198
The examples provided above provide a
solid impression of the variety of information
that can be gleaned from these inscriptions.
They yield four names which are used in an
onomastic survey of the material. In a paper
presented at the Viking World Conference
2016, it was shown that in comparison to other
name corpora dating to approximately the
same time (specifically the name corpora
represented in the Icelandic and Norwegian
Diplomataria as published by Lind 1915,
1931), the Bryggen name corpus contains
some peculiarities that are in need of further
investigation. Despite an earlier theory by Jan
Ragnar Hagland (Hagland 1988a; 1988b;
1989), as a corpus it is closer to general
Norwegian tendencies than to the Icelandic
corpus; yet some prominent, well-used names
from the Diplomatarium Norvegicum appear
to be underrepresented in the Bryggen names.
Since both Diplomataria contain mainly
correspondence and documents written by
people with the requisite knowledge and
resources, i.e.
the upper classes of society, this
may give an indication of runes as a means of
communication being preferred by the middle
and lower classes of society. This thesis is
further strengthened by the appearance of
names in the Bryggen corpus which are not
present at all in one or both of the
Diplomataria. However, no large in-depth
studies of changing naming customs over the
course of the Middle Ages in Norway and
Iceland have been conducted as of yet. A
diachronic study of name use in Bergen,
Norway in general and Iceland will thus
necessarily remain exemplary; but since the
Bryggen corpus can be dated fairly well, the
corpus can provide a scaffolding for future
research on a larger scale.
A different approach leaves aside names
and instead looks more closely at the content
and purpose of each message in itself. Since
there is such a wide variety of texts, it seems
plausible that certain types of inscription may
point to different areas of activity in the town
landscape. Due to comparatively good
documentation of the excavation area, it is
possible to map the
exact location of a number
of runic inscriptions in the context of a unit, for
example a house or a thoroughfare. Although
the wooden sticks featuring these inscriptions
are not large – and may easily have been lost
in places where they have no business being –
it is possible to pick out inscriptions which
have very likely been deposited where they
were used (cf. Hansen 2005: 51). Initial test
runs with Geographical Information Systems
(GIS) have proven that it is possible to look at
patterns inside the larger excavation area; what
remains to be seen is how much such an
analysis can contribute to detailed analyses on
a house/street level. In the meantime, though,
an example of how the mapping of a specific
kind of inscription works may suffice.
The type of inscription chosen are the so-
called
name tags, small sticks or pieces of
wood bearing only a name and in some cases
the verb “owns”, sometimes succeeded by the
goods owned. They were used by merchants to
mark their wares. These inscriptions have been
extracted from the runic database by taking the
scholarly opinion of their use and
purpose as a
means of filtering all available runic material.
They are subsequently mapped using available
coordinates,
which
produced
the
map
presented in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Occurrence of name tags in the excavation
area of the Bryggen Site BRM 0 in Bergen (c) Elisabeth
Maria Magin, 2016.
Although only 36 of the approximately 100
name tags could be mapped during the test runs
(this being due to coordinates lacking for the
rest), so far the spatial pattern suggests that
name tags occur more frequently in the
199
foremost parts of the excavation area, closer to
the waterfront.
Since name tags
are
traditionally connected to trade and tradesmen,
this might hint at storerooms for goods located
near the waterfront to allow for easy access
when loading and unloading cargo, and it
stands to reason that traders would prefer to
store their goods close to the waterfront rather
than further back. This pattern, though, will
need to be compared to maps including the as
of yet unmapped name tags as well as the
dating of each individual name tag. These
analyses will require different approaches,
though, as GIS mapping is reliant on
coordinates. As the project moves into its
second year, these key issues (missing
coordinate
data,
in
situ
finds,
and
varying/missing dating) will need to be
addressed. However, the database created for
this project has proven to be a vital tool for
interpretation, and will continue to be
expanded, thus rendering results clearer and
more encompassing. It is to be hoped that by
the predicted end of this project in 2018 or
2019, it will have helped
to shed more light on
what function runes had in medieval Bergen
while providing new insight into the people
who used them.
Notes
1. Fights for the Norwegian throne started during the
Viking Age and continued into the High Middle
Ages. Ólafr Hettusveinn, the man mentioned in the
second inscription, can (with some caution) be
identified as one of the pretenders to the Norwegian
throne in the Civil War era between 1130 and 1240.
He was declared king for a short period before
another party overthrew him and his followers.
2. Every few years a newspaper article in
Aftenposten,
Bergens Tidende, or another Norwegian newspaper
calls attention to these extraordinary finds, and they
have been featured both in museum exhibitions and
TV documentaries. This does not appear to have had
any lasting effect on the general public’s memory,
though. For example, as of September 2016, while
the English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggen_
inscriptions), French (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Inscriptions_de_Bryggen)
and
Swedish
(https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runinskrifterna_fr%C3
%A5n_Bryggen_i_Bergen ) Wikipedia extensions
host at least a short article on the Bergen finds, the
Norwegian Wikipedia does not feature an article on
them at all.
Works Cited
Hagland, Jan Ragnar. 1988a. “Nokre onomastiske sider
ved runematerialet fra bygrunnen i Trondheim og
Bryggen i Bergen.” In
Studia Anthroponymica
Scandinavica 6: 13–25.
Hagland, Jan Ragnar. 1988b. “Runematerialet fra
gravingane i Trondheim og Bergen som kjelder til
islandshandelens historie i mellomalderen.” In
Historisk Tidsskrift 67: 145-156.
Hagland, Jan Ragnar. 1989. “Islands eldste
runetradisjon i lys av nye funn fra Trondheim og
Bergen.” In
Arkiv for Nordisk Filologi 104: 89–102.
Hansen, Gitte. 2005.
Bergen c 800 – c 1170: The
Emergence of a Town. The Bryggen Papers. Main
Series 6. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.
Lind, Erik Henrik. 1915.
Norsk-isländska dopnamn och
fingerade
namn
från
medeltiden.
Uppsala:
Lundequist.
Lind, Erik Henrik. 1931.
Norsk-isländska dopnamn och
fingerade namn från medeltiden. Supplement-Band.
Uppsala: Lundequist.
Samnordisk Runtextdatabas (2014 release). Online:
http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm
Between Unity and Diversity: Articulating Pre-Christian Nordic Religion and its
Spaces in the Late Iron Age
Luke John Murphy,
Aarhus University
Dissertation project undertaken for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Study of Religion at Aarhus University,
Denmark, completed in May 2017.
Supervisor: Jens Peter Schjødt (Aarhus University); Terry Gunnell (University of Iceland).
Submitted to the School of Culture and Society
at Aarhus University in January 2017, this
dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing
academic discourse regarding unity and
diversity within pre-Christian Germanic
religion. John McKinnell argued that pre-
Christian religion was
Both One and Many in
1994,
Fredrik
Svanberg
pushed
for
Decolonizing the Viking Age in 2003, and
Stefan Brink demonstrated intense regional
variation in sacral toponymy in 2007, leading
to a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the
idea of a single reconstructable pre-Christian
religion. These ideas appear to have broken