11 February 2027, Starts: 19:30

Kings of the Wild Frontier? Pathological Cultures and Place-Name Change in Viking-Age Scotland

Online talk by Dr Alan Macniven

Organised by Society of Higland & Island Historical Research. Details on how to researve a place, and to receive the Zoom link are available on their website. Participation is free for members and students. Non-members are requested to pay a lecture fee of £5. 

The islands off Scotland’s west coast were early victims to the Viking expansion. Commanding the sea road between Norway and Ireland, they were conveniently placed for colonisation, forward attacks, and further migration. Over the decades that followed, this led to significant and lasting changes in material culture, language, and even DNA. What is not quite so clear, however, are the processes by which those changes took place.

While competing ‘schools’ once debated the role of ‘War’ and ‘Peace’ in Scottish Viking Studies, attention has gradually drifted from cause to effect. In reaction to the less palatable aspects of colonisation, emphasis has moreover shifted onto the positive contribution of the colonists. The result has been the elevation of peaceful and long-form explanatory models over those which allow for the darker side of human nature. Take, for example, interpretations of emerging DNA evidence. Despite concerns over nuance and context, this has been used to downplay the impact of violent invasion, and frame interactions even more tightly around present-day ideals of equality and inclusion. This projection of modern cultural sensitivities onto the past has arguably made the field more accessible. At the same time, it has served to obscure the early-medieval realities of identity, landownership, agency, and violence, masking standards of behaviour that were very different from our own. In the wider context of European prehistory, this is problematic. While epoch-defining changes in material culture were previously attributed to cultural diffusion, analysis of genetic evidence is increasingly linking them to predatory migration and demographic change, the implications of which are far from pleasant.

In this paper, I will review the archaeological, documentary, and settlement-historical sources for Scandinavian activity in the Western Isles, and how this might be reconciled with the available DNA material. I will argue that Scotland’s Viking communities were not unusually violent, and in some ways less socially conservative than global contemporaries. Following recent thinking in anthropology and psychiatry, however, I will explore how pathological cultures bend the behaviours of whole communities around the aspirations of certain types of individual, prioritising acknowledgement of human trauma above the perpetuation of sanitised marketing cliches.