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Sverre Bagge. From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c. 900-1350. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010. Pp. 441.
In this voluminous study, Professor Sverre Bagge examines the emergence of the medieval kingdom of Norway, which was engulfed by the Kalmar Union at the end of the fourteenth century, and only later re-emerged as modern Norway at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is a part of two related research projects, "Periphery and Centre in Medieval Europe" and "The Nordic Countries and the Medieval Expansion of Europe: New Interpretations of a Common Past," between the universities of Bergen, Gothenburg, Odense, and Helsinki. Bagge himself has served as the Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen, and the book is in many ways one of the conclusions of a brilliant and prolific career spanning four decades, as evidenced in four pages of its forty-page bibliography.
Although Bagge identifies the state formation of Norway as a process that took four centuries, his main focus is on the last century, beginning in 1240. During this period, Norway wound up in the vanguard among European Christian kingdoms, stronger in many ways than the other Scandinavian monarchies. Norway then collapsed as a state in less than a century, eventually becoming effectively dominated by Denmark. Curiously, at the beginning of the period under scrutiny, Norway seems to have been a far less developed monarchy than neighboring Denmark.
The early stages of the period from 900 to 1350 in the history of Norway are significantly murkier than those later in the period, as most of the sources are far removed from the events depicted therein. Scholarly opinions remain divided on whether to accept Skaldic poetry, for example, as more or less...