Original version
Avaldsnes - A Sea-Kings' Manor in First-Millennium Western Scandinavia. 2017, 765-779, DOI: 10.1515/9783110421088-030
Abstract
During many of the 3,400 years prior to the royal manor’s waning following the fire in AD 1368, aristocratic presence is evident at Avaldsnes and along the Karmsund Strait (Ch. 27). What was the nature and context of that presence, and did it change from c. AD 200 and into the 11th–12th centuries AD? Focusing on this period, this chapter, as indicated in the ARM research plan (Ch. 4), explores these issues from a central-place perspective. Centrality may be perceived from two perspectives, either from the centre or from outside. From an outside perspective a site is identified as a centre if it serves certain communal functions. Regarding Avaldsnes’ centrality from the perspective of a local aristocracy, the following questions need to be addressed: what use did aristocrats make of the Avaldsnes manor and its surroundings, and what type of authority did they exert over the adjacent land and waters? The main result from these discussions is that there is little or no evidence to indicate that Avaldsnes had communal functions of the types found in the south- and east-Scandinavian central places. Given that such functions are the basis for identifying a central place, Avaldsnes does not appear to have been a site of that type. Regarding centrality from an aristocratic perspective, late Viking Age Avaldsnes appears to have been the manor of a vast estate comprising about 70 farms in northern Kormt and across the Karmsund Strait. Some 3–4 centuries later, the land rent from the farms in the estate will have sustained 120–170 men, probably not much fewer in the 10th–11th centuries. Through most of the period, Avaldsnes residents deliberately built up the manor’s monumental appearance facing the sailing route. The land along the narrowest section of the Karmsund Strait has been used for similar purpose: two monuments in particular, one on either side of the strait, may have connected the site with Þórr, the god that protected society from destructive beings, and the world tree Yggdrasil. Supplied by yield from the estate and bolstered by myth and monuments, military dominance of the sailing route appears to be the primary rationale for aristocratic presence at Avaldsnes and along the Karmsund Strait in the first millennium AD. Thus, Odd Nordland’s characterisation in 1950 of Avaldsnes as ‘the warrior manor’ (krigargarden) seems appropriate.