Social Norms in Medieval Scandinavia

In the Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia, social values such as reputation, honour, and friendship, were integral to the development of rituals, customs, religion, literature, and language. Everyday norms are mainly conveyed orally or ritually, and rarely in a written or material shape. Despite this, the Old Norse-Icelandic literary corpus remains the most important source of our present-day knowledge of social development in the medieval North. New research methods allow us to explore how relics of the material culture of the medieval north can confront, corroborate, or disprove the depiction of social norms in medieval Scandinavian literature. This volume considers in depth how social norms affected the creation and functioning of societies in the medieval North, approaching the topic from a range of disciplinary angles including law-making, politics, religion, and literacy.

Morawiec Jakub :

Jakub Morawiec is Associate Professor in the Institute of History of the University of Silesia, specializing in Scandinavia and the Viking Age, skaldic poetry, and Old-Norse literature.Jochymek Aleksandra :

Aleksandra Jochymek is a Doctoral Researcher in the Institute of History of the University of Silesia with a specialism in medieval history.Bartusik Grzegorz :

Grzegorz Bartusik is a Doctoral Researcher in the Institute of History of the University of Silesia with a background in Classical Philology.

William Sayers:
This is a welcome collection of essays on an important topic and should spark interest in pursuing the needed elaboration of a theoretical frame in which to analyze attitudes toward, and expressions of, normativity and its violation, not only in the fictional world of the sagas of Icelanders that view the national past through glasses idiosyncratically tinted dark-rose but also in the tumultuous thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that produced them.