Public Seminar Series - Placing Women, Tracing Journeys: Female Mobility and Social Bonds in the Norse Period
Mobility is about more than movement. In the Norse period, as today, it could be a form of agency, power and social capital. Yet, women’s mobility has too often been dismissed as passive, forced and dependent on men.
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Dr Andrew Lind
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This paper challenges this assumption, by examining how female mobility in the Norse period was enacted and experienced across different spaces, from movement within the home and in the local community, through to long-distance maritime migration and travel.
Women’s movement, whether local or long-distance, was not simply a reflection of geography but of social structures. The ability or inability to be mobile was shaped not just by intersectional factors such as gender, age, status, marital status and ability, but by a person’s membership of and role within dynamic, overlapping and sometimes conflicting social groups. Of these groups, the household stood at the heart of the system, providing the social, legal, economic and political basis for, and the social conventions that governed, the mobility of women and men. Yet, the people who lived outside of permanent household ties were exposed to the precarious side of mobility, where movement became a threat rather than a form of agency.
By placing women at the centre of the analysis, this paper explores how gender, status, household membership, and mobility were deeply entwined, redefining how we understand concepts of gendered mobility, power and belonging in the Norse period.
Tara Athanasiou undertook her BA degree in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge and returned to further education, after some years, as a part-time student at the University of the Highlands and Islands’ (UHI) Institute for Northern Studies. She was awarded the MLitt Viking Studies with Distinction in 2020. Her dissertation examined gendered identities in the Viking Age diasporic island hubs of Orkney and the Isle of Man and was awarded the Best Dissertation Award 2020 by the Institute for Northern Studies. She is currently a final year PhD candidate at UHI, focusing on gender, mobility and migration in the Norse period and is supervised by Prof. Alexandra Sanmark, Prof. Stefan Brink and Dr. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir.
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