This chapter concludes the volume’s first thematic strand (Home and Away) with a study of Scandinavia and the North Sea world in the age of William the Conqueror. Beginning with Denmark and Norway, it moves on to scrutinise the legacy of Cnut’s North Sea empire, before turning to Scandinavia’s Christianisation and the consolidation of its Church. This is followed by a study of towns, trade centres, and the settlement and increasing urbanisation of the North Atlantic. The chapter is rounded off by discussions of Sweden and the two Baltic Islands of Gotland and Bornholm.

BEFORE CHRISTIANITY: RELIGION AND POWER

If the Danish evidence were considered in isolation, very little would be known of the Danish pagan religion. A few rune-stones carry invocations to the god Thor, and onomastic evidence indicates that Thor was by far the most popular of the gods of the Nordic pantheon. The name of the god Freyr is attested as a component in a few names on rune-stones, but while the names alluding to Thor remained in use after the conversion, the names referring to Freyr did not. Although its philological roots have nothing to do with the pagan god, the name Odinkar seems to have been understood in the eleventh century to be referring to Odin (Wodan). A broader range of the Nordic pantheon is represented in place names; the name of the later episcopal city of Odense is derived from ‘Odin's vi’, that is, the sacred ground of Odin, indicating that it was a location for pagan cult before the conversion.

Any idea of the myths and beliefs connected with these gods can be obtained only from Icelandic literature; Saxo Grammaticus's heavily reworked and classicizing rendering of the myths (c. 1200) is ultimately derived from Icelandic informants. A few pieces of art can be identified as representations of mythical episodes known from the Icelandic literature.

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.