2024
Major research to investigate legacy of the Vikings in Europe
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- UCC researcher to lead European-wide project investigating how ideas, misinformation and extremist narratives about the Vikings spread.
- Dr Birkett awarded €2m European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to lead research on the legacy of the Vikings.
- NorseMap will adapt large-scale citizen science mapping to the humanities.
A major project has received significant European Union (EU) funding to map the complex history of the Vikings across Europe and investigate the impact of the Vikings on politics, culture and identity.
Between the 8th and 11th centuries, the Vikings traded, plundered and conquered their way across Europe. They left lasting legacies in many countries, from Ireland in the west to Spain in the south and Ukraine in the east. The lands they settled – including Normandy, England and the Scottish Isles – became integrated into developing European states, and the legacy of their presence on language, literature, placenames and popular culture survives to this day.
Now Dr Tom Birkett, a researcher at University College Cork (UCC), has been awarded a €2m European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to investigate how ideas, misinformation and extremist narratives about the Vikings evolved.
A unique crowdsourced map, NorseMap will, with the help of the public, attempt to map how Vikings are understood across Europe and investigate how the modern understanding of the Vikings has developed over a thousand years and been reimagined in increasingly diverse ways.
European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants aim to support outstanding scholars and scientists as they establish independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas.
The five-year project will explore how perceptions of the Vikings have developed to reflect the politics, identities and cultural memories of different communities across Europe.
The Vikings are everywhere we look in the modern world
Researchers at UCC will interrogate the extent to which the ‘Viking’ is a construct used to project values and identities onto the past. Achieving this will help researchers to measure the impact of a historical phenomenon on the present, and to understand how ideas – including misinformation and extremist narratives – develop and spread.
Dr Tom Birkett, Senior Lecturer in Old English and Old Norse in UCC College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, said: “The Vikings are everywhere we look in the modern world, used to entertain, sell products, promote tourism, underpin political movements, and support diverse identities. NorseMap asks how is the Viking past used today, and how has public understanding of the Vikings evolved over time?”
NorseMap will make a step change in cultural heritage crowdsourcing, taking the model of app-based geographic information system (GIS) mapping used for large-scale citizen science documentation projects and adapting it to the humanities.
Reorienting the discipline to map the Viking legacy will entail drawing together various strands of reception history – Literature and Art; Branding and Tourism; Politics and Identity – and demonstrating how they have interacted to create a uniquely pliable cultural memory. The resulting Deep Map of reception will reveal the multiple influences that intersect in any individual reimagining of the Vikings and open up new ways of thinking about the remediated past.
Dr Tom Birkett said: “I am excited to lead a project that takes on such a big challenge and that hopes to get people involved in mapping the Vikings across Europe. The Vikings are popular for a reason, and this project hopes to find out why, and what impact this period of history has on our politics, our culture, and our European identity. It has the potential to not only change the way that we carry out reception studies, but also how we think about history and the role we all play in creating it.”
Professor John F. Cryan, UCC Vice President for Research and Innovation said: “Congratulations to Tom on securing such a highly competitive and prestigious ERC Consolidator Award. I welcome the opportunities that this award will offer Tom to expand his research team and further develop the international impact of his work. I look forward to following the progress of the NorseMap project, and in particular, the citizen science aspect to it.”