Ebook: The Viking Age in Åland: Insights into Identity and Remnants of Culture

The Viking Age in Åland presents a mystery. Some disciplines see a (near-) complete discontinuity of language and culture from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages, which produces challenging riddles concerning the people who lived there, the societies that they created, and indeed why there would be such discontinuity at all. An equally puzzling question concerns who those people were. The Aland Islands were positioned on the frontier between Scandinavian and Finnic cultural areas, in a key location along the so-called Eastern Route that connected them. Even though Åland was not a significant political or economic center during the Viking Age, its cultural and geopolitical situation makes it extremely significant to understanding the networks spanning the Baltic Sea and how these networks related to the identities of cultures, polities and individuals. At the same time, the position between Sweden and Finland has politicized the reconstruction of history as heritage, which is inevitably bound up with current identities and conflicts. The present volume introduces the topic of Aland in the Viking Age and discusses it from the perspectives of a number of different disciplines with emphasis on questions of identities. The chapters review earlier interpretations, present current views, and also offer exploratory investigations that will stimulate future discussion and will certainly be of interest to specialist and non-specialist alike.