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The aim of this thesis is to examine the assumption that Norse settlement in western maritime Scotland was substantially less extensive and influential than in more northerly parts of the maritime zone. This assumption is based on comparison of the apparent ratios of Norse to Gaelic farm-names in these areas; and the observation that the inhabitants of the former were Gaelic-speaking in both the Early Historic and Later Medieval periods. In view of the virtual hiatus in the documentary record between c.AD 750 and c.AD 1150 and the unqualified nature of the place-name ratios, it is suggested that such evidence is misleading. The investigation which follows comprises a detailed case-study of the island of Islay. Although use is made of environmental, archaeological, historical and fiscal data, the main focus is on place-names. Emphasis is placed throughout on the processes by which names become implanted in the landscape and the factors which affect their survival afterwards. There are three sections. Background material for the study of Norse settlement is presented in the first. This includes: a detailed examination of the physical environment, an ethno-linguistic profile for the preNorse community and a review of the evidence for Norse activity in Islay specifically within the context of western maritime Scotland generally. Aspects of Dalriadan and Norse society are highlighted which prompt critical re-appraisal of theories on Norse settlement. It is suggested that this process was not without friction. It may have involved a certain amount of violent depopulation and almost certainly led to social dichotomisation between the Norse incomers and remaining natives. Section two comprises a theoretical and methodological introduction to place-name studies. Following an overview of basic theory, Islay sources and previous approaches to Norse settlement, a model is presented for the study of Islay's Norse place-names. While use is made of both habitative and nature names, the framework selected as most appropriate is Stephen MacDougall's map of 1749-51. As this provides typologically uniform coverage of all of the island's farm-districts from a period preceding the agrarian reforms and settlement re-organisation of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it is more likely to reflect the settlement patterns and nomenclature of the Middle Ages than later yet more detailed sources. The third section, which constitutes the bulk of the thesis, concentrates on analysis of the place-name data presented in Appendices I and II. There are two main parts to this section. The linguistic back-ground, economic potential and spatial characteristics of individual farm-districts are examined in the first. Contrary to previous assumptions, it is noted that farm-districts with Norse names are spread fairly evenly across all land-types on the island. They are not primarily coastal, restricted to enclaves or less likely to include Iron Age fortifications than those with Gaelic names. Analysis of the distribution and linguistic categorisation of the nomenclature in view of post-Norse historical developments suggests that many of the island's Gaelic settlement names are the result of prestige immigration in the It century or later. This hypothesis is supported by linguistic investigation of the more common habitative generics shown on MacDougall's map. Magnus Olsen's User-group theory is then applied to the typology and distribution of ON nature-name material. It is argued that this too supports the idea of widespread Norse language use being replaced by a reintroduction of Gaelic and Gaelic naming practices. The second part of this section comprises an examination of land and territorial divisions. The fiscal 'extents' of later medieval and early modem Islay have long been considered anomalous in a Hebridean context. Examination of the historical and fiscal sources in conjunction with a geometric analysis of the farm-districts on MacDougall's map, suggests that Islay may once have been divided into the 'ounceland' units more familiar from surrounding areas. These findings are then developed in the context of ecclesiastic organisation. While certain aspects of Islay's later medieval parish system appear to reflect the military districts of the Senchus fer nAlban, it is argued that these survived through the intermediary of an Orcadian style leiðangr system of naval defence. It is concluded that while the Norse impact on Islay was less long-lived than in more northerly parts of maritime Scotland, it was not necessarily any less intense or destructive with regards to the pre-existing ethno-linguistic identity.

