Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age by Stefan Brink (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age by Stefan Brink
• John Kennedy

Brink, Stefan, Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age, New York, Oxford University Press, 2021; cloth; pp. xii, 392; 37 b/w figures; R.R.P. US$37.95; ISBN 9780197532355.

In his foreword and acknowledgements, Stefan Brink identities Thraldom as a ‘revised’ and ‘extensively extended version’ of a book he published in Swedish in 2012. Though not further identified there, the book is Vikingarnas slavar: den nordiska träldomen under yngre järnålder och äldsta medeltid (Atlantis, 2012), which was republished as a paperback in 2018. Signs of this origin remain evident in the English language book, most notably and somewhat confusingly in the use of Scandinavian periodisation practice, so that the Viking Age is ‘prehistory’ and the twelfth century is ‘early medieval’. Some of the discussion, notably in the chapter devoted to Ålmeboda Parish in Småland, is most likely to have limited interest to an audience outside Sweden.

Despite its subtitle, this book is not a history of Viking Age slavery. As the author amply demonstrates, the sources do not permit such a chronological survey. But displaying mastery of a remarkably wide range of sources, including later literature and law codes but also encompassing archaeology, runic inscriptions, place names, personal names, DNA, and etymology, Stefan Brink provides a very rich, sound, and wide-ranging discussion about slavery in the Viking period. He clearly indicates that there seem to have been very diverse kinds of slavery and semi-slavery, and he argues that, except perhaps in Iceland, slavery was not as commonplace as some previous writers have believed. Much of the book focuses on comparing Nordic slavery to that elsewhere in the world, particularly the ancient world, the Islamic realms, and other parts of medieval Europe. (He argues that American antebellum slavery was not a comparable phenomenon.) The material relating to these societies is often fascinating, but perhaps it receives proportionally more attention than it deserves for purposes of comparison. [End Page 218]

A listing of Brink’s seventeen chapters is readily available online. It reveals a wide range of diverse topics and, arguably, a relatively loose structure. The chapter entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of Scandinavian Thraldom: When Did Slavery Appear in Scandinavia?’ is the fifteenth chapter, near the end of the book, and focuses almost entirely on the origins of slavery, its ‘fall’ being outside the Viking period. Some of the material that appears is at least mildly surprising in the context of this book. The long chapter ‘Terms for Thralls and their Meanings’ is largely a moderately in-depth study of etymology. Though Beowulf is of course set in Scandinavia, it is a little surprising, in a relatively concise book, to find several pages (pp. 167–72) in this chapter devoted to the poem’s ‘Wealhtheow’, a passage of only thirty-five lines quoted in the original Old English as well as translation.

There is some evidence that the editing process could have been stricter. The recruitment in the Ottoman Empire of non-Muslim boys who were trained to be Janissaries or officials is outlined on pages 13–14 and again in very similar terms on pages 17–18. Some of the runic inscriptions transliterated, presented in normalised Old Norse, and translated in the chapter on runes receive the same treatment again in the following chapter on ‘Terms for Thralls and their Meanings’. Sometimes the text seems to contradict itself. On page 105, we read in the first paragraph that ‘probably only six (perhaps nine) thralls are mentioned in around three thousand runic inscriptions from Scandinavia’, but a few lines later, we read that ‘not a single thrall is mentioned’ in the inscriptions. On page 207, we are told that Scandinavian sources do not provide evidence for the marking or mutilation of slaves to help identify them, but, on page 208, that ‘also in Scandinavia the bestial custom, common in other cultures, of physically mutilating the face of a slave was practiced’. Careful reading can resolve the apparent discrepancies, but it is fair to say that more than usual care is at times needed in following...