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

This book reprints four of the author's previously published articles ("Leding og Skjaldekvad," "Den Hedenske Fyrstedigtnings Samfundssyn," "Kongemagt og Leding i Norge og Danmark omkring 1100," and "Fyrstedigtningens Kildeværdi") followed by four chapters in English that turn out to be synopses of them ("Leiðangr and Skaldic Poetry," "The Pagan Skaldic Poets' View of Society," "Royal Power and Navy in Norway and Denmark about 1100," and "The Authority of Skaldic Poetry as a Historical Source"). A historiographical essay, "Den Danske Ledingsforsknings Historie" (corresponding to the later chapter "Danish Research in the Early Medieval Leiðangr"), introduces the volume, which was submitted as Malmros's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Aarhus in 2010.

Rikke Malmros identifies herself as a historian, not a philologist or a literary critic, and her book consequently differs in point of view and agenda from most books on skaldic poetry. She states at the outset that since she does not have a command of Old Norse language, the material will be dealt with in (Danish) translation, and "the many problems concerning the origin and dating of the verses will not be dealt with here." Her intent is to challenge a thesis that she believes has dominated Danish historiography for the past 200 years: that the Viking Age was a golden age of economic equality and political democracy that reflects the original and natural condition of the Nordic peoples and provides an ideal model for the modern Scandinavian parliamentary state. The opening essay traces the evolution of this idea in Danish historical writing from Christen Sørensen Thestrup (1756) to Niels Lund (1986). Malmros's goal is to demonstrate, through evidence found in skaldic poetry, the strength of royal authority and the centralized organization of society in Viking Age Scandinavia.

While Malmros is well aware that uncertainty about dating and transmission make skaldic poetry unreliable as a historical source, she rightly argues that it must at least be considered as a supplement and possible corrective to the prose sources, all of which were composed centuries later than the tenth- and eleventh-century events they describe. Her method is to analyze the vocabulary, rather than the narratives, of the poetry, and it yields some interesting results. For example, by examining the occurrences of the word skeið and other words for "ship" in skaldic poetry, she shows that the skalds consistently describe fleets made up of slender and easily maneuverable warships of uniform size, each manned by about forty oarsmen. The navies of saga prose, on the other hand, are headed by massive vessels called búza and skúta, manned by as many as eighty warriors and supplemented by smaller ships of varying sizes. Malmros points out that the discrepancies between the verses and the sagas in which they are embedded is an indication of the age and authenticity of the poetry.

The central piece of evidence for her thesis, that the occurrence of the word leiðangr in skaldic poetry indicates early state formation and royal domination of peasants in the Viking Age, is more problematic. Old Norse leiðangr, the reflex of Modern Danish leding, came to be used for royal naval levies in the law codes of the late Middle Ages, and Malmros argues that the five instances of the word she has identified in the skaldic poetry (there are in fact at least eight) indicate that kings like Haraldr harðráði and Haraldr Sigurðarson had the authority to raise naval levies to mount their campaigns. Since the original publication of "Leding og Skjaldekvad" in 1985, this interpretation has been carefully examined and convincingly rejected by Niels Lund ("Danish Military Organization," in The Battle of Maldon, ed. Janet Cooper, 1993), Judith Jesch (Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age, 2001), and Diana Whaley (Poetry from the Kings Sagas, ed. Kari Ellen Gade, 2009). Jesch's lexicographical study of the word and her consideration of...