Hudson, Benjamin, ed. Studies in the
Medieval Atlantic. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
Reviewed by: Jana K. Schulman (jana.schulman@wmich.edu)
This collection of seven essays originated at a conference, Sailing the Western Sea: The Atlantic Ocean
in a Medieval Perspective, held in March 2009. The volume’s purpose is to draw attention to
the Atlantic Ocean, in all its vastness, and its impact on those who lived
along it. Hudson, in his Prologue, sets
the context for the essays that follow, tracing references to the Atlantic from
the earliest times, specifically those that highlight the distances and the
interconnectivity, by means of travel, of those sailing it. In the next four sections, he discusses the
coming of Christianity and how it brought more deep sea navigation as saints
and missionaries traveled by sea; the Vikings and their mastery of the sea; how
the ocean contributed to trade and commerce; and, finally, how the Atlantic led
to conquest, colonization, and subsequent support of commerce. What is unusual about Hudson’s Prologue is
that he does not discuss the seven essays at all, which is both good and
bad. The good is that the focus stays on
the ocean itself, the bad is that there is no attempt to explain how the essays
relate to each other; as someone whose field is more literary than historical, more
focused, perhaps on Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Iceland, I would have
liked an expert’s introduction that not only established the importance of the
medieval Atlantic, but also explained the relevance of and connections between the
seven essays.
Part I, Transnationalism and Environment, includes three
essays: Alfred Siewers’s “Desert Islands: Europe’s Atlantic Archipelago as
Ascetic Landscape”; Vicki Szabo’s “Subsistence Whaling and the Norse Diaspora:
Norsemen, Basques, and Whale Use in the Western North Atlantic, ca. AD
900-1640”; and Thomas Haine’s “Greenland Norse Knowledge of the North Atlantic
Environment.” All three of these essays
actually focus on the environment, but it is not obvious to this reader how any
of them relate to the first word of the section heading, Transnationalism.
Siewer’s essay is very theoretical, and is also
philosophical in tone. Siewers, who has
written on the environment and on ecocritical approaches to literature, argues
that literature has an environmental function and that such literature is
important because it illuminates the role the Atlantic played in the lives of
the literature’s authors. The essay focuses mostly on early Irish literature,
but Siewers also mentions Beowulf and
frames the essay with reference to James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, The Deerslayer. Siewers argues that the sea is both a
connector and a divider, that it is otherworldly, particularly as articulated
in early Irish literature, that it is more fluid than one would expect, and
that close study of diverse, early texts informs us as to how to read the image
of the sea.
Szabo’s essay is a fascinating analysis of how the Norse
used and acquired whales. She argues
that, unlike the Basques who actively pursued whales and eventually developed a
reputation for and a business of this, the Norse did not. Instead, the Norse made use of whales only
when they drifted ashore. Consulting
legal texts, sagas, and the archeological record, Szabo concludes that whales
“were not the chosen food for the boldest Norsemen” (84); that people in
Iceland were glad to have whale meat only in times of famine; and that a
cultural reluctance or refusal to actually hunt whales might have contributed
to the Norse extinction in Greenland.
Haine’s essay examines what the Greenland Norse knew about
the North Atlantic; focusing on oceanographic phenomena—such as the tides, non
tidal ocean currents, surface water properties, and sea ice—and their relationship
with and need for wood, he argues that they, because of their environment, had
to know much about the sea, weather, and ice surrounding them. The section on
wood is fascinating. Haine begins it by discussing what the Greenland Norse
would need wood for (most necessary was good quality wood for building and
repairing ships) and how they could obtain wood. He identifies four sources of wood: native
Greenlandic wood, which was inadequate for building large structures; imported
Norwegian wood, which was a vital source; harvested timber from Markland, also
a vital source; and driftwood, whose supply would vary from year to year. The Greenland Norse, Haine concludes, would
have paid close attention to ocean currents and sea ice as these would have an
impact on the kind, amount, and quality of driftwood that came upon their
shores. Unfortunately for the Greenland Norse, “these wood sources declined
during the Norse Greenland occupation, especially toward the end” (115).
