The arrival of viking raiders in northern Britain at the end of the eighth century was the start of a period of intense social interaction with Scandinavia that would continue in various ways down to the late thirteenth century. This was of course part of a wider set of phenomena commonly but not unproblematically referred to as ‘the Viking Age’ in which Scandinavians engaged in trading, raiding and settlement in an area extending from the Caspian Sea to the Labrador Coast. Despite some rich evidence for Scandinavian diasporic settler communities across several centuries and some excellent publications, what is now Scotland has arguably been under-appreciated in discussions of these phenomena, partly due to the low level of survival of documentary evidence. This lecture will thus use what is now Scotland as a case study to outline some of the provisional findings of an ongoing project exploring the long-term impact of the Insular Viking Age on Scandinavia, along with some of the findings of an earlier project on the Scandinavian diaspora in western Scotland. It will draw on a range of sources to do so, including documentary, material culture, burial and place-name evidence, both in Scotland and in Scandinavia, and will take a long-term approach extending beyond the traditional mid-eleventh-century end of the Viking Age.

Biography

In 2020, Russell Ó Ríagáin was awarded his PhD by the University of Cambridge for a thesis on the relationship between settlement and colonialism in Iron Age and medieval western Scotland and northeast Ireland. Since then, he has been involved in several research projects, including Insular saints’ cults at Heidelberg University, the ‘Vikings in the Suir Corridor?’ with Neil Jackman for the Irish government, the history of Insular cartography at Queen’s University Belfast with Christopher Lloyd and Keith Lilley, and his current project is ‘Scandinavia’s Insular Age’, funded by the Irish Research Council at University College Dublin.