Landscape Interfaces. Reading sacredness and mythology in the viking landscape – an "archaeo-philologist's" approach

Landscape Interfaces. Reading sacredness and mythology in the viking landscape – an “archaeo-philologist’s” approach

Professor Stefan Brink.

A Norse and Viking Seminar from the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age. 

In this talk Professor Brink will discuss how we can “read” the early landscape in Scandinavia, especially regarding Old Norse myths, cults and rituals, using toponymy as a starter or indicator. He will present some illustrative cases and discuss how to interpret these sites and landscapes, which often have a liminal location. He calls these sites Landscape Interfaces, and hopes to illustrate what he means by that. The aim with this research is to “let the landscape speak to us”. He calls this approach Spatial History.

Professor Stefan Brink is a Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, Adjunct Professor in Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the Institute for Nordic Studies (Orkney), University of Highlands and Islands and Associate Professor (Docent) in Scandinavian Language at Uppsala University. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Stockholm and The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala. He is editor of the journal Viking and Medieval Scandinavia and the academic series Acta Scandinavica.