UW-Madison Department of German, Nordic and Slavic
presents

WHAT DID VIKINGS DO IN POLAND
(AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE)?

This zoom event is free and open to the public

► link to the event ◄

From the GNS website: ...We know today that in the period between the ninth and eleventh centuries the southern coasts of the Baltic were frequently visited by people from Scandinavia. Many of them probably came as traders with the hope to sell and exchange foreign goods in the vibrant and multicultural ports of trade and emporia. Some of the Scandinavians, however, had different roles to play and to achieve their goals they had to sail up the Oder and Vistula rivers or travel on foot or horseback through the interior of the emerging Piast realm and its vast forests and fields. This paper will investigate the nature of ‘Viking’ interactions in Poland using a wide array of sources. It will also seek to demonstrate that our understanding of the Viking world, its archaeology and history, is incomplete without taking into account the Scandinavians’ southern and eastern neighbours, namely the Western Slavs.

About the speaker:

Leszek Gardeła is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the National Museum of Denmark. He received his Ph.D. in Archeology from the University of Aberdeen (UK) and has published widely on early medieval mortuary behavior in Scandinavia and Central Europe. He has published over 100 articles on this and related topics and is currently working on a monograph about Vikings in Poland. He has also authored 5 monographs, with the recent one, "Women and Weapons in the Viking World: Amazons of the North," published in 2021.