The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination

This book examines the ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts, focusing on the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Rix maps how these discourses informed ‘national’ legends of ancestral origins, showing how an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend can be found in works by writers like Jordanes, Bede, ‘Fredegar’, Paul the Deacon, Freculph, and Æthelweard. He investigates how legends of northern warriors were created in classical texts and re-calibrated to fit different medieval understandings of identity and ethnicity, employing perspectives from poetry, history, rhetoric, linguistics, and archaeology. Following interest in medieval attitudes towards the classical world, Africa, and the East, this study of ‘the North’ will inspire new debates in medieval studies.