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Dr Christian Cooijmans - Home is Where the Hirð is: Revisiting Viking Camps as Social Spaces.Throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries, viking groups are known to have established numerous encampment sites as part of their expeditions across western Europe. Being much more than a means to wait out the winter, camps like these are recognised to have hosted a broad range of activity, serving as places of production, commerce, ritual, leisure, and domestic life. In order to make these assorted interactions possible, viking encampments would have harboured complex and layered social systems, in which goods and services were provided, information flowed, and interpersonal bonds were formed and strengthened. Nevertheless, as the camps were generally undesirable to their surrounding environment, they represented paradoxical spaces: walking the line between impermanence and permanence, they were neither open nor fully sealed off, neither public nor fully private, and neither peaceful nor fully hostile.
Although viking encampments have been extensively investigated as physical, practical spaces, they have only rarely been highlighted in their roles as social and mental constructs, embedded inside these tangible settings. As such, it remains unclear how their establishment and development would have contributed to an individual and collective 'sense of place' for those occupying them, and – in turn – how these spaces might have informed wider viking identities and relationships. Building on a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary body of evidence from across Ireland, England, and the Frankish realm, this paper will cast viking encampments in a novel light, considering them not merely as material sites, but as socially fundamental spaces. Drawing on socio-anthropological theory, it will explore how these sites – even when established in deeply inhospitable environments – served as safe havens, communities, and homes, and as such would have been integral to the success and sustainability of a viking way of life.
Christian Cooijmans is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. His research focuses on the reach and repercussions of viking activity across the Frankish realm, as well as its subsequent, premodern historiography. At UiO, he examines how ideas and images of Viking Age martial ideologies are shaped and perpetuated across the present-day public sphere.
Foredraget starter kl 1800 og arrangeres i samarbeid med Midgard Vikingsenters Venneforening.
Inngang til foredraget er inkludert i ordinær museumsbillett.
Dette foredraget holdes på engelsk.
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