Prof. Dr. Stefan Brink

Scandinavian Slavery

An early stance in research, emanating from the 19th century, was that Early Scandinavian society was an egalitarian peasant society, with free farmers, kings and chieftains. In the Icelandic sagas and the earliest provincial laws there were, of course, mentions of slaves, most commonly known as þrælar. Hence, the existence of an unfree class was known. Kings could have many þrælar, farmers some. This fact did not alter the view of the prehistoric society; it was still looked upon as fairly homogeneous. When the topic has been under analysis, the two main sources consulted have been the provincial laws and the Icelandic sagas; the former evidencing the last phase of thraldom in Scandinavia with the manumission of thralls, and for the latter sources – the sagas – we always have the creeping suspicion that they describe more the time of the writing of the sagas (thus mainly the thirteenth century) and what these authors thought of or had heard of thraldom in the Viking Age. What we can deduct from the stories is the fact that many of the thralls in Iceland seem to have been seized abroad; very often slaves from Ireland are mentioned.

The provincial laws are the most important sources for us in our study especially of medieval slavery (hence from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries). Here we get a wide range of terms for slaves, and we get an insight into the judicial dependence of the slave in society; I assume there must have been legal rules in these laws, which were based on old customs, hence older than the Middle Ages. In order to understand prehistoric slavery, and to complement what we can learn from the laws, archaeology, onomastics, and especially the semantic and etymological analysis of slave terminology are vital. In my analyses of Scandinavian slavery I am able to show the social, legal and linguistic complexity we had: I can identify what must have been chattel slaves (þræll); female household slaves (ambáttr, deigja); household slaves being part of the (extended) family (fostra, fostre); stewards, even a King’s stewards at a royal manor (bryti). You could be captured and taken as a slave, you could be sentenced (for a time-limited period) into slavery for some criminal offence, or you could voluntarily step, or sell your children, into a slave status, due to handicap, old age or poverty, to be taken care of. This kind of etymological and semantic analyses of terms for slaves proves to one of the best tools for understanding a prehistoric (i.e. pre-c. 1100) slavery, and servitude and dependency in general, in Scandinavia.
In the project I am going to pursue at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies I will broaden my earlier research, which has been focused on the Viking Age, and analyse the early Scandinavian laws. We have now a new research situation thanks to my project Medieval Nordic Laws (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/medieval-nordic-laws/), with new analyses of all the earliest laws in Scandinavia and the ongoing publication of these laws (https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Medieval-Translations/book-series/RMT).

I am also going to historically contextualize Scandinavian slavery activities in the light of the new results which has been produce by especially Michael McCormick (Harvard). We are today faced with a new Stand der Forschung in this field, mainly due to three things:

1. The huge impact of DNA analyses, and especially the cooperation between Humanities (History/Archaeology/Comparative Linguistics) and Science (DNS and Isotope analysis), by teams of scholars lead by e.g. Professors Patrick Geary IAS, Princeton, Michael McCormick, Harvard, Kristian Kristiansen, Gothenburg and others, painting a new and exciting picture of our pre-history, which forces us to revaluate our present stances.
2. New Archaeological findings in Eastern Europe since the 1990 of Scandinavians penetrating todays Russia, and our knowledge of the trade, settlement and impact of the Scandinavians in the East has dramatically changed the picture. The driving force here seems (again) to have been slave trade with the goal to get hold of silver. To this picture we can today also bring in linguistics and terms for slaves, such as the word kæfsir (see Brink 2019).
3. The new stance regarding early trade and economy in Europe, going back to Henri Pirenne, via Richard Hodges, to Michael McCormick, where the latter has convincingly been able to show that in the period second half of the first millennium Europe was able to achieve a “positive” trading balance, and this mainly thanks to export of people, slaves, which in his words was the Birth of European Commercial Economy. In this achievement Scandinavian Vikings were a major player, opening up new trading routs in northern Europe, to the west, but more importantly, to the East. The Vikings became a major player in this slave-trade economy.

My contribution to the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies programme will firstly be to develop a ‘Grammar of Dependency’ for Scandinavia, for the period which saw an ‘indigenous’ slavery in society, that is early Scandinavia up to c. 1350. I have already shown, in my book from 2012, that this terminological analysis is probably the best possibility to grasp the extent and the complexities of this slavery and servitude.

I would secondly also like to combine this philological/linguistic research with the new knowledge we have from Archaeology and History, and especially the new insight we are getting thanks to the ongoing cooperation between teams in the Humanities with teams of Science (esp. DNA) scholars.