Björk’s Salmon Inspires Viking Film

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgaard and Willem Dafoe are among the actors in the eagerly awaited Viking epic The Northman. The idea for the film, which is apparently about a Viking prince seeking revenge in Iceland, can be traced to a dinner party that Björk held some years ago. Director Robert Eggers and his wife were on a trip to Iceland and, like anyone would, expressed interested in meeting Björk. Unlike most people, however, they were summarily invited for salmon at the Björk residence, even if they had never met before. Björk also invited her friend and sometime collaborator Sjón to the dinner. It turned out Sjón was a big fan of Eggers debut film The Witch, and Eggers was similarly a fan of Sjón’s 2008 novel In the Mouth of the Whale. Both, as it happens, are about 17th century belief in magic, where the supernatural is ingrained in the world view of the characters. This led to the two collaborating on the screenplay for the upcoming film where, as previously mentioned, Björk will play the role of a Slavic witch. This marks the songstress’ first foray into acting since Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark from 2000, and one of few examples of Vikings interacting with Slavs on the big screen. In an interview with Icelandic National Radio, Sjón said he would rather fail to do a Viking film with Eggers than anyone else. The film will no doubt attempt to capture the Viking mindset in a manner not previously seen.

You can hear the interview here, where Sjón also talks about the movement of myths from east to west, from Asia to Europe, in the past 8000 years (Icelandic only). https://www.ruv.is/utvarp/spila/lestin/23619/923ea3

Viking Societies Were Cultural and Genetic Melting Pots

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Peer-reviewed journal Nature has published an article by a team of researchers who have been mapping Viking DNA by examining the remains of 442 people from burial sites all over Europe. It probably comes as little surprise that Norwegian ancestry is found in Iceland, Greenland and Ireland, Danish in England and Swedish in Eastern Europe, Swedish DNA having been traced to the present day Baltic States, Russia and Poland. However, the study also shows that there was a considerable influx of people from southern Europe and even Asia into Scandinavia. This is in line with recent discoveries of objects from far afield found in Nordic excavations. It seems that rather than Vikings emanating from Scandinavia and setting off to conquer, all blond and blue eyed, they may have been a very mixed group, with Picts from Scotland found to have been accorded full Viking burials. The popular conception of what Vikings supposedly looked like is up for re-evaluation, but some researchers point out that as the study only looks at the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050), we don’t as yet know how far back this cultural melting pot goes. The solution would seem to be to dig deeper.

A short podcast discussing the findings with scholars from Norway and Denmark can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02659-w

The full article is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2688-8

International Byzantine Studies Congress Moves From Istanbul to Venice

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Much like the Triumphal Quadriga above the porch of St. Marks Basilica in the 13th Century, the 24th International Byzantine Studies Congress has been moved from Constantinople to Venice. The International Association of Byzantine Studies website has announced that the 2021 Congress has been postponed until 2022 and will now take place in Venice and Padua, Italy. The congress was originally to take place in Istanbul in 2021.

The Turkish Duvar Gazette states that while the reason for the postponement was Covid related, the reason for relocating the congress was not. Rather, it was a response to the Turkish government converting the famous Hagia Sophia Byzantine church from museum to mosque. The congress committee quotes Covid as well as “other concerns associated with issues of heritage management” as cause for the move.

The congress has been held every five years since 1948 and over 1000 scholars were expected to attend the 2021 congress. They will now be meeting a year later with the Bronze Horses of Venice instead of the Hagia Sophia as backdrop, with the precise date yet to be announced.

For the International Association of Byzantine Studies website, see: https://aiebnet.gr/

For the Duvar website, see: https://www.duvarenglish.com/culture/2020/07/27/byzantine-studies-congress-moved-from-istanbul-after-conversion-of-hagia-sophia-into-mosque/

Varangians Could Only Visit Constantinople in Small Groups

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

At the end of August, Turkish news sources announced that the remains of a Varangian settlement had been discovered outside Istanbul. This is not the first hard evidence of Northmen in what was once the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the most famous being the runes found inscribed on the walls of the Hagia Sophia itself. But it may tell us a lot more about their activities there.

