Continental Europe and the Mediterranean

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

SCANDINAVIA AND THE

CONTINENT IN THE VIKING AGE

Johan Callmer

D

uring the entire Viking Age Scandinavia was profoundly influenced by the
spiritual and material culture of Continental Europe. As we might expect,
this cultural Continental impact was most influential in the southern and south-
western parts of Scandinavia. From there it often reached other parts of Scandinavia as a
secondary phenomenon but there are several exceptions to this rule. The influence was
very significant and the culture in Scandinavia at the end of the Viking Age had adopted
numerous important cultural patterns of Continental origin. At that date Scandinavian
culture in many respects had already become a variant of a west and central European
culture. This rapprochement with Continental culture then continued in the high and late
Middle Ages. For once rather legitimate political reasons this Continental influence has
been generally undervalued by much Scandinavian twentieth-century research. As a
consequence the study of this cultural process has been neglected in comparison with the
broad study of Insular influence. Although highly relevant and indeed in many ways
central, the Christianisation of Scandinavia will not be treated here but separately (see
Brink, ch. 45 , below).
Continental cultural influence in Scandinavia is of course an obvious consequence
of the geopolitical position of Scandinavia. However, we must also consider the fact that
Scandinavian cultural exchange with other parts of Europe from the Stone Age onwards
mainly followed a north–south pattern. The east–west perspective so important in the
high medieval period and later in the modern period begins only on a modest level in
the centuries preceding the Viking Age (Callmer 1990 ). The Continental cultural
influence is not homogeneous and the process is dynamic, including both phases when
change is radical and rapid and others when culture influence is slow and steady. Also
the geography of the homeland of this Continental influence is different and changing
over time. Continental cultural influence in Scandinavia emanates from four different
geographical zones: ( 1 ) the North Sea coastal lands from southern Jutland down to the
Channel, a region often named Frisia; ( 2 ) the central part of the Merovingian and
Carolingian state including the major part of Neustria and north-western Austrasia;
( 3 ) Saxony (the heartland of the East Frankish and later German kingdom); ( 4 ) the lands
of the Slavs on the southern coast of the Baltic from the southern end of the Jutish
peninsula in the west to the mouth of the Vistula in the east. The first three zones were