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Today marks my last official day on my project @GentesDanorum! To say I've been working a lot on identity -- professionally and personally -- over these past 26 months would be an understatement. So, a little thread may be in order?
For past identities, finding self-identifications is gold. If, like me, you study those people who show up in ships on the shore, you know what the people on the shore who wrote it down called them, but whether that's what they called themselves is a different story.
Looking for ethnic self-identifications in 8th-11th century Scandinavia is very difficult. They are very rare in rune-stones, where familial relationships and titles are the main things in establishing the commemorated person's relevance.
The identifications we do find are not strictly self-identifications either, but those applied by the commemorators to the deceased. And there are complicated cases, like the delightful Sædinge Stone (DR 217) on Lolland in Denmark: https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?id=19041&if=runic&table=mss
The deceased is described as 'the most resolute of the Sunder-Swedes and South-Danes' and 'the best of the Northmen'. In context, this seems to refer to Swedish-Danish competition in the Baltic, while Northmen ('af nurminum sem baistr') is generically Scandinavian.
Lolland being an area where there was also Slavic settlement, this differentiation of someone as a 'northman' seems significant. Another place we see this is in the Old English account of Ohthere's journeys in the far north among the Sami.
Ohthere describes himself as a norðmon, and I would argue that this primarily distinguishes him from the Sami. The fact that the northern Norwegian power centre at Lade seems to have derived considerable benefit from this northern trading route suggests to me that...
...this would be an area where the more generic term Northman/Norðmaðr/etc. could begin to acquire a more focused meaning as 'Norwegian' -- perhaps around the late 10th century, under Jarl Håkon of Lade, really the first historical ruler to rule anything resembling Norway.
Not only Harald Fairhair but his successors are not firmly historical, and in a forthcoming article I argue that the later depictions of Håkon the Good and Håkon Jarl could have derived from a single person. (Some of you know I've been tinkering with this theory for years.)
Anyway: if you're interested, you'll find this in more detail on this in two forthcoming articles I wrote in 2019, and the monograph I've been working on this year.
Some other more personal thoughts to follow in a second thread!
Some other more personal thoughts to follow in a second thread!
