This chapter examines beer and beer culture in the Nordic countries – Sweden Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland. It notes some key innovations made in relation to beer, such as Norwegian kveik yeast and the important research work done at Carlsberg. A set of unique laws is also examined.

Women of the middle millennium were more mobile than we imagine, moving from one location to another for marriage, work, trade, worship, to visit family members, to take part in warfare, to settle in new lands, and—against their will—to be trafficked as slaves and sex workers. This picture of women on the move might contradict pervasive stereotypes of premodern women confined to the domestic sphere, or living out their whole lives within the context of one village or neighbourhood. Certainly, diverse religious and secular edicts ordered women to remain confined to domestic spaces and denigrated ‘wandering’ women as harlots of loose character. Many women of elite status were constrained to obey such orders and found themselves subject to strict control over movement. The majority of women who did travel probably did so less often and over shorter distances than their male peers. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to imagine half of humanity was absent from the roads, paths and ship-routes of the premodern world. It is not that women did not make journeys, but rather that travel was highly gendered in ideology and practice.

Iceland was an island discovered and populated by travellers in the early Middle Ages. Travel was thus an essential part of the Icelandic experience. The Old Icelandic sagas include numerous examples of travel writing, describing various kinds of sea voyages, such as Viking raids, military conquests, diplomatic missions, trading expeditions, as well as voyages of discovery and colonisation. Journeys on land are also described, in particular the pilgrimages which are called ‘walks to the South’ (ON. suðrgöngur). Norsemen drew geographical material from erudite works in Latin by Solinus, Orosius, Isidore of Seville, Bede, and Honorius Augustodunensis. To these they added information acquired personally, both at home and on journeys abroad as Vikings, traders, and pilgrims. What information concerning actual travel can be gathered from these sources? What was the motivation for the journeys described in the sagas? How do the sagas combine learned material from medieval Europe with native traditions from the Norse world? And above all, in what sense did the Icelanders view travel as a liminal experience?

William Morris’s ‘greatest single inspiration’ was said to be the language and literature of medieval Iceland. After a brief survey of the origins and scope of Old Norse literary texts, this piece works through the considerable volume of translations of Old Norse saga literature which Morris made along with his Icelandic collaborator Eiríkur Magnússon, and considers why, after a ten-year period of astonishing productivity, his interest seems to have cooled. Morris’s knowledge of Old Norse literature and traditions is detailed, his translation methods are analysed, and the style and lexis of his controversially archaizing translations described, with special reference to Eiríkur’s experiences of working with him. Morris also translated Old Norse eddic verse, and many of the prose sagas he translated contain skaldic stanzas in the elaborate and unique dróttkvætt, or court, metre. The piece concludes with an assessment of these poetic translations, which are often overlooked, and the particular metrical and lexical challenges the originals present.

Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

This overview of Iceland’s medieval history is divided into three phases: firstly, from settlement in the ninth century to 1096−7, which marks the emergence of the Icelandic Church; secondly, from the appearance of Iceland’s earliest written historical sources to the ceding of independence to Norway in 1262/4; and finally, to the end of the fourteenth century. It shows how Iceland’s marginality to the rest of Europe, its lack of a centralized authority and the blurring of historicity and fiction in its most prominent texts have affected understanding of Icelandic history and problematized its historiography. The chapter begins with discussion of the two primary native sources, Ari Þorgilsson’s Islendingabók (The Book of Icelanders) and Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements), their accounts of settlement and conversion, and the value of archaeology as a source. The second phase details the growth of the church and monasteries as places of learning, and how the church’s increasing power led to clashes with the secular elite, resulting in the chaos and violence of the Sturlungaöld. The final phase concerns Iceland’s loss of independence, economic condition and relations with Norway.

The subject of this chapter is Grágás, the compilation of the laws of Iceland in the Commonwealth period. The chapter begins by outlining the court structure of Iceland and the fundamentals of legal procedure, briefly discussing the importance of law to the conversion narrative in Íslendingabók and its account of the first decision to put Iceland’s laws into writing. It describes the distinctive concepts and customs which underlie the legal system of medieval Iceland, looking at the role of the búi (neighbour) in legal procedure, and explaining the key concepts of helgi (the right of inviolability), grið (domicile, or household attachment), vígt (the right to kill or to avenge a wrong with impunity), and the problem of dealing with ómagar (dependants). The chapter argues that the laws and sagas are often mutually informing and demonstrates how fundamental an understanding of law is to the interpretation of the Íslendingasögur. It gives numerous examples of how the laws can be used to help elucidate the sagas, and uses the sagas to reveal the importance of law and legal knowledge in medieval Icelandic society.