Events characterised as "natural disasters" now had an impact on early medieval Europe (c. AD 476-1054), but previous attempts to measure said impact have been hindered by ambiguous terminology. This study reviews the modern mainstream concept of "natural disaster," defined most broadly by The Asian Natural Disaster Reduction Center, and redefines it to fit within a medieval setting. Since the only clearly discernible impact of early medieval natural disasters appears to be exploitative political responses, it emphasises their cultural rather than environmental impact. A brief review of a selection of written sources suggests two particularly high-profile links between disasters and exploitative raids by the Scandinavian raiders now known as Vikings: the first on Lindisfarne, Northumbria, in AD 793 and the second on Dorestad, Frisia, in AD 834. The two disasters, a famine and a flood, would have weakened each populace physically, but would have also weakened their resolve and capacity for defence. Informed by the emphasis of later military strategists, the focus of this study becomes the possible exploitation of disaster-induced weaknesses by these warbands. A range of medieval written sources is then examined, but because only annals provided by Continental Europe's contemporary Carolingian Empire provide the necessary extended run of precise data within a clear timeframe, the geographic focus is pinpointed upon the Empire. As the volume and detail of relevant data is at its peak before the Treaty of St. Claire-sur-Epte, when Charles the Simple granted the Viking leader Rollo of Normandy and that expanded to become the duchy of Normandy, the focus was further refined to the period before AD 911. By extracting, collating, coding, and then charting annalistic data for disasters and raids, and by using deaths of politically significant individuals and Frankish aggressions as controls, a methodology is devised to investigate the disaster/raid correlation. As the relative severity of these disasters remains unclear, corroboration is sought from non-narrative sources. While dendrochronology, (the science of tree rings), is used to help establish the broad climatic background, it does not allow for precise assessment of disaster severity. The embedded nature of Christian symbolism within Carolingian culture, however, allows for a subjective but more secure interpretation of severity through intertextual comparison of annalistic descriptions of disasters with the language of the Bible. The charted data is then revisited to find potential links between disasters and attacks, leading to the identification and presentation of four extensive case studies. The geographical, political, and climatic situation are all assessed along with the disaster's likely severity, then the attack is modelled in light of military theory to assess whether the disaster created an exploitable weakness. In all four examples this is found to be the case. Thus, the thesis confirms that one of the most visible impacts of natural disasters in Early Medieval Europe was their potential for exploitation for political gain. By then investigating the geopolitical significance of these exploited disasters, the study then points to a possible loosely coordinated military strategy against the Carolingian Empire, challenging current theories on the origins of the Viking Age in Continental Europe. Further studies into the exploitation of natural disasters would therefore provide a path into understanding political developments in early medieval Europe and especially the Viking Age.

This is a study of the Old Norse (hereafter abbreviated to ON) setr/sætr and ærgi place-names in areas of Scandinavian settlement in Scotland. The elements setr/sætr and ærgi all have a general meaning of a place for summer grazing in the hills, referred to in Scotland as a shieling. However, the related terms setr and sætr, are employed as shielings names in Norway and are indistinguishable from each other in Britain. It is only in areas of Scandinavian settlement in Britain and the Faroes that ærgi is found to signify a shieling site. The element ærgi was adopted as a loanword from either, the Scottish Gaelic àirigh or Irish áirge, both of which can also have the meaning of a shieling. What is unusual about this adoption is it is rare for a more prestigious speech community (ON in this instance) to adopt a word from, what is believed to have been, a less prestigious language at the time (Gaelic). Various scholars have looked at this question, but none have adequately explained the reason for the adoption. Much of the previous research has relied on comparisons of local farming systems that were recorded many centuries after the Viking Age. Farming techniques from the fifteenth to twentieth century are unlikely to adequately represent the agricultural situation in the Viking Age due to different social imperatives. The overall question I want to answer in this thesis, is why Scandinavian settlers in Scotland adopted ærgi, when they already had corresponding ON terms for a shieling. The distribution of ON settlement names is one of the main pieces of evidence to prove Scandinavian settlement in Scotland during this period. This is especially true of secondary settlements, such as shielings, which rarely feature in early documentation. The language shift to either Gaelic or Scots-English is likely to have led to the loss of many ON place-names, but will also have fossilised some names in the landscape. The location of these settlement names can give an understanding of how Scandinavian settlers utilised the landscape and highlight differences in the use of different shieling names. This thesis is interdisciplinary in nature, but one based on cultural and historical geography. The first element of the study is to understand why shielings developed in Scandinavian society and if there are identifiable environmental factors behind their location. Studies in Norway suggest shielings developed as a response to environmental constraints to agriculture and social pressures to produce a surplus. A locational study of shielings in areas that were the likely origin of Viking settlers in Norway, highlighted seven key locations for shielings. These locational factors were then compared to setr/sætr-names in Scotland. The locations were broadly similar to Norwegian shielings, however, Scottish setr/sætr-names were more likely to be situated in slightly more fertile locations than Norwegian examples studied. A comparison of Scottish setr/sætr-names with ærgi-names also revealed the latter to be more likely found on even richer grazing land. The conclusion being, setr/sætr had a more general meaning of a place for summer grazing, whereas, ærgi was specifically linked to richer soils and richer grazing land. This link may relate to an intensive dairy economy, something which is known from contemporary documentary sources from the Gaelic world, but has not been proven in pre-Viking Age Norway.

