(Mythical) Battles in Medieval Scandinavia

This chapter uses Lincoln’s critical analysis of myth to examine various medieval poetic and historiographical accounts of the battle of Hjørung Bay, fought by Danes and Norwegians off the coast of Norway in the late tenth century.. These accounts, which for the most part postdate the battle by some two hundred years, are compared not to reconstruct the event itself but rather to identify the political subtexts embedded in them. It argues that these battle narratives, like cosmogonic myths in other contexts, have played a key ideological role in the construction of social and political identities from the medieval period to the present.