Introducing Telling different stories: Combining perspectives on the Viking Age

In 2021, the Centre for Viking-Age studies at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo arranged their fifth international conference, under the title The Viking Age as a Foreign Place. Inviting contributions to probe the unfamiliar, exotic and strange in the Viking Age rather than focusing on similarities and trends, the conference included a wide range of papers under three main headings: Viking Age Narratives, Speaking Objects and Human- Environmental interactions. Though these sessions brought different perspectives to the fore, they all spoke to the same core topic, namely the Viking Age as varied through the different narratives told in and about it. The following volume brings together papers that all link into this central topic, be that through examining the objectives hidden in saga storytelling (Griffiths), the power of modern stories about the past (Vohra, Gjerpe), the multiplicity of motivations and stories contained in a monument built through collective action, such as the Oseberg grave (Pedersen), or how human-animal cooperation comes into view in both textual sources and zooarchaeological data from Viking Age Iceland (Evans-Tang & Milek), to name but a few examples.