The interest in understanding how books move from a Scandinavian source culture to the British target culture has never been greater. This thesis analyses this buoyant demand by tracing the transmission of Scandinavian literature to Britain and its relationship with the British literary market over the past century. Through a series of case studies, the thesis examines what influences the likelihood of transmission and successful reception in Britain; the position of Scandinavian books in the British literary polysystem; how the transmission of Scandinavian books to Britain differs from the transmission to other polysystems; and how the publication practices of translated books have evolved. This approach is supported by an interdisciplinary framework encompassing translation, literary and sociocultural theories: key theoretical strands utilised are Holmes' theory of function-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies, Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, and Heilbron's sociology of translation. In addition, elements of book history and patronage theory are also applied. The thesis comprises five case studies, spanning the years 1917-2017, of which one is Danish (Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow), two are Norwegian (Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil and Agnar Mykle's four Ash Burlefoot novels), and two are Swedish (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck decalogy, and Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, now continued by David Lagercrantz). Each of these case studies draws upon a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, archival materials, interview transcripts, industry statistics, and a range of scholarship, in order to provide comprehensive and contextualised insight into the transmission and reception trajectory of its respective subject, exploring the sociological and literary background to both production and reception. The increasing commercialisation of publishing, and more specifically of translated Scandinavian literature, is explored alongside literary and social changes, with emphasis on the tendency for transmission to be most likely at moments of paradigmatic shift in British society. This is especially reflected in the emergence of genre fiction and hybrid forms of writing during the period in question. Taken in combination, the case studies generate significant and original findings by identifying and analysing overarching trends that cannot be established through examining just one case subject or one source language. They both provide an historical account of Scandinavian literary transmission to Britain during the twentieth and early-twenty- first centuries, and they identify and analyse the significant factors involved in that process. The research offers an enhanced understanding of the contemporary situation of the publication of Scandinavian books in Britain.

Despite decades of scholarly scrutiny, the politico-economic exploits of vikings in and around the Frankish realm (c. 750-940 CE) remain - to a considerable extent - obscured by the constraints of a fragmentary and biased corpus of (near-)contemporary evidence, conveying the impression that these movements were capricious, haphazard, and gratuitous in character. For this reason, rather than selectively assessing individual instances of regional Franco-Scandinavian interaction, the present study approaches the available interdisciplinary data on a cumulative and conceptual level, and combines this with the innovative use of GIS to detect and define overall spatiotemporal patterns of viking activity. Set against a backdrop of continuous commerce and knowledge exchange, this overarching survey demonstrates the existence of a relatively uniform, sequential framework of wealth extraction, encampment, and political engagement, within which Scandinavian fleets operated as adaptable, ambulant polities - or 'hydrarchies'. By delineating and visualising this framework, a four-phased conceptual development model of hydrarchic conduct and consequence is established, whose validity is substantiated by its application to three distinct regional case studies: the lower Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt Basin, the Seine Basin, and the Loire Basin. As well as facilitating the deductive analysis of viking activity for which primary evidence has thus far been ambiguous or altogether absent, the parameters of this abstract model affirm that Scandinavian movements across Francia were the result of prudent and expedient decision-making processes, contingent on exchanged intelligence, cumulative experience, and the ongoing individual and collective need for socioeconomic subsistence and enrichment.

The Internet represents an abundant source material for linguistic research, which continues to pose new challenges and opportunities on how language is used by its speakers. Its personal naming system, for example, has remained largely unexplored. Of the many facets of names on the Internet awaiting closer scrutiny, the phenomenon of usernames is perhaps the most fundamental. This thesis investigates the role they play in online life, the most suitable methods to approach them, and how they compare with the names used offline and where their place is in onomastics in general. With people’s names inevitably connected with one or another aspect of identity, this work focuses on the relationship between usernames and online identities. The data has been gathered from a forum on the Russian-speaking sector of the Internet (RuNet) and comprises all registered usernames (676 at the time of collection) as well as an extensive and methodically selected sample of users’ conversations. As a general analytical framework, it utilises Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology, which conceptualises identity as a result of the ongoing interaction that people negotiate and achieve in everyday life rather than a set of inherent inner qualities. More specifically, the following methodological tools devised by Sacks (e.g. 1995, 1984a, 1984b) have been used to perform the analysis: Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to categorise the usernames of the forum participants, and Conversation Analysis (CA), to observe how usernames contribute to the construction of individual identities. Finally, the concept of Stance, as presented by Du Bois (2007), has been used as a lens to identify relevant evidence in the conversation samples. The analysis has demonstrated the need for a systematic categorisation of usernames. The way in which they associate sets of attributes, facilitates the allocation of named entities as members of certain categories of persons. Both linguistic and typographic elements of usernames contribute to how they are perceived and what impression they create. It is also argued that usernames have an important role to play in the active and ongoing construction of individual identities. The study concludes that CMC participants operate their usernames as meaningful linguistic devices to construct and co-construct each other’s identities. CA and MCD are confirmed to be relevant methods to analyse onomastic data. This study has generated a reliable body of evidence for the assertion that usernames are far from meaningless, and demonstrates, moreover, how their meanings are established. In so doing, it constitutes an important contribution to onomastic theory with the potential to shed new light on personal naming in general.

