In Austrvegr : : the role of the Eastern Baltic in Viking Age communication across the Baltic Sea / / Marika Magi.

• Superior document: Northern World : North Europe and the Baltic c. 400-1700 AD. Peoples, Economies and Cultures ; Volume 84
• VerfasserIn: Mägi, Marika, 1968-
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, [2018]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Northern world.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xix, 491 pages) :; illustrations, maps

Marika Mägi’s book considers the cultural, mercantile and political interaction of the Viking Age (9th-11th century), focusing on the eastern coasts of the Baltic Sea. The majority of research on Viking activity in the East has so far concentrated on the modern-day lands of Russia, while the archaeology and Viking Age history of today’s small nation states along the eastern coasts of the Baltic Sea is little known to a global audience. This study looks at the area from a trans-regional perspective, combining archaeological evidence with written sources, and offering reflections on the many different factors of climate, topography, logistics, technology, politics and trade that shaped travel in this period. The work offers a nuanced vision of Eastern Viking expansion, in which the Eastern Baltic frequently acted as buffer zone between eastern and western powers. Winner of the Early Slavic Studies Association 2018 Book Prize for most outstanding recent scholarly monograph on pre-modern Slavdom. The work was described by the prize committee in the following terms: \'The scope of this book is far broader than the title might suggest. It amounts to a substantial rethinking of the history of the eastern Baltic from the tenth to the thirteenth century, based on both archaelogical and written evidence. The author is by training an archaeologist, and she mounts a powerful criticism of historians who prioritise the written sources and then pick and choose from the archaeological evidence to suit their theories. This book foregrounds the archaeology, which is used to question and consider the written evidence. The author is also highly and rightly critical of the archaeological scholarship, for projecting back into the past the narrow concerns of the numerous nation states that now exist across the eastern and northern Baltic, or the Great Russian nationalist-materialist-imperialist interpretations of the Soviet period. The result is a detailed and fascinating account of the interactions of the worlds of Scandinavia and Rusʹ with the various peoples of the Baltic region, both Finno-Ugric and Baltic. The resulting picture of commercial, political, and cultural interaction across several cultures, and based on reading in a wide range of languages, is a tour-de-force.\'

Table of Contents

Viking age cultural contacts across the Baltic Sea : behind the interpretations -- Clan-based collectivists or hierarchical individualists? Late prehistoric societies in the Ea; stern Baltic -- Making trade : cultural landscapes and communication routes -- The historical reality : places, place names, and ethnonyms in written sources -- Networks take shape : communication through the Eastern Baltic 600-850 -- West goes east : Viking age long-distance communication and the Eastern Baltic 850-ca. 1000 -- Between consolidating states. The Eastern Baltic areas in the 11th and 12th centuries -- Summing up and conclusions.