The second part of the volume, Colonialism, includes four
essays: Christopher Fee’s “Med Lögum Skal
Land Vort Byggja (with law shall the land be built): Law as a Defining
Characteristic of Norse Society in Saga Conflicts and Assembly Sites throughout
the Scandinavian North Atlantic”; R. Andrew McDonald’s “The Manx Sea Kings and
the Western Oceans: The Late Norse Isle of Man in its Norse Atlantic Context,
1079-1265”; David Beougher’s “More Savage than the Sword: Logistics in the
Medieval Atlantic Theatre of War”; and Kelly DeVries’s “Into the Atlantic or
into the Mediterranean? Spanish Military Choices in the late Fifteenth and
early Sixteenth Centuries.” The title of this part does not seem to be the best
given the essays in the section; what is meant exactly by “colonialism”? Fee’s
essay is not necessarily about taking over or settling a country, but about the
importance of law as evidenced in place names. McDonald’s essay examines
battles between the Manx and those peoples on neighboring islands among other
things that set the Manx kings apart. Beougher’s essay focuses only on
logistics, on how different countries organized and supplied their armies; at
no point does he discuss anything to do with attempts to take control of
another country. Finally, DeVries’s
essay is about colonizing the New World to some degree, but is more an analysis
of why it took Spain so long to actually realize wealth from the New World. The title of this section does not encompass
the ideas or investigations of the essays contained within it.
In his essay, Fee investigates place names on the Isle of
Man, Shetland, and Iceland, focusing specifically on the names Tynwald, Ting
Wall Holm, and Thingvellir. All three
names contain the element “þing,” which in Old Norse-Icelandic refers to the parliament and the assembly site
itself. According to Fee, the fact that
all three islands have places that are physical monuments to assembly places in
addition to the relevant place names provides evidence of the importance of a
cultural self-identification as Norse as well as the importance of law
throughout the Atlantic where the Norse settled.
McDonald examines the position of the Isle of Man and the
role of the Manx kings in the broader context of the North Atlantic world.
Noting the strategic placement of Man, between Britain and Ireland, McDonald
argues that it is not at all surprising that the Manx people were excellent
sailors. Much of the information about
the Manx comes from a chronicle, the Chronica
regum mannie et insularum or Manx
Chronicle. From this, we learn that the ruling dynasty was founded by Guðrøðr
Crovan and that his descendants ruled until 1265. We also learn that the Manx were well
respected as sailors and warriors, often hired as mercenaries. McDonald’s essay
establishes and stresses the connections that the Manx had with Norway,
Shetland, the Orkneys, and the islands—Lewis and the Hebrides in particular—both
in terms of trade networks and sea voyaging.
Beougher’s essay is absolutely fascinating. In his examination of the logistics necessary
to feed and provision armies, he focuses on four different military theatres
(Carolingian, Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Irish), and three different
aspects of logistics (assembly of troops, rations and what people ate, and
transportation of those provisions). Beougher demonstrates that Charlemagne got
around some problems of provisioning troops by requiring his men to appear with
three months worth of food supplies (187).
He also analyzes what a daily ration would need to be (1-2 kilos of
bread daily supplemented with meat and drink) and how many carts would be
needed to transport all the food, clothing, tents, baggage, and equipment to
prepare the food. Given the magnitude of
this undertaking, it is not at all surprising that having waterways to transport
food and other provisions makes it easier. Iceland and England provide
Beougher’s second and third logistical models, differing from the Carolingian
and the Irish. In Iceland, most battles
were small and involved groups of men moving over the land, either with their
own provisions or with access to supplies freely provided from others. Beougher
cites Flosi’s gathering of men from his quarter in Iceland and their movement
over land to attack Njal. In England, the Anglo-Saxons were involved primarily
in coastal defense; the nobles came when called and farmers and workers
supported them. In Ireland, little
information exists about how people moved about, but it is clear that people
involved in battles relied on horses and cattle because they moved themselves
(and thus the men had beef to eat). In other words, having cattle to eat made
the lack of roads less of an issue. All
four of these models combine to demonstrate that extended fighting could not be
sustained, with one exception, and that the kings and peoples of these four
countries were well aware of how to work with what they had.
