Iron Age Myth and Materiality
An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400-1000
Lotte Hedeager
Published by Routledge, 2011
Iron Age Myth and Materiality: an Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400-1000 considers
the relationship between myth and materiality in Scandinavia from the beginning of the
post-Roman era and the European Migrations up until the coming of Christianity. It pursues
an interdisciplinary interpretation of text and material culture and examines how the
documentation of an oral past relates to its material embodiment.
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 longue durée, 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 worldviews 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.
Old Norse myths are explored with particular attention to one of the central mythical narratives
of the Old Norse canon, the mythic cycle of Odin. In addition, contemporaneous historical
sources from Late Antiquity and the early European Middle Age are examined. No other
study provides such a broad ranging and authoritative study of the relationship of myth to the
archaeology of Scandinavia.
Lotte Hedeager is Professor of Archeology and Head of the Department of Archaeology,
Conservation and History at the University of Oslo, Norway.
(The text above comes from the back of the book)