Thraldom : a history of slavery in the Viking age /
"Thraldom, the old Scandinavian word for slavery, is an elusive phenomenon characterized by different conditions of dependencies and with fluid transitions between being free and unfree; a person could be at once socially respected but still unfree; you could voluntarily go into a slavery; you...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2021]
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Thraldom, the old Scandinavian word for slavery, is an elusive phenomenon characterized by different conditions of dependencies and with fluid transitions between being free and unfree; a person could be at once socially respected but still unfree; you could voluntarily go into a slavery; you could be sentenced to time-limit slavery for a criminal offence; you could give away your child to become a slave, but you could also buy yourself out of slavery. Hence, slavery was not a black-and-white social phenomenon. You could be a chattel thrall, living in the barn with the cows, but also a legally unfree steward, living on and running the king's estate. In this study all conceivable source materials are analyzed, such as archaeology, runic inscriptions, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves. Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the Early Middle Ages, and it seems the Scandinavians became a major player in the north European slave trade. However, the hypothesis is that the Scandinavian Vikings were not particularly interested in taking slaves to Scandinavia, instead their 'business model' seems to have been to raid, abduct and then sell of captured people at major slave markets. Their quest was not people, but silver. Scandinavian slavery eventually was abandoned, a process which is very obscure, and seems to have disappeared in society in the beginning of the fourteenth century"-- |
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| Item Description: | Translated from the original Swedish into English. The result of my research was turned into a book published in Swedish in 2012. This present book is a revised translation and extensively extended version of that book. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 392 pages) : illustrations (some color), maps. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197532386 0197532381 9780197532379 0197532373 9780197532362 0197532365 |