safely left out when discussing feudal society in the high Middle Ages. There is a persistent conception of Scandinavian alterity whose historiographical origins might be well worth pondering. Nineteenth-century German legal historians saw the Scandinavian law books of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as comparatively pure expressions of age-old Germanic traditions, among which the liberty and equality of all free men were seen as highly important. This idea was enthusiastically adopted by Scandinavian scholars, even when they were fiercely anti-German like the Danish national and liberal historians. The subsequent demise of the Germanistic construct has certainly affected Scandinavian legal history too, but it has proved remarkably difficult for Scandinavian medievalists at large to revise the general conception of high medieval Scandinavian society that was based on the Germanistic theses. Even nowadays, Scandinavian nationalism is deplorably strong and keen to stress national separateness from the rest of the world.