In Search of the Vikings

"The title of this book expresses the nature of Viking studies as viewed by its editors and contributors: it is a search, and not an easy one, and by no means a complete one as yet. A thousand years is a long time for the traces of a migrant Scandinavian people and culture to remain detectable. Most of the settlements, burials and hoards they left behind have gradually disappeared under more modern development, or been eroded away, leaving only a few startling discoveries to be made in modern times. Carved stones in churches have fared a little better, but many have still been lost to posterity. Language, folk traditions and blood-lines have diffused with generations of later influences and new introductions, but some key aspects survive. Putting all these types of evidence together is a major challenge. No individual is expert in every research skill and area of understanding required. It is, and should be, a team effort.^ Until fairly recently, archaeologists, place-name scholars, linguists, saga-scholars, historians, and geneticists tended to work in their own separate disciplines, in some cases jealously guarding their territory. Few publications were brave or rash enough to attempt a genuinely interdisciplinary approach. We wanted to try to change that. North-west England is the focus, but not the narrow obsession, of this book. We recognise that it is only a small part of the wider Viking world. Even in Britain it is perhaps overshadowed by York, the Danelaw, and Orkney and Shetland. Its near (and inter-visible) neighbour the Isle of Man gives its Viking past a higher cultural profile, and just across the Irish Sea the great trading town of Dublin once stood pre-eminent in the western Viking World.^ Yet the Viking Age of north-west England has some intriguing facets: A number of distinctive localised settlement areas, with strong concentrations of Scandinavian place-names; some exciting excavations but many unanswered questions as to the extent of Viking settlement; rich surviving traces of Viking dialect in local speech and folklore; the largest Viking silver hoard yet known, from Cuerdale (Lancashire), and a rash of recent hoard discoveries. It has also produced some of the most promising biological data from genetic sampling programmes in the modern population, which is reason in itself to merit a reappraisal of the Viking influence in the region. Whatever flows from this will have much to say about north-west England but, we hope, potentially something useful to say about the rest of the Viking World.^ The basis of this book was an inter-disciplinary conference, held at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, in November 2010, as a key part of the Footsteps of the Vikings project, funded by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund"--Provided by publisher.