Living space

CHAPTER SIX

NAMING THE LAND

Stefan Brink

T

he Viking Age in Scandinavia is – unlike in Francia, Ireland and Anglo-Saxon
England – a prehistoric period, hence with practically no written sources. To be able
to write the Viking history for Scandinavia we therefore have to rely upon other sources,
of which archaeology, of course, is the most important. Another vital source are the
place names, especially the names of settlements.

BACKGROUND TO THE TOPONYMIC STUDY

IN SCANDINAVIA

The study of place names (toponymy) has a long history in Scandinavia, being more or
less the cradle of research in this field. A couple of Scandinavian historians and especially
philologists produced some groundbreaking research in this field in the nineteenth
century; one to be mentioned is Oluf Rygh, Professor of Archaeology in Oslo, and the
founder of the series Norske Gaardnavne, which would become a foundation and guide-
line for future research.
What these early founders of the discipline were attracted by was the possibility
of extracting historical information from the old place names after they had been
scrutinised and interpreted in a linguistically solid way, according to known language-
historical rules. This material also lacks the problems related to letters, hagiographies
and chronicles, which are nearly always biased in some respect and difficult to use. On
the other hand, although the place names are linguistic entities, we do not get the full
historical narratives, only a contextual hint. But since place names are a mass material,
their potential as socio- and cultural-historical sources becomes great.
Place names have recently been highlighted again for their potential in landscape
studies (Tilley 1994 : 18 f.). Since every name carries some historical information, place
names can make the landscape ‘speak’ to us. The names give another dimension to the
silent archaeological sources. They become small narratives that can be used in retelling
the history of an early landscape, a field of research that I have called spatial history, hence
whose aim is to write a history where people are not the agents, but the landscape is.
A crucial prerequisite for using place names in this way is to have them dated. This
problem has been discussed for nearly two centuries, and we now have a fairly solid