Diversity and the diaspora

For many decades, scholars wrote of a ‘Viking expansion’ as a means of describing the apparent explosion of Norse movement out of Scandinavia and into the wider world – through raiding, trading, settlement and voyaging – that seemed to begin in the late eighth century CE and then accelerate over the following three centuries. We know now that these initiatives, impulses and activities began much earlier, indeed their exploration is a central part of the WIVA Centre’s mission. But over the past twenty years or so, researchers have also understood the degree of variation and nuance in this ‘Viking phenomenon’, and also acknowledged the massive component of feedback as people migrated into Scandinavia as others left, and back again: a multicultural world moving in all directions. The new identities and attitudes that such a world embodied also called for a new terminology, and we have begun to talk instead of a ‘Viking diaspora’, moving away from a monolithic expansion – with its connotations of intention and driving process, in an almost imperial spirit – to something much more layered, haphazard and involving as many agendas as there were people.

A diaspora inevitably represents diversity, the essence of all the cultures and places within it, in motion and in interactive contact. All too often, however, diversity is used now as a superficial label, applied to claim relevance for material that does not always warrant it, and this has sometimes been unintentionally the case in academia too. Facing up to this issue also requires that we recognise and address an inadvertent parochialism in studies of the Viking Age and the geographical marginalisation of scholarly research opportunity, all of this at odds with the vast reality of the diaspora. An important commitment at WIVA is an attempt to rectify this situation, to go deeper than ever before into the detail and practical realities of the furthest reaches of Norse interactions, far into the Afro-Eurasian world. As part of this, we hope to open up the Centre to scholars from (for example) west, central and east Asia, or from north and east Africa, to discover what new insights and perspectives they can contribute to a Scandinavian research environment.

These are ambitious goals and we do not know if we will succeed, but the attempt will be made. As ever, WIVA is not a research project in itself, but a platform primarily for others to take their ideas forward in new directions. The essence of our mission is that we do not know where the work of these researchers will take us, beyond the core competences of the Centre staff, but we are eager to find out.