Iron Age Myth and Materiality An Archaeology of Scandinavia, AD 400-1000

About this book

While the material evidence is from the Iron Age, most Old Norse texts were written down in the thirteenth century or even later. With a time lag of 300 to 900 years from the archaeological evidence, the textual material has until recently been ruled out as a usable source for any study of the pagan past. However, Hedeager argues that this is true regarding any study of a society's short-term history, but it should not be the crucial requirement for defining the sources relevant for studying long-term structures of the tongue dure, or their potential contributions to a theoretical understanding of cultural changes and transformation. In Iron Age Scandinavia we are dealing with persistent and slow-changing structures of world views and ideologies over a wavelength of nearly a millennium. Furthermore, iconography can often date the arrival of new mythical themes, anchoring written narratives in a much older archaeological context.

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