Vikingernes syn på militær og samfund: Belyst gennem skjaldenes fyrstedigtningen (review)

The title of this book might be translated rather literally as 'Attitudes of the Vikings to the military and society, illuminated through the poems of the skalds in honour of princes'. Despite first appearances, it is not a conventional monograph, but rather a collection of articles by the Danish historian Rikke Malmros. Four of the six Danish language pieces appearing here have been previously published elsewhere, one in Aarbøger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie and three in the Danish Historisk Tidsskrift. They are reprinted in what appears to be unaltered form, and this does involve a modest amount of repetition and overlap, notably in the explanation of the nature of Old Norse skaldic verse. After the six Danish language articles appear five short pieces in English. These are summaries of five of the Danish articles, though they are not labelled as such, and a reader with no Danish might need time to become aware of their nature. (In the following discussion the titles given to the summaries by the various translators are employed when referring to the Danish texts.)

The first article after a brief introduction is 'Danish research in the early medieval leiðangr'. It has not appeared previously and provides a summary of Danish views on the leiðangr and related aspects of Viking age society from 1756 to Malmros herself. (It is difficult to translate leiðangr without implicitly buying into a debate: 'levy, esp. by sea (including men, ships and money)' is the definition in Zoëga's Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic.) Here, as throughout the book, Malmros is particularly interested in the relationship between the various scholars' views and the social attitudes both of their own time and of later generations. The useful and relatively extended English summary, translated by Richard Cole, provides some guidance for English readers that is not found in the Danish, but the expression is often fractured: 'The illustres and magnates are leaders of the navy, they are great in the people, the uulgus, by natural right and stand in no service to the king' (p. 308).

Next follows a short piece, described as 'Indledende bemærkninger' ('Introductory observations') to the following 'Leiðangr and skaldic poetry'. This introduction had not been published earlier, and no English summary is provided. Malmros focuses here on new archaeological evidence about medieval Scandinavian ships, and inter alia corrects an error that she attributes to a 'hastig gennemgang af min daværende notesamling' - hasty examination of her notes.

'Leiðangr and skaldic poetry', originally published 1985 and probably the central article here, is based on Malmros's argument that though usually overlooked by historians, skaldic poetry is a generally trustworthy source of evidence for certain important aspects of Scandinavian social and military organization in the Viking age, a standpoint that she believes to be supported by a correlation between descriptions of ships in the poems and the evidence of archaeology. It is followed by three articles reprinted from the Copenhagen Historisk Tidsskrift. 'The pagan skaldic poets' view of society' (1999), her examination of fifteen skaldic poems, leads her to reject suggestions that Scandinavia in the late pagan period was in any Lockean 'state of nature'. 'Royal power and navy in Norway and Denmark around 1100' (2005) uses skaldic verse and Latin sources to elucidate a slightly later period - mainly in fact the eleventh century. The final article, 'The authority of skaldic poetry as a historical source' (2006), subtitled 'En discussion with Niels Lund' in the Danish, is a response to an article by Lund in which he challenged her views, not least her belief in the reliability of skaldic verse as an historical source.

Malmros repeatedly emphasizes that she is a historian with a limited command of Old Norse. She refers to help received from philologists, notably Katrina Attwood. She freely admits to having read the poetry in translation and in making careful use of commentaries by...