Content area
Full Text
* Folke Josephson, ed. Vikings and Celts: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica. Meijerbergs arkiv for svensk ordforskning 20. Goteborg: Styrelsen for Meijerbergs Institut vid Goteborgs Universitet, 1997. Pp. 292.
These thirteen papers and welcoming address were initially delivered in late 1992. Their regrettably tardy appearance in print is characteristic of past vicissitudes in research along the medieval Norse-Celtic cultural axis, but the quality of the contributions, like the formation ofthe Societas Celtologica Nordica itself, signals a rejuvenation and reorientation of scholarly interest and of the multiple competencies, not least linguistic, required to address this complex of issues. Since the turn of the century, the focus of attention has shifted from the grand questions of Irish influence on the development of skaldic verse or on the emergence of the saga genre to more concrete issues such as the consideration of the Norsemen as raiders, traders, and slavers, the relative scale and intensity of Viking depredation as compared with that of Irish kings against their domestic rivals and neighboring monastic centers, or the impact of Norse marine technology on Celtic sea-faring.
Six papers deal exclusively and, in the main quite competently, with Irish linguistics, poetics, literature and oral tradition, and will not be considered in detail at this time. Among these, Ole Munch-Pedersen's contribution...