There are scattered mentions of Scandinavian matters in ancient sources, notably the elder Pliny, Tacitus, and Ptolemy.
The runic alphabet (futhark), known from around ad 200 on, must be derived from the Greco-Roman letters and thus represents a very early ancient influence.
Many local finds of Roman workmanship testify to lively trade relations between Rome and Scandinavia during the first centuries ad. In particular, two beautiful cups decorated with scenes from the Trojan cycle were found in Hoby, Denmark. The Swedes maintained a travel route via Novgorod to Byzantium. The magnificent ships from around 850 found in Oseberg, Norway, testify to Byzantine influence on local woodcarving (Shetelig 1949: 104-5, 123). Vikings met with Roman-inspired communities during their raids to the British isles and Normandy. But coherent ancient influence only came with the Christian missionaries during the ninth and tenth centuries. By around 1100 Scandinavia had accepted the new religion.
During the Middle Ages the ancient culture that was transmitted by means of the church and its schools was almost exclusively Roman. A selection of Roman authors - mainly Terence, Cicero, and Vergil - was taught in schools, and Latin was a living, spoken idiom among the educated classes. Students traveled to seats of learning abroad in order to qualify for posts in the government and church at home, and Scandinavia had its role to play in the international Christian organizations. Also in the field of law, Scandinavia was part of a common European trend. Already in 1164 a Norwegian synod assembly produced canons influenced by Decretum Gratiani (Gratian’s decree; i. e., canon law), and this influence continues in the many provincial laws issued in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden during the following two centuries (Landau 2005).
It is impossible to say how widespread runic writing became, since in most cases only texts on stone have been preserved. But in Bergen, Norway, rich finds of inscriptions on wood from the late Middle Ages include many private, informal messages and suggest that vernacular runic literacy was considerable even among the common people. Some Latin phrases (e. g., a quote from Vergil) occur (Liest0l & Johnsen 1980-90: 11-13). Thus runes and Latin letters coexisted for centuries. In general, however, the picture we meet in the manuscript tradition is that of a culture in which the spoken language is vernacular, the written one Latin. Iceland is the great exception to this rule. Here the Roman alphabet was used right from its introduction for writing in both Latin and Icelandic, and a rich literature of sagas as well as Eddic and Scaldic poetry has survived, testifying to a lively interaction between oral narrative traditions and Latin literature. There is even a saga of the Trojan War, based on the tradition of Dares and Dictys.
As elsewhere in Europe, Latin evolved away from its classical form under influence from the vernaculars. Most written literature was composed in this idiom. However, around 1200 two ambitious representatives of ‘‘the Renaissance of the twelfth century,’’ both Danish, returned to classical models. Anders Sunesen composed a paraphrase of the beginning of Genesis, Hexaemeron (A poem of the six days), in 8,040 hexameters, and Saxo Grammaticus in his huge national history modeled his prose on authors such as Valerius Maximus and Martianus Capella, while the interspersed poems move in classical meters (Friis-Jensen 1987). His overall purpose was to demonstrate that the Danish kingdom had a glorious past, well able to compete with Rome. Significantly, the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (ca. 1178-1241) chose the vernacular for his history of the Norwegian kings.
In Sweden, St. Birgitta (ca. 1303-73) established her own monastic order, which gradually spread to other countries and even to Rome. Her revelations were translated from her original Swedish into Latin by her confessors.
The church as an institution represented an unbroken link to Roman culture, and so did its buildings. Churches and monasteries, first in Romanesque and then in Gothic style, were erected all over Denmark and Sweden, with the most lively building activity concentrated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Christian art, too, was international and in the final analysis inspired from ancient Rome. Churches were decorated with lively paintings, brilliantly colored; normally these are anonymous, but in the Stockholm area the signature of Albertus Pictor is well known. In Norway, too, monumental churches were constructed, most notably the cathedral of St. Olav in Nidaros (later Trondheim). But there smaller, local churches were most often wooden buildings in a style of their own. About 1290 a small cathedral in stone was even begun in Kirkjub0ur in the Faroes, but never finished; its ruins are still to be seen.
Universities were opened in Uppsala in 1477 and Copenhagen in 1479.
World History
