Heirlooms and Stories as Technologies of Memory

This paper examines objects associated with notable Viking-Age individuals who were active away from the ancestral landscapes of the homelands. Among viking armies overseas, where sites of memory could not be established, the associative significance of objects imbued with a past may have been particularly powerful. Glimpses of such objects in contemporary and later texts and legends – a sword alleged to have belonged to a long-dead viking leader in Ireland, a banner said to have been made by the daughters of another in England, a knife used by a viking king to escape from a dragon in Constantinople – raise questions: how were viking army identities created and curated? How mutable were the objects’ associations? And how were the stories that objects could tell adapted to new purposes over time?