The team doing the dig consisted of 75 archaeologists led by the Turkish Şengül Aydıngün and including the Polish Viking expert Blazei Stanislawski. The site is in the the ancient city of Bathonea near Lake Küçükçekmece, and findings date from the 9th to the 11th centuries. Bathonea was an international port at the time and among the objects found are a north European ambergris cross and a necklace bearing the symbol of Jörmundgandur, the Midgard Serpent.

Among the theories prompted by the discovery are that the Varangians were not allowed to live within the walls of Constantinople at the time, but could only enter in groups of 35 men at the most and had to be gone by sundown. It seems that fear of the Northmen encouraged social distancing long before our era.

For the news story in Hurriyet Daily news, see:

https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/archaeologists-unearth-viking-neighborhood-in-istanbul-157658

Did the Finns Help the Swedes Go East?

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

The tribes that populated what is now Finland and Estonia have traditionally seen to be in the receiving end of Viking raids, most notably in Egils’ Saga where the titular hero slaughters a whole Estonian farmstead instead of letting them suffer the indignity of being robbed in their sleep. New research suggests that the Finno-Ugric tribes may ialso have played a key role in allowing the Vikings to navigate the waterways that led to the Black Sea, having familiarised themselves with the territory at a far earlier date. Archaeological evidence also suggests that influences from the east may have played a greater role in the culture of the Mälaren area. The iconic thick leather belts with metal buckles may even have come to present day Sweden from nomadic tribes to the east via present day Finland. A new Finnish documentary highlights this and the second part is shown on Icelandic State Broadcasting tonight:

https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/eystrasaltsfinnarnir/26872/808ls1

(In Finnish and Swedish with Icelandic subtitles)

A Sami in modern day Finland

Belarus: Waving the Flag of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Avid news watchers may have spotted that Belarusian protesters are waving a red and white flag, often with a picture of a knight on it. This flag, in fact, goes back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania when it was used by Belarusians under Lithuanian rule. It was briefly adopted as the flag of the independence movement at the end of World War I. The white reflected the country’s name. One theory behind the naming of Belarus (sometimes called White Russia) is that it was the part of the Rus kingdoms that was not conquered by the Mongols in the 13th Century and hence was ruled by Christian princes. The westernisers in Belarus, as in Ukraine, see continuity from the ancient Rus through the Lithuanian Duchy and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to today.

Hence, a red stripe was added and sometimes the picture of the knight. This was the official flag of Belarus from independence in 1991 until 1995, when Lukashenko changed it back to the flag of the Belarusians SSR of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it will be changed back if he relinquishes power. For more on the Belarus flag, see:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Belarus

Belarus: He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

History is being made these days in Belarus and inevitably whoever comes out on top will have his own of history canonized. The current conflict between Westernizers and Pro-Russian groups goes back over 100 years, each faction viewing historical events in very different terms. The difference between the two is recounted in an article late last year by Moscow-born University of Radford Professor Grigory Ioffe called “Split Identity and a Tug-of-War for Belarus’s Memory.”

https://jamestown.org/program/84916/

For the pro-Russians, the history of Belarus goes back to the Polotsk principality, which was subservient to the Kyivan Rus, the precursor to both modern day Ukraine and Russia. For centuries after the collapse of Kyiv, most of Belarus was occupied by Lithuanians and Poles before being liberated by the Russians in the 18th Century (and again during World War II). The official view, quite neatly, sees Kyiv, Novgorod and Polotsk as separate ancestors of the three eastern Slavic states of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

For the Westernizers, the county’s history also begins with Polotsk but here the connection with Kyiv is downplayed. St. Volodymyr is seen to have incorporated the principality against the wishes of the populace (as related in the Primary Chronicle) and so a heritage of resistance to foreign authority is established. Conversely, the union with the Lithuanians and the Poles in the later Middle Ages is seen as having been on equal terms, making Belarus a full member of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this narrative, Russia comes the main enemy and the many uprisings of the Poles against the Russians in the 19th Century are seen as joint Polish-Belarusian affairs.

