Final Essay: Proposal for a Viking Age Reading Packet

Due: 24 April 2012: hard copy due in class;please submit an electronic copy via Turnitin on the companion BlackBoard site, no later than 10:00am.

Interim due dates: to facilitate your progress towards this assignment, you are asked to have a draft ready on 10 April 2012 (electronic submission only – no hardcopy necessary); each of you will review two or three of your peers' drafts, returning them with your comments by 17 April 2012.

Length: ca. 1500-2500 words (= ca. 6-10 pp. double-spaced , 12-pt font , at least 1” margins), not counting footnotes, bibliography, and reproduced texts; your paper should not exceed 3000 words of your own prose (include a word count on your front page).

References: please make sure all of your references are complete and accurate. You may use any referencing format (Chicago is usually preferred among historians, but MLA, Turabian, etc. are also fine), so long as your references are clear, complete & consistent. The Chicago Manual of Style is available online.

If you are unsure how to write references, please consult one of the many aids available to you (primarily Gordon Harvey, Writing with Sources, 2nd edn [2008], but also works like Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual , 6th edn [2011], on the recommended readings list, or the Viking Age research guide webpage). If you still can't find an answer to your question, your instructor will, of course, be happy to help.

Rationale for this exercise

This assignment builds on the skills you have developed during the semester, requiring you to track down & accurately reproduce a set of bibliographical references, to engage with a variety of primary sources, and to make sense of them through reference to the secondary literature & your overall understanding of the Viking Age. By focusing on a theme or thesis of your choice & by tracing it across several sources from different periods, you are encouraged to make an individual contribution to the historiography.

Procedure

Following the success of A.A. Somerville & R A. McDonald's The Viking Age: A Reader (2010), the Vision Institute for Knowledge, Insight and Novel, Groundbreaking Scholarship has decided to publish a series of short reading packets for studying the Viking Age. Each packet will consist of a short selection of primary sources illuminating a particular historical topic, prefaced by an editor's introduction. Packet editors have free rein in framing topics through any and all aspects of Viking Age history (including material culture, social structures, customs and mores, politics, religion, literature, trans-historical resonances, etc.). For example, a packet on Norse jewellery might draw on archaeological finds, on theories of gender and status, on art historical analysis, and on modern re-enactors' experience; a packet whose topic is troll-lore might touch on aspects such as etymology, folklore, beliefs about the supernatural, landscape architecture, and contemporary fantasy literature; and so on.

You have been asked to edit one such packet on a topic of your choice, selecting the sources to be included and writing the introductory material. The publishers recommend that you organise your exposition of the topic around some theme or thesis, which you should explicate in your introduction. In order to shed light on the historical development of the topic on which your packet focuses, you are strongly encouraged to select primary sources from various eras: some from the Viking Age itself (or as close to it as possible), some from the later Middle Ages, and some from the modern period. For example, you might illustrate the development of a particular poetic form by juxtaposing evidence from a runic inscription (Viking Age), Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (later medieval), and Amon Amarth's Viking Metal lyrics (modern); a packet on the reinvention(s) of Þórr might include the story of St Boniface felling the god's oak, excerpts of eddic poetry, and the trailer for the recent Marvel Comics film “Thor”; and so on . Ideally, your selection of sources will include samples spanning the range of periods from the Viking Age (or, if appropriate, before it) to our time; at least 60% of your sources should be pre-modern.

Your proposal to the publishers should include:

• an eye-catching title, capturing the theme or thesis of your reading packet & ensuring it sells well in a competitive market;
• a table of contents, listing the primary sources (or excerpts from primary sources) pertaining to Viking Age history which you intend to include in the reading packet. You may choose primary sources in any medium: texts, images, material artefacts, film or sound clips, etc. (as well as combinations of any of the above, e.g. a coin or a graphic novel displaying both image and text). You should list at least 5-6 such sources, each no more than ca. 5 pp. in length, and totalling no more than 35 pp.; in some cases, it may make sense to assemble a larger number of very short sources (e.g. a cluster of brief runic inscriptions), and the publishers recognise the need for some flexibility in the case of sources in non-textual media;
• full bibliographic information for each of your primary sources, including both the ultimate author (if known), title and chapter or section information (e.g., “Saxo Grammaticus, History of the Danes , Book 8, § 226/271 …”) and the proximate source at which you accessed the source (in this example, “… ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson, tr. Peter Fisher [Woodbridge & Rochester: D.S. Brewer, 1979-80, rpt. 1996], p. 249”);
• copies of any primary source which the publishers cannot readily access, i.e. anything not assigned as a reading in this course or available on the open Web; if you encounter technical difficulties in reproducing a primary source, please discuss this with your publishers (i.e., Oren);
• an analytic introduction, in which you discuss the significance of the theme or thesis underlying your selection of sources, explain to the readers why you chose these sources in particular to illuminate this theme or thesis, interpret the sources' contribution to our understanding of the central theme or thesis, and refer the readers to the relevant secondary literature. Do not structure this introduction as a series of mini-discussions, one per primary source included in the packet; rather, you should write a single, continuous text which creates a framework for thinking about the ensemble of sources. The intended audience for your reading packet are undergraduates just beginning to study the Viking Age, who may have little or no prior knowledge of its history; your introduction should aim to give them the tools to read these sources, and to appreciate the theme or thesis you highlight, against the backdrop of the Viking Age as a whole. So, for example, if your packet addresses women as political agents in the Viking Age, you must strike a balance between focusing on issues of gender, specifically, and clarifying the overall dynamics of political life, in general.

Questions?

Please be sure to contact Oren if you run into any difficulties. I will be happy to advise you on where you may begin looking for sources beyond those assigned in the course. Some good places to start include the ‘Virtual Viking Links' on the course website, the recommended texts listed on the syllabus (available on course reserve in Uris Library), as well as The Dictionary of the Middle Ages and Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia , both in the reference section of Olin Library.

Good luck!

return to HIS 3200 syllabus

Oren Falk, Associate Professor

Department of History, Cornell University

of24@cornell.edu

Page last updated on: 10 April, 2012