The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature

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 ances...