Eastern Vikings in New Jersey

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

To the serious medievalist, it might be a cause for some disappointment that when one googles Eastern Vikings, the first thing that comes up is the sports team of the Eastern Regional High School in New Jersey. As is to be expected, the logo is of a bearded man with (backwards facing) horns on his helmet. This is also how Leifur Eíriksson is portrayed on statues all over Minnesota, as opposed to our own clean-shaven, hornless Leifur in downtown Reykjavik, itself a gift from the Americans.

Minnesota has its own sports Vikings, of course, and Nordic immigrants in the state have a habit of fabricating evidence that the Vikings reached that far west. As far as we know, they only made it to Newfoundland and there is no evidence of them making it to New Jersey. However, these were western Vikings, emanating from Iceland via Greenland. Eastern Vikings, of course, went east, to present day Russia and Ukraine and even all the way to Iran and Iraq.

So it would be slightly less inaccurate to name the team Western Vikings but in the America-centric view, New Jersey is at the easternmost part of the known world. Of course, it would be more proper to place Scandinavia at the centre of the universe, from where Russia lies east and America (all of it) is west.

The Hagia Sophia in International Politics

Posted on October 28, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

In late July, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke on the phone about the Turkish decision to change the Hagia Sophia from museum to mosque. Putin had previously criticized the Greek-Macedonian name deal that led to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to change it’s formal title to Northern Macedonia. But last summer, the heads of the two orthodox countries found much to agree on, apart from the status of Constantine’s church.

This autumn, they seem to be drawing yet closer as Putin has recognised Greece’s claims to an exclusive economic zone in the Aegean Sea, contested by Turkey. The support was reiterated by the Russian Embassy in Athens via its Twitter account. The title of the account might be confusing to Medievalists. At the top, it say “Rus embassy, Greece.” The Rus are not known to have sent an embassy to the Greeks for roughly 700 years.

https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/10/23/putin-greece-2021/

The Next Frontier in Viking Studies

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

In his very interesting online talk, Dr. Neil Price of the University of Uppsala suggested that the Eastern Vikings are the next frontier in Viking studies. Whereas 20 years ago it was unproven that they had gone east of the Urals, it now seems that they went as far as Central Asia and even to western China. Dr. Price even mentioned that the Chinese character in season 4 of the Irish/Canadian TV show Vikings was not at all unpalatable.

He further said that one of the reasons why the eastern Vikings have been under researched so far was due to the Cold War. It was very hard for western scholars to be granted access to the Soviet Union and even to communicate with people there, which has led to an overemphasis on the raids, trade and settlements in the west, rather than on a Viking worldview that stretched from North America to China.

Among his other points was that the first documented Viking raid took place not in Lindisfarne in England in 793 but on the Estonian island of Saaremaa in 750. What we now call the Viking Age probably had its roots in around 500 CE, with the major shifts that occurred with the end of the Western Roman Empire.

For more information, his book Children of Ash and Elm is widely available and the Facebook page for the talk can be found here

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