IMC 2023: Sessions
Session 1704: Ambiguity of Hospitality, III: The Norse World, 11th-14th Centuries
Thursday 6 July 2023, 14.15-15.45
| Organiser: | Miriam Tveit, Fakultetet for Samfunnsvitenskap, Nord universitet |
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| Moderator/Chair: | Wojtek Jezierski, Institutionen för historiska studier, Göteborgs Universitet |
| Paper 1704-a | High-Status Foreign Guests in Medieval Scandinavian Households (Language: English) Index terms: Politics and Diplomacy, Social History |
| Paper 1704-b | 'And to not spare any man who would cause mischief': Women and the Hosting of Outlaws in the Íslendingasögur (Language: English) Index terms: Gender Studies, Language and Literature - Scandinavian, Social History |
| Paper 1704-c | The Ambiguity of Urban Hospitality in the Norwegian Realm (Language: English) Index terms: Economics - Urban, Law, Social History |
| Abstract | Hospitality is a phenomenon that appears in the earliest Scandinavian sources. Hosting strangers that turn out to be Odin is a common theme shared by many sagas. To further explore the multifaceted reality of hospitality in the Norse world, the session consists of contributions that focus on social, gendered, and urban contexts of host-guest relations. Foreign, high-ranking guests navigated two seemingly incompatible realities - belonging to the upper stratum of society while remaining outsiders; in urban centres, guests had well-defined obligations, even though they lacked full rights. Hospitality, however, was not necessarily societally normative or legal; women sometimes offered hospitality to outlaws, even when this went against local jurisdiction or their husbands' approval. |