DeVries analyzes what Spain preoccupied itself with in the
fifty years after Columbus died: the Spanish monarchs focused on their
interests in the Mediterranean because these interests were known producers of
wealth. He argues that the New World
needed to pay its way and that until this happened or was perceived to happen,
Spain would invest its funds in known commodities (209). For some sixty years, from 1494 to 1559,
therefore, Spain was at war with France over holdings in Italy. According to
DeVries, Italy was so much more important economically to Spain that Spain chose
to ignore the threat of the Ottoman Empire; even though Columbus’s voyages were
couched in the language of conversion, the Spanish did not pay attention to the
Muslims. Greed trumped spreading the
Christian faith as a motivation to wage war (221).
The volume, while a collection, lacks not only an
introduction to the essays, but also standardization of spelling; it is truly
as if each essay stands alone and no one has sought consistent spelling or
proofread the essays. There are typos in
the prologue and most of the essays (I mention only a few: “upstream on even on
minor rivers” p. 10; “for those who refuse to divided fairly” p. 69; “must have
seem” p. 217). Spelling of personal
names and foreign words is inconsistent both within essays and between them. In
Fee’s essay, he spells lögum in his
essay’s title with an umlaut, but does not do so in any other words where one
would expect that: lögberg, lögsögumaðr. The absence of the appropriate diacritical
marks is made more noticeable because the author of the next essay, McDonald,
does not omit any of the special characters. Furthermore, Beougher mentions two
of the same people that McDonald does, a certain Svein and Holdboldi, but
spells one of their names differently from McDonald, who uses the Icelandic
spelling (Sveinn).
Other inconsistencies and lack of proofreading abound. In Fee’s essay, the quote from Njal’s saga has vort ‘our’, but the word has been translated as the definite
article, ‘the’. Also, referring to Njal’s
saga both as Njalssaga and Brennu-Njal is confusing for a reader
not familiar with the Icelandic titles of the saga. In two quotations from an
essay by Gillian Fellows-Jensen, Fee has introduced errors. In McDonald’s
essay, there are fewer errors, but one particularly irritating error is a
reference in note 14 to note 186 for a further discussion. While I would have liked to read the promised
discussion, there is no note 186.
Further problems that may derive from the essay authors’
diverse backgrounds and/or from an audience that is never defined include a
reference to Njal’s saga as an
historical romance (Beougher, p. 189); Siewers’s contention that Beowulf’s fights
with Grendel and his mother reflect “Anglo-Saxon colonialism” (37); and Haine’s
figures that seek to provide information about the sea’s currents, temperature,
and salinity. What is Siewers’s evidence for Beowulf’s
fights reflecting Anglo-Saxon colonialism?
Given that Grendel comes into Hrothgar’s hall, who is the colonizer?
Speaking to the issue of saga-genre in Beougher's essay, Njal’s saga is not an
historical romance; it is one of the sagas of Icelanders, which means that it
has historical elements; it is never classified as one of the romances. Finally, Haine’s figures, found in
his essay’s first section, Norse Environmental Knowledge, indicate currents,
temperatures, and salinity respectively, but these are very technical, hard to
read, and there is little discussion of what the figures indicate and/or why
they are relevant. While Haine is a professor of physical oceanography, as
indicated in his contributor’s biography, he does not consider the fact that
many of the book’s readers may not be.
Studies in the Medieval Atlantic does allow the reader to appreciate the Atlantic Ocean, its image, and its significance in the lives of those who lived on its shores. While I was extremely frustrated by the number of typos and errors in general—errors that could have been so easily caught and fixed—I enjoyed the essays and found myself thinking about the Atlantic Ocean in ways other than I have previously.
Jana K. Schulman
Western Michigan University
Western Michigan University
