The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination

This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an out-of-Scandinavia legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The pagan North was an imaginative region, which attracted a number of conflicting interpretations. To Christian Europe, the pagan North was an abject Other, but it also symbolized a place from which ancestral strength and energy derived. Rix maps how these discourses informed national legends of ancestral origins, showing how an out-of-Scandinavia legend can be found in works by several familiar writers including Jordanes, Bede, Fredegar, Paul the Deacon, Freculph, and thelweard. The book investigates how legends of northern warriors were first created in classical texts and since re-calibrated to fit different medieval understandings of identity and ethnicity. Among other things, the out-of-Scandinavia tale was exploited to promote a legacy of barbarian vigor that could withstand the negative cultural effects of Roman civilization. This volume employs a variety of perspectives cutting across the disciplines of poetry, history, rhetoric, linguistics, and archaeology. After years of intense critical interest in medieval attitudes towards the classical world, Africa, and the East, this first book-length study of the North will inspire new debates and repositionings in medieval studies.