With Scandinavia's first towns (Ribe c. 710, Birka c. 750) and the influx of Islamic silver coinage from c. 790 onward, the region's archaeological record changes dramatically and irrevocably. Long-distance commodity trade and serial production mean that there is new material to study and new questions to answer, because the Scandinavians were doing new things. In the absence of much relevant source material, almost no Scandinavian scholars think about the economics of the seventh century. As this solid and comprehensive anthology of Viking Age economics in Norway shows, things were quite different from the eighth century on.
Viking Age Transformations contains thirteen papers developed from presentations given at a 2013 conference organised by the Centre for Viking Age Studies at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. All eighteen contributors but one are based in Norway itself. The book's main title might mean anything or nothing, but it could have been worse. The conference was titled ‘The Power of the Market’, and the volume's editors certainly chose wisely when they avoided that in the book title. The introduction is dated May 2016.
Resource extraction, transportation, crafts and trade: the book covers most aspects of its theme. There are discussions of judicial districts and assemblies, annual skeid horse-races, announcements of new coinage, iron production, copper alloy casting, soapstone, quernstones, whetstones, stone baking trays, reindeer hunting, fur trapping, and many less visible socio-economic activities. Agriculture, the local base of the whole system, is however almost invisible. Four papers in particular caught my attention.
The biggest piece of news here is the craft and trade site of Heimdalsjordet (Vestfold, Østlandet): Kaupang's little sister, located within clear view of the Gokstad ship barrow. In Chapter 11, Jan Bill and Christian Løchsen Rødsrud detail the results of geophysical surveys and excavations carried out in 2012–13. The site is only fifteen kilometres north of Kaupang and was active probably between c. ad 700 and ad 1000, before and after its larger sibling. Heimdalsjordet too sports a wide and rich range of find categories and corresponding activities. The coin assemblage and pottery types suggest that its patrons cultivated east Scandinavian contacts while Kaupang's lords looked toward the south. Perhaps these finds correspond to a Norwegian lineage versus the Danish kings, say the authors. Small nearby cemeteries composed mostly of small-boat inhumations complete the picture. Of course, there must be a mead-hall waiting to be found somewhere nearby, as the authors point out. The place-name Heimdalsjordet, however, has nothing to do with Heimdallr, the Watchful God. As far as I can judge, it would mean roughly ‘Home Vale Field’. In early 2021 this paper remains the most comprehensive publication on the site, which becomes an instant locus classicus.
When you excavate a Viking Age or later urban site in Norway, soapstone vessels are a ubiquitous local product, but every single potsherd is a continental import. There were no local potters for centuries! In her impressively labour-intensive paper about the materials available in post-Viking Age towns, Gitte Hansen (Ch. 4) reveals that this imported pottery has quite different origins in the towns of southwestern and southeastern Norway. (Remember, Vestlandet and Østlandet are both part of long, slender Norway's south-west end.) Stavanger is not very far by sea from Tønsberg, but apparently few foreign ship crews either from the south-west or the south-east bothered to make the extra effort once they had made landfall in Norway. They knew with whom they wanted to trade, much, in fact, like many crews would row past Kaupang to get to Gokstad and Heimdalsjordet.
The weighing of silver is an inescapable theme in the study of Viking Age economics. Two papers deal with peripheral settlement districts in the Norwegian orbit where people's lifeways and identities appear to have been focussed on interregional trade. So much so that these areas constitute major concentrations on Scandinavia's map of where we find hack silver, coins, scales, and weights in graves. Olof Holm (Ch. 3) writes about the Lake Storsjön area in Jämtland, current Sweden, the province just south-east over the mountain passes from Trøndelag. This area was not involved in any particular Viking Age state formation project. Zanette T. Glørstad and Camilla C. Wenn (Ch. 10) write about the Setesdal valley, due east and uphill from Stavanger. Burials with silver, scales, and weights cluster here around Valle, but the paper deals mainly with an isolated cemetery at Langeid, excavated in 2011. For more about this informative site, see Wenn et al. (Reference Wenn, Glørstad and Loftsgarden2016). For recent work on the silver economy in general, see Kershaw & Williams (Reference Kershaw and Williams2019).
Overall, the English is quite good, but one recurring error that mars several papers is worth pointing out: the misuse of the term ‘the outfield’. To a UK reader this is a peripheral part of a farm's land, to which the owners can walk from their house in less than twenty minutes. To a US reader the word probably conjures up images of baseball. Context shows however that throughout the book it is a mistranslation of the Norwegian word utmarka: a distant wooded mountainous area with reindeer, bog iron, and fur trapping, the property of no-one in particular. A better English term might simply be ‘the wilderness’.
All in all, this is a useful and commendable anthology that serves well as an entry point into the field of study for English-speaking readers. A thirteen-page thematic index adds substantially to its value. I wish more work like this were being done in Sweden. It would be a shame if the vague main title with its possibly shamanistic connotations kept readers from finding this book.
