18 July 2024, Starts: 19:30

Scotland and Scandinavia, c. AD750-1300: material and social entanglements

Online talk by Dr Russell Ó Ríagáin of University College Dublin

Organised by Groam House Museum. Click here to book tickets.
Tickets for the lecture are £6 for adult non-members of the museum, or £3 for members or students. 

The arrival of viking raiders in northern Britain at the end of the eighth century was the start of a period of intense social interaction with Scandinavia that would continue in various ways down to the late thirteenth century. This was of course part of a wider set of phenomena commonly but not unproblematically referred to as 'the Viking Age' in which Scandinavians engaged in trading, raiding and settlement in an area extending from the Caspian Sea to the Labrador Coast. Despite some rich evidence for Scandinavian diasporic settler communities across several centuries and some excellent publications, what is now Scotland has arguably been under-appreciated in discussions of these phenomena, partly due to the low level of survival of documentary evidence. This lecture will thus use what is now Scotland as a case study to outline some of the provisional findings of an ongoing project exploring the long-term impact of the Insular Viking Age on Scandinavia, along with some of the findings of an earlier project on the Scandinavian diaspora in western Scotland. It will draw on a range of sources to do so, including documentary, material culture, burial and place-name evidence, both in Scotland and in Scandinavia, and will take a long-term approach extending beyond the traditional mid-eleventh-century end of the Viking Age.