The Biskupa sögur (sagas of bishops) deal with the lives of six medieval Icelandic bishops, covering the history of Iceland’s two bishoprics, Skálholt and Hólar, from the mid eleventh century to the fourteenth century. They are important sources for Icelandic church history and the lives of individual bishops, three of whom were venerated as saints. This chapter provides a history of the genre, surveying texts about the saints Þorlákr Þórhallsson, Jón Ögmundsson and Guðmundr Arason, the chronicle Hungrvaka, which records the lives of the five bishops who preceded St Þorlákr, the sagas of three other bishops, Páls saga, Árna saga Þorlákssonar and Lárentíus saga Kálfssonar, and two þættir, Ísleifs þáttr and Jóns þáttr Halldórssonar. This genre has received less scholarly attention than some other genres of Icelandic literature, but this chapter argues that the sagas have much to offer historians and literary scholars. It examines the role of miracle-stories within the sagas and considers what these texts can tell us about such questions as the relationship between memory and literacy in medieval Iceland, the expression of emotion, masculinity, sexuality and celibacy.

By the time Christianity reached Iceland, saints’ lives were already a vast and enormously popular genre of literature well-established across the medieval Christian world. This chapter discusses how Icelandic writers engaged with this genre, concentrating especially on translated saints’ lives in Old Norse. While rooted in and responding to the particular conditions of Icelandic society, these vernacular adaptations and engagements with Latin Christian culture also transported the readers and writers of Old Norse-Icelandic literature far beyond their immediate environs. Beginning with the earliest examples of saints’ lives from the twelfth century, this chapter outlines how the genre developed over time from relative simplicity to a more complex and rhetorically accomplished approach. It describes how saints’ lives intersected with other forms of literature being written in medieval Iceland, including romance and the family sagas, and addresses categories of saint’s life which have received less critical attention: the Marian corpus, the lives of virgin martyrs and Low German translations into Old Norse-Icelandic.

The subject of this chapter is rímur (rhymes), long narrative poems intended to be delivered orally, which were the most important secular poetic genre in Iceland from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the genre, beginning with a brief introduction to the rímur and the terminology used to describe them, before focusing in detail on their metrical form and linguistic features. It then discusses the relationship of the rímur with their different kinds of source material, since almost all are based on pre-existing narratives, particularly the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur. It surveys what is known of the poems’ authorship, performance and dating, as well as describing the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Finally, it outlines the critical and editorial history of the rímur, arguing that their unusual linguistic and metrical features, their long-lasting popularity and the significance of their interactions with other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature means they deserve more scholarly attention than they have typically received.

Late medieval Europeans extended exploitation of fish stocks to marine frontiers previously little affected by intense human predation. Driven by demand since the twelfth century and supported by waves of innovative capture and preservation methods, herring fisheries in the North Sea and Baltic fed millions of northern Europeans with the largest medieval catches known. Stockfish (naturally freeze-dried cod) from arctic Norway went from a regional subsistence product c.1100 to an export trade profiting fishers and merchants alike. Elsewhere entrepreneurs caught, preserved, and exported pike and other fish from the eastern Baltic, hake and conger from the Channel approaches and Bay of Biscay, and migratory bluefin tuna off Sicily and the Gulf of Cadiz, all for consumption a thousand and more kilometers away. Transforming local abundances for distant tables at unprecedented scale drove new capitalized forms of organization and market behaviour. Consumers, merchants, and fishers saw fish as economic objects disconnected from any familiar nature and free for competitive exploitation. Yet besides prospects of infinite abundance the new frontier fisheries posed risks, and not simply those of hazardous access or human conflict. Heavily fished local stocks of herring successively crashed to commercial insignificance when further stressed by environmental changes in the pulsating arrival of the Little Ice Age. But the almost accidental discovery of virgin cod stocks off Newfoundland in the 1490s confirmed the mythic belief that abundance always lay over the next horizon. Thoughts of limits vanished at the eve of modernity.