Viking Blood: Premodern Scandinavia and Thereafter

What did blood mean to the Vikings, and what work did (and does) it do? This lecture will follow blood’s paths in epic and praise poetry, sagas, learned literature, and art from the Scandinavian Middle Ages.

It is perhaps no surprise that blood was a powerful medium in Viking Age and Medieval Scandinavia. Blood has remarkable physical properties—its colors, temperatures, smells, tastes, and consistencies are unique and strange—and a deep connection to human and animal life and death.

Blood flows through ancient epic and religious texts, western medieval medicine, Iberian canon law, pre-Columbian art, Hawai’ian sacrificial ritual, American slave markets, and contemporary practices from adoption and blood donation to street protest.

Its traces connect the apparently disparate domains of kinship, sacrifice and war, testimony to its oceanic quality. But blood also divides, between killer and victim, animal and human; and encloses, most notoriously in the case of religious communities.

By the fifteenth century, blood had begun its grim career as a signifier of a distinction among people, that of race. The lecture will conclude by touching on its role in twentieth-century racist and antifeminist ideas about medieval Scandinavia, and in our own ideas of “the Viking.”