Conversion and Identity in the Viking Age ed. by Ildar Garipzanov (review)

This volume is a collection of essays on the sociocultural aspects of the conversion to Christianity in Viking-Age Scandinavia and the Scandinavian colonies of the North Atlantic. The main topic is how conversion affected people’s identities on either side of the divide between Paganism and Christianity and how existing and changing identities shaped the progress of conversion as a process of societal and cultural change. Each of the papers in this volume provides examples of the complicated patterns of interaction, influence, and identity modification that characterized the transition from Paganism to Christianity in the Viking world. Apart from an extensive introduction by the editor, Ildar Garipzanov, there are nine articles devoted to different aspects of the topic. Christopher Abram writes on two “modes of religiosity” in Conversion-Era Scandinavia (pp. 21–48), whereas Haki Antonsson offers a critical review of recent scholarly writings on the conversion and Christianization of Scandinavia (pp. 49–73). Orri Vésteinsson depicts the relation between Norse and Christian in the Viking-Age North Atlantic as “shopping for identities” (pp. 75–91), and Rosalind Bonté examines elements of conversion and coercion in relation to religious change in the Faroe Islands (pp. 93–116). David M. Wilson discusses aspects of the conversion of the Viking settlers in the Isle of Man (pp. 117–38), whereas Ildar Garizpanov looks at the relationship between Christian identities, social status, and gender in Viking-Age Scandinavia (pp. 139–65). There are two articles devoted especially to archaeological artefacts from the period in question; Søren Sindbæk looks at Christian and non-Christian imagery in oval brooches (pp. 167–193), and Anne Pedersen at late Viking and Early Medieval ornaments (pp. 195–223). Finally, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson offers some afterthoughts on conversion and identity in the Viking-Age North (pp. 225–43).

With so many perspectives on offer, coherence is always going to be a problem. However, one can say that all the articles in the volume deal with one of three main themes: the process of the conversion, ethnic identities, and social identities. Furthermore, to counter the heterogeneous types of theory and evidence that are on display in various parts of the volume, three chapters are meant to offer a synthesis. Garizpanov’s Introduction, Antonsson’s overview of recent research, and Sigurðsson’s final summary. In particular, there is much to gain from Antonsson’s research survey, which is much more comprehensive than the author’s modesty would indicate (p. 51). Antonsson argues, rather provocatively, that “as the term Christianization has drawn more and more elements into its orbit, the process has revealed its own less than well-defined nature” (p. 73). As it turns out, this might well be borne out by closer examination of this volume.

Christopher Abram attempts to bring some clarity to the subject, analyzing the process of the conversion with the aid of the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse’s dichotomy between doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity. As Christianity was evidently a doctrinal system, the main focus of Abram’s analysis is on the pagan religion, as it is represented in different types of sources. Unfortunately, Abram’s approach to source criticism is a bit arbitrary. He finds the description in the thirteenth-century text Heimskringla of pagan practices around 280 years before the writing credible “because it is less sensationalist and contains more specific details” (p. 34) than that of Adam of Bremen, highly selective criteria to say the least. This leads to curious results as Abram consequently adopts a sceptical stance toward the most ancient source of Old Norse pagan practices, Ibn Faldlan’s account of the burial rites, which actually happens to conform very well to the imagistic mode of religiosity that Abram suggests might have been a feature of the pagan religion (p. 35). Why he would choose to believe Snorri’s late statement over an earlier source that actually offers proof...