Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age

Nordic slavery is an elusive phenomenon, with few similarities to the systematic exploitation of slaves in households, mines, and amphitheaters in the ancient Mediterranean or the widespread slavery at American plantations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scandinavians in the early Middle Ages lived in a society foreign to us, characterized by different and shifting social statuses. A person could be at once socially respected and unfree. It was possible to hand oneself over as a slave to someone else in exchange for protection and food. One could be sentenced temporarily to enslavement for some offense but later purchase his manumission. Young men could enter into a kind of "contract" with a king or chieftain to join his retinue, accepting his authority, patronage, and jurisdiction, while at the same time making a quick social elevation. Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages and Scandinavians, as Stefan Brink illustrates in this book, became a major player in the northern slave trade. However, the Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia; instead, their "business model" seems to have been to raid, abduct, and then sell captured people at major slave markets. Their goal was not people but silver. Using a wide variety of source materials, including archaeology, runes, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves, Thraldom provides the most thorough survey of slavery in the Viking Age.

Table of Contents:
Foreword and Acknowledgements Prologue Introduction 1. Slavery in Europe during antiquity and the first millennium 2. Scandinavian slavery 3. Where did the slaves come from? 4. Thralls in Old Norse poetry and sagas 5. Thralls in runic inscriptions 6. Terms for thralls and their meanings 7. How were thralls used? 8. Evidence for thralls in Scandinavian place-names 9. How were thralls identified? 10. Thralls' names in Scandinavia 11. The special case of Älmeboda parish in southern Småland 12. Thralls in the archaeological material - Can we excavate slavery? 13. The rise and fall of Scandinavian thraldom - when did slavery appear in Scandinavia? 14. The status of slaves in Prehistoric Scandinavian society 15. Excursus Trelleborg Appendix 1- Historical and Archaeological Periods in Europe Appendix 2- Development of Indo-European languages Abbreviations Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Stefan Brink is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the Institute of Nordic Studies at the University of Highlands and Islands, and Professor and Researcher at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University, Sweden. He is an Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge, and formerly the Sixth Century Chair of Scandinavian Studies at University of Aberdeen. He is also a Member of the Royal Swedish and the Royal Scottish Science Academies. His previous books include Namenwelten (2004), The Viking World (2008), Sacred Sites and Holy Places. Exploring the Sacralization of Landscape Through Time and Space (2013) New Approaches to Early Law in Scandinavia (2014), and Theorizing Old Norse Myth (2017).

Review :
Timely, relevant, thoroughly researched and assembled by one of the foremost authorities on Old Norse law, Old Norse place-names, and the Old Norse language, this has to be the definitive work on slavery in the pre-historical Old Norse world. It encourages us to question of our many previously held ideas about slavery in the Old Norse and Germanic world. This study, based upon eminent insights into linguistics, history and archaeology, fills a definite gap. It is a great contribution to Viking Age studies and to studies of slavery in general. Stefan Brink is at the top of his field and no one is better equipped to do justice to the difficult and still underexamined topic of Viking slavery. Brink's interdisciplinarity is masterly as he weaves together his sources drawn from historical documents, runic inscriptions, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and archaeology into a cohesive narrative. By combining his analysis of the sources on the Viking Age with an impressive historical depth and an anthropological approach to slavery, Brink provides readers with a deep understanding of unfreedom in the early history of Europe well beyond the borders of Scandinavia. Karen Bek-Pedersen, who translated this work from a Swedish version, deserves high praise for an easily readable and learned book that deals even-handedly with numerous disciplinary specialties. This is an important book for students and researchers concerned with the Viking period, a work of formidably scholarly research by a writer with a probably unparalleled knowledge of the subject. The book stands as a welcome provocation to longstanding assumptions about how slavery worked in medieval Scandinavia, and as a challenge to confront the ambiguities of our sources in creative and diverse ways. Stefan Brink's conclusions, which are sometimes unexpected, will certainly be debated [...] Nevertheless, the method he uses and the erudition he displays are to be admired.