According to Belarusian philosopher (and Westernizer) Valantsyn Akudovich, the former view appeals more to Belarusians as it allows them to be a part of the glory of Russian and Soviet Empires rather than its victims.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s move to Lithuania and Lukashenko’s calls for assistance to Russia can be the seen as the latest chapter in the long running debate about whether Belarus’ history runs through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or Muscovy, and whether its future belongs to the Westernisers or pro-Russians.

St. Vladimir and Comrade Stalin

Heroic or Just Cruel. What Do the Sources Say?

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

A review of The Children of Ash and Elm: A New History of the Vikings by Neil Price has appeared in the “Socially Distant Summer Issue” of the London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 16, 13 August 2020. Price is an archaeologist and professor at the University of Uppsala and is also associated with this program. His previous book is The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

The review is written by Tom Shippey and titled “Did they even hang bears?”, a reference to the ritual sacrifices at Uppsala which may have included larger animals than previously thought. Shippey recounts some of Price’s conclusions, such as the fact that 125 million silver dirhams are thought to have gone north from the Caliphate to Scandinavia in the 10th Century. Meanwhile, only seven million pennies did so from the Frankish Empire, which still amounted to around 14 percent of the Franks output. No one knows why so many of the coins were put into burial mounds but it can hardly have been an accident. Price suggests ritual as a possible explanation.

Even more interesting is the mystery of why the Viking Age started. Price points to a couple of factors, such as lack of central power following the collapse of the Roman Empire as well as the many volcanic eruptions of the 6th Century, which may have destroyed crops all over but hit the Nordic Countries with their limited agriculture particularly hard. More immediately, the feuds between the successors in the Frankish Empire in the 9th Century may have led to new opportunities to acquire loot.

Perhaps most interestingly, there may have been a considerable male surplus in Scandinavia in the period, as male children seem to have been better looked after and less likely to suffer from malnutrition. This may have led to raids to find funds to impress the girls back home or a chance to find and abduct entirely new girls.

Finally, Shippey finds many examples of the Vikings being alternately heroic and cruel in Price’s text, saying that the idea that they were simply one or the other belongs in the realm of comic books.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-shippey/did-they-even-hang-bears

The History of Hagia Sofia

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

As probably everyone knows, the Hagia Sofia church in Istanbul has been turned back into a mosque for the first time in almost a century. On Icelandic National Radio this week, our very own Þórir Jónsson Hraundal spoke about the history of the church from Orthodox to Catholic and back again, to mosque to museum and again to mosque.

https://www.ruv.is/utvarp/spila/morgunvaktin/23614/7hhgb6

(Icelandic only)

Meanwhile, on the podcast Byzantium and Friends, University of Pennsylvania professor Bob Ousterhout also recounted the history of the illustrious church, contextualising it with the current global trend of changing memorials. He also mentions the considerable part its reputation played in the Christianisation of the Rus.

https://byzantiumandfriends.podbean.com/e/29-the-many-identities-of-hagia-sophia-past-and-present-with-bob-ousterhout/

(In English)

Swedish Proto-Vikings on Icelandic TV

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

De första svenskarna, or The First Swedes, is a two-part series by archaeologist Jonathan Lindström. The series debuted on Swedish television in February and the first episode was showed on Icelandic television last week. Using modern DNA technology from the University of Uppsala, Lindström aims to show that Sweden was first settled by dark-skinned, blue-eyed people from coming the south at the end of the last Ice Age 11.000 years ago. Almost simultaneously, a pale skinned group entered from the north via Russia, emanating from modern day Turkey. These hunted elk and had superior stone age weapons and tools and soon interbred with the former group. The second episode, to be aired tomorrow (July 21st) deals with proto-Viking raids from long before the beginning of the Viking Age.

The link to Icelandic National Broadcasting is here: https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/fyrstu-sviarnir/29633/8qj8oh

The link to Swedish National Broadcasting: https://www.svt.se/special/mot-de-forsta-svenskarna/