« Carnivalia | Main | The Sorrows of an Underfunded National Gallery »

July 3, 2007

Vikings on the Edge

I noticed an article at 24 Hour Museum (what a great site!) about a loan from the British Library to the Manx Museum - returning the Chronicle of the Kings of Mann and the Isles for an exhibition in the new Viking and Medieval galleries. If you click you can see a not terribly impressive page - but scroll and see the map with the kingdom highlighted (highlit?) on the map. This was one of those kingdoms put together out of isolated bits and pieces - an edge kingdom.

The main part of the manuscript is believed to have been written at Rushen Abbey on the island around 1257 as a look back at significant events in Manx history. Written in Latin, it records the island’s role as the centre of the Norse Kingdom of Mann and the Isles.

Several notes taking the Chronicle up to 1316 were later added by the abbey’s Cistercian monks. After the abbey was dissolved in 1540 the manuscript is thought to have passed through a number of private hands until becoming the property of Sir Robert Cotton, whose collection of medieval works was one of the founding collections of the British Museum and are now cared for by the British Library.

The Manx Museum's own site, and their summary of the period covered in the manuscript.

I'm thinking a lot about the Vikings right now - or actually trying not to think so much about the Vikings, because I have other things on my plate that are even more urgent. I'd much rather be thinking about the Vikings - my colleague and I are teaching our Medieval Art & Literature course on them. Let me tell you one thing - there's no book that I've found on Vikings and art worth buying for an undergraduate.

I've looked at a lot of maps lately, and Viking arrangements do have this quality of trickling outwards. The political organizations, at least as abstracted on maps, don't show much sign of interest in coterminous territory. Maybe that's caused by the wandering/trading/raiding pattern of picking up possessions here and there. Maybe it's just an abstraction of the mapmakers - maps of medieval power arrangements are even more absurdly abstracted frozen moments than most other periods. In this case, the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles probably never had the same territory for a whole generation, and only an occasional claim to sovereignty after the first two or three kings. Norse domination, Scots domination, English domination - and still today it's not a part of Great Britain, but a lordship of the Queen, like Sark, I guess.

All in all, the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles will make an interesting 20 or 30 minutes next semester. I guess I can count this blogging episode as course prep. BIG SIGH

Posted by CrankyProfessor at July 3, 2007 7:23 AM