Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;FitzNigel, post: 4532120, member: 74712&quot;]<i>Silver Economy in the Viking Age</i>, ed. James Graham-Campbell and Garett Williams, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007.&nbsp; </p><p>ISBN: 978-1598742220</p><p>Price: $130 (can be found used for less)</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1122464[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Grade: B+</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Silver Economy in the Viking Age</i> is a collection of essays compiled after a symposium on the economic uses of Viking silver in May 2000.&nbsp; While a thin volume, the essays within are particularly dense, and the shortness of many of them is a trick of the small font used in printing.&nbsp; As with any collection of essays from an academic conference, these are papers meant for specialized research, and are not typically useful for a general readership.&nbsp; Since this is also a collection of multiple people’s works, I will attempt to give a brief summary my impression of each paper (or group of papers if no particular impression was given to me).</p><p><br /></p><p>At first I found the essays a little difficult to understand, as the pictures of the coins and types being written about are not necessarily laid out in the most accessible way (such as inline with the spot of the text which covers the coins).&nbsp; This made the first three papers by D.M. Metcalf (‘Regions Around the North Sea with Monetised Economy in the Pre-Viking and Viking Ages’), Brita Malmer (‘South Scandinavian Coinage in the Ninth Century’), and Ralf Wiechmann (‘Hedeby and its Hinterland: A Local Numismatic Region’) hard to follow, but this may also be a product of my unfamiliarity with early Scandinavian coin types, and the academic discussion surrounding them (I entered into this book as relatively ignorant of Scandinavian coins).</p><p><br /></p><p>I found myself on firmer ground with Marion M. Archibald’s paper of pecking on coins of the Cuerdale Hoard.&nbsp; Archibald had some fascinating points about pecking being a potentially ‘official’ institution rather than individual’s simply testing a coin’s metal in everyday trade.&nbsp; However, the paper is disappointingly short, as the majority of her work was to be presented in a book on the hoard.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mark Blackburn’s paper on Gold in England was an illuminating take on the use of Gold in the Anglo-Saxon period - a time which has been assumed to primarily be using silver.&nbsp; A new contextual interpretation of the mysterious OFFA REX Arabic-imitation coin was given - one that suggests it was not a royal issue but an independent product of a moneyer who had no direction for what a gold coin should look like.&nbsp; This theory is supported with later gold issues of England which are similarly mysterious, but put within the context of one another, a potential path of gold production from independent issues to official minting from the same/similar dies as silver pennies is proposed.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Jens Christian Moesgaard’s “A Survey of Coin Production and Currency in Normandy, 864-945” is admittedly the paper which sparked my main interest in getting this book.&nbsp; The paper is exactly what it says it is in the title: a general survey of what we know about coin production in Normandy from the late Carolingian age through the reign of William Longsword (when the Normans first begin minting coins in their own name).&nbsp; Perhaps what stuck out to me the most from this paper is the theory of a possible Norman coin from before William Longsword (more on this forthcoming...).</p><p><br /></p><p>Märit Gaimster then gives a nice overview of the presence of types of silver in hoards (‘Viking Economies: Evidence from the Silver Hoards’), which is followed by Birgitta Hårdh’s interesting paper (‘Oriental-Scandinavian Contacts on the Volga, as Manifested by Silver Rings and Weight Systems’) suggesting that ‘Permian’ rings were a form of large coin payment, and not simply ornamentation.&nbsp; John Sheehan’s following essay (‘The Form and Structure of Viking-Age Silver Hoards: The Evidence from Ireland’) was merely a call to change the classification system of Viking hoards to one that did not stress numismatic finds as much as other types of silver (such as ornaments, ingots, and hack silver).&nbsp; Susan E. Kruse (‘Trade and Exchange Across Frontiers’) challenges some of the preconceived notions that Viking traded solely on a basic weight standard, and that an established bullion economy could only come from a more stabilized political environment.</p><p><br /></p><p>Gareth William’s paper on “Kingship, Christianity and Coinage” was in many ways the overview of Viking coinage and economy that I would have preferred to see at the beginning of the book.&nbsp; For a beginner, this is an excellent introduction.&nbsp; But at the same time, I understand it being the penultimate paper, as much of the evidence and conclusions given by Williams has been informed by the other papers of the book.&nbsp; The volume was then concluded with a similarly reflective paper by James Graham-Campbell’s final paper (‘Reflections on ‘Silver Economy in the Viking Age’) on the symposium which formed the basis of this book, but he does stress a general conclusion that Viking use of money could be split into two different “economies”: the ‘Display’ economy where one’s wealth is shown off in ornamentation, and the ‘Bullion’ economy where the weight of silver was used in transactions.&nbsp; Naturally, each of these economies could feed into the other.</p><p><br /></p><p>I regret not going into this volume with a better understanding of Scandinavian coinage, but by the end of it, particularly with Gareth William’s paper, I believe I have a better understanding of he ‘Viking’ economy worked.&nbsp; As I mentioned above, this is a volume clearly meant for specialists, and I would not recommend it for the general reader.&nbsp; However, if one of these paper’s happens to be in an area of interest or specialization (as Moesgaard’s paper was for me), then there is some excellent scholarship to be had.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in