Vikings in the Celtic World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will consider the interaction between the Scandinavian groups that arrived in the waters around these islands at the end of the eight-century and the peoples they encountered. The chroniclers of the period present their appearance as a new and terrifying phenomenon. While undoubtedly these gentiles (heathen), as they were described by the Annals of Ulster, were horrifying, their geopolitical knowledge of the lands into which they came suggests that they were not strangers - just the manner of their arrival had changed. In this course we will attempt to see beyond the image, initially formed by startled monks in their besieged monasteries and later re-worked as part of the propaganda canon of medieval Irish and Scottish kings. In doing this we are lucky in our sources. The Annals of Ulster are a contemporary record for this period and the style in which Viking activities are recorded, just one event among others, provides us with a prospective that we might not otherwise have. The Norse themselves were silent so they and their actions were interpreted by those they were attacking and those lands and possessions they were attempting to conquer. It is only in the thirteenth century that Icelandic sources, drawing in some cases on earlier Norse material, provide a late but biased rebalance.