This thesis explores the creation and resolution of environmental conflicts in modern Sweden from a narrative ethics perspective. By problematising the concept of Swedish exceptionalism in environmental questions, it allows for a multi-disciplinary reappraisal of Sweden’s international reputation as a nominally ‘green’ nation. This emphasises the dissonance between perceptions of a self-identifying green nation and idea of a sustainable modern green state which is structured in a sustainable way. In so doing, the thesis asserts the pluralistic approach to the ethics and moral identities of modernity pioneered by the Scottish political and moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre as a means of understanding the diverse and often contradictory nature of Sweden’s environmental performance. The main source material for this investigation is a corpus of circa 1000 texts in four major newspapers, taken from debates surrounding three environmental conflicts between 1970 and 2010. These conflicts are the 1970 campaign to save the Vindel River from development, the 1980 referendum on nuclear energy in Sweden and the role played by the proposed Stockholm Bypass road project in the 2010 municipal and national elections. Chosen to cover variation in location, size and time period, they yield a substantial sample in relation to the discussion and resolution of environmental conflict. These texts are listed in full in Appendix II. Utilising the theory of textual selves presented in the analytical discourse methodology of Norman Fairclough and the reflexive nature of self-identity within modern narrative, these entries are then coded. This coding uses the concept of a textual ethos developed within Fairclough’s Text Oriented Discourse Analysis (TODA) methodology. From this large corpus, thirteen specific examples reflecting these quantitative labels are more closely analysed using TODA. This pays attention to both their composition and to the wider context of the debates from which they are taken. In the detailed analyses that follow, the conflicts and their characteristics are viewed through the concept of modern non-rational doxa. This entails argumentation being based on temporally specific contexts and narratives over epistemologically coherent rationalism. Parallels are drawn between larger societal meta-narratives and values and the argumentation for specific choices about the future made by individual authors, and it is argued that the continued fragmentation of Swedish politics has implications for understanding the concept of norms and the hegemony of ideologies or ethical standpoints. Discussing the impact of such a situation on Sweden’s future development and the potential for export of Swedish environmental practice, this study ultimately posits that any attempt to replicate Swedish environmental practice must come to terms with the narrative context in which action is to take place. Finally, it speculates on the challenges of writing and arguing for truly sustainable eco-modernities.

This thesis investigates the representation of social reality that can be reflected by folk belief and the supernatural within mythic worlds created in epic poetry. Although the society, itself, can be regarded as the creator of its own myth, it may still be subjected to the impact of the synthesized mythic world, and this study seeks to address the roles of the society in the shaping of such mythic worlds. The research is inspired by an innovative approach, using James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760-63) and Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835-49) as epic models that benefit from mythical traditions. Through the examination and the comparison of these two epic collections, both of which seem to have a close association with social reformation and restructuring, the study explores the universality of human nature. It also reveals the extent mythic worlds may exhibit the ‘realities’ of their source-societies and how mythical tradition may become a reflection of a society’s transforming past modes of thinking. Moreover, the study devotes special attention to the influence of mythic heritage on national awakening and the construction of national identities. The research treats Macpherson as the re-inventor of Gaelic oral tradition with his Ossian, where he portrays a Romanticized image of a gallant past according to the norms of the eighteenth century. Therefore, the mythic world of the epic can be seen as a combination of an ancient heroic past and the aesthetic refinement of a polished age. In this framework, as the product of a society going through a transition period from traditional to modern, Ossian seems to reflect the society’s changing world-view, both celebrating, and mourning for a culture on the verge of extinction. Focusing on the Kalevala, the study analyzes its portrayal of Finnish folk belief. The Kalevala, like Ossian, is an attempt to recover ancient tradition, which seems to revolve around supernatural and divine elements, with hopes to establish a common social reality. It is an expression of Finnish language, belief and culture, whose production was prompted by the looming Finnish nationalism. Therefore, the evolving mode of thought represented in the mythic world of Kalevalaic poems, is expected and favoured by the society, enabling the epic to encourage a social reformation.