This volume is explicitly the third in a trilogy concerned with silver, exchange and economies in the Viking Age that began in 2000 with a symposium at University College London that was published as Silver economy in the Viking Age in 2007, followed by a second symposium in Aarhus in 2008, published in 2011 as Silver economies, monetarisation and society in Scandinavia AD 800–1100. Now we have the outcome of a third symposium, held in 2014 in conjunction with the British Museum's blockbuster Vikings: life and legend exhibition.
Jane Kershaw notes in her introduction that the book consciously builds on the earlier volumes, while also introducing some new themes. Certainly, while the essays collected here mark the emergence of a new generation of scholars – of the 19 contributors listed, only John Sheehan and Gareth Williams appeared in the 2007 volume – there are also some very obvious intellectual batons being passed on.
The book itself consists of 14 papers and a short introduction that valiantly tries to structure the disparate contents. The focus is relentlessly empirical and predominantly on a local scale, with some of the contributions feeling more like reports on works in progress than complete essays. Unlike the earlier volumes there is no concluding overview or indeed much overview at all beyond the main editor's introductory comments. Nevertheless, within those limits, there is an impressive range of scholarship on display.
Kershaw finds four sections in the book. The first concerns the monetary uses of silver, with essays on the fragmentation of Islamic dirhams by Marek Jankowiak; the silver hoards of Bornholm by Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson; and of Mózgowo, Poland by Mateusz Bogucki. An interpretation of the Irish coinage by Andrew Woods stresses the commercial over the political elements. The second section, on the non-monetary functions of precious metals, offers useful essays by Svein Gullbekk on coins, churches and the ‘spiritual economy’ in Christian Scandinavia; John Sheehan on the use of Viking Age silver hoards by Irish kings and the Church; and Florent Audy on the re-purposing of coins as pendants, as well as detailed studies of the gold hoard from Essu, Estonia by Ester Oras, Ivar Leimus and Lauri Joosu; and on containers and hoarding practices on Gotland and in Pomerania by Jacek Gruszczynski. The third section takes an archaeometric approach with Guillaume Sarah examining the sources of silver coinage in the Carolingian kingdoms and Stephen Merkel on Danish silver coins and objects from Hedeby. The latter paper shows clearly that the production of the Malmer KG-7 coinage of the early tenth century recycled pre-Samanid, possibly Iranian, silver from the late ninth century. The fourth and final section moves beyond silver into the butter and cloth promised in the title, as well as into gold, the role of which as a means of exchange in Scandinavian England is analysed by Kershaw herself. Michèle Hayeur Smith contributes a valuable discussion of Vaðmál and the history and functions of Icelandic cloth currency, which integrates archaeology, law, gender and mythology into a coherent whole. Finally, Aaron Critch, Jennifer Harland and James Barrett offer a nicely contextualised study of the late and post-Viking Age butter economy and its ecological impacts at Quoygrew in Orkney.
What does all this add up to beyond the individual points of interest to be found in the essays themselves? As already noted, there is no summation or presentation of a model to bring this wide-ranging and methodologically varied material together. Despite this, Kershaw does offer some reflections on how to read the essays in her introduction and makes some claims for three original features in the collection. Firstly, she argues that this volume, more so than the previous two, integrates economy with social relations and takes a ‘post-substantivist’ approach that examines ‘how political, gendered, religious, and other social praxes structured the use of silver within Viking-Age economies’ (p. 2). While this makes sense, at the same time ‘post-substantivism’ does feel like a debate that has been primarily going on – at least in those terms – among the attendees of the three Viking Age silver symposia rather than among the wider discipline, where such claims are likely to be met with a casual shrug of agreement. Even so, the contributors to this volume have embraced the central idea of a social economy in various ways and to very different extents. In practice, what this leads to when the essays are read together is the honest but unambitious conclusion that there were different uses for different kinds of wealth in different kinds of Viking economies and that further research is needed before anything much more can be said.
The other two claims to originality raised by Kershaw are that this volume ranges more widely both in its definitions of currency commodities and in its geographical scope. In reality ten of the fourteen papers take silver or silver coinage as their sole or primary focus, another two take gold as their major concern, with only two – those on cloth and butter – moving beyond the precious metal paradigm. As to geography, it is very welcome to see the Slavic Baltic getting more attention, but most papers still concentrate on the core zones. Only from the most Scandinavia-centric viewpoint can Ireland, England, Orkney, and Iceland qualify as marginal areas of the Viking world.
All of the contributors have produced work to very high standards of scholarship that will doubtless be used and discussed by those within the circles of Viking Age numismatics, monetary history and economic archaeology at which the book is most clearly aimed. While the best essays in the volume do manage to break out from these confines, to those outside looking in, the hefty asking price and the sense of disengagement from broader debates and trends may well render the book as a whole a less compelling attraction.
