Fibula, Fabula, Fact - The Viking Age in Finland

"The chapters of Fibula, Fabula, Fact – The Viking Age in Finland are intended to provide essential foundations for approaching the important topic of the Viking Age in Finland. These chapters are oriented to provide introductions to the sources, methods and perspectives of diverse disciplines so that these resources and the history of discourse from which they emerge are accessible to specialists from other fields, specialists from outside Finland, and also to non-specialist readers and students who may be more generally interested in the topic. Rather than detailed case studies of specific aspects of the Viking Age in Finland, the contributors have sought to negotiate definitions of the Viking Age as a historical period in the cultural areas associated with modern-day Finland, and in areas associated with Finns, Karelians and other North Finnic linguistic-cultural groups more generally. Within the incredible diversity of data and disciplines represented here, attention tends to center on the identification of the Viking Age through differentiating it from earlier and later periods, and on contextualizing it geographically in an era long before the construction of modern nations with their fenced and guarded borders. Most significantly, the contributions lay emphasis on contextualizing the Viking Age within the complexities of defining cultural identities in the past through traces of cultural, linguistic or genetic features."

The full preface for this peer reviewed publication from the Finnish Literatue Society of Helsinki, edited by Joonas Ahola and Frog with Clive Tolley, may be read and also downloaded at Academia.edu.

Immortal Maidens: The Visual Significance of the Colour White in Girls’ Graves on Viking-Age Gotland

Via Medievalists.net:

"In some Viking-Age (AD 800-1050) burials on Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea, a large number of white shell-beads have been recovered together with glass-beads predominantly coloured yellow, green, red, blue and turquoise as well as beads of exotic materials such as carnelian and rock crystal. The beads were part of bead-sets from necklaces worn by females. Previous research assumed that the shell-beads were made of local limestone, but analyses have revealed that the beads were actually crafted from the exotic cowry shell (cypraea pantherina), originating in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea." Read the full article by Susanne Thedéen in a PDF edition of Making Sense of Things: Archaelogies of Sense Perception, pp 103-120.