Historical texts as symptoms of crises

Birgit Sawyer

‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”

The quotation ‘if you ask for a monument, look around!’ is from St. Paul’s cathedral in
London, where Christopher Wren’s son had the inscription hewn in above the north portal of
the church. The originator of this building could not have been shown greater respect than to
allow his work speak for itself.
In several ways the exhortation of the inscription reflects the theme of this article, which
deals with our oldest written monuments and the importance of recognizing them as
memorials of the situation in which they were created and of their originators. For a deeper
understanding and fruitful use of them as historical sources it is important that we ‘look
around’ – on recent domestic and foreign research, within and outside our own discipline. In
this way we can also discover how the existence or absence of some sources is in itself a
memorial.

Our source-critical heritage

After the source-critical break-through there was not much left of Scandinavia’ earlier history.
The written sources dealing with the time before the 12th century consist partly of foreign
literature (from Tacitus to Adam of Bremen), partly of later domestic literature: legends,
historical works and Sagas that began to be produced from the early 12th century. When these
narrative sources were exposed to the whole armoury of criticism (nearness, tendency and
dependence) they were considered defective in most regards. Some of these texts were written
several centuries after the events they describe, and successive analyses have revealed how
their authors reshaped and “distorted” their material, and how they revised their stories and
information to construct their own, logically coherent accounts, permeated with distinct
tendencies. Therefore, the object of the source-critical historical research was to ‘dissolve’ the
medieval authors’ constructions in order to use their sources. What was left after that was a
skeleton of ‘facts’ which were considered to reflect reality; the rest was left behind as
belonging to the realm of fantasy. In the great zeal of dissolution the value of the works as
survivals remained in the background, and unfortunately has remained there for a long time.
In 1968 the Danish medieval historian Aksel E. Christensen deplored that source-critical
research had ‘almost killed our most brilliant history work’: Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta

1
Danorum. He was of the opinion that the important task remained, namely to analyze Saxo’s
work as a survival, “as an expression of the mentality of the Valdemarean period”. In this
respect almost nothing had by then been done.1 Since then, however, Gesta Danorum has been
analyzed, but much remains to be done with other twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors.
Many scholars still hold the same view as the first generation of source critics and have thus
accepted and taken over their judgements and results, as if the last word had been said. It is to
be hoped that this is not due only to respect for the fathers of source-criticism and for their
authority, because in that case it is misdirected; respect for authorities did not characterize
those who through their programmatic questioning laid the foundations of our modern
historical research. Most probably the stagnation is due to the fact that exactly the same
questions have been asked, and the same methods have been used as 70-100 years ago, and it
is therefore not so strange that the same results have been reached.2
With other questions and other methods we can reach other results. I tried to show this in
my doctoral thesis Kvinnor och män i Gesta Danorum (“Women and men in Gesta
Danorum”).3 Against the current opinion of Saxo as a loyal propagandist for the kingdom of
the Valdemars I found many examples of indirect criticism of both Valdemar and his son
Knud. Not even Saxo’s commissioner, archbishop Absalon, escapes criticism, but this is
achieved by a very sophisticated technique with which Saxo can be said to have developed
ambiguity to a fine art.4
Discovering this technique made it possible to gain more knowledge from his historical
work, not least about the tensions and conflicts that marked contemporary political reality.5
The further my work advanced, the more curious I became to know more about the earlier and
contemporary authors with whom I compared Saxo. Were they also more complicated than
had hitherto been assumed, and what could a more thorough analysis of their works reveal?
Even if much was happening – internationally – within the area of literary criticism in the
1960’s and 1970’s, the new signals had not really reached Swedish historical research, and at
my disputation (1980) I was (as I might have expected!) criticized for not having used the
latest methods of literary analysis. The criticism did not, however, come from the
opponent/history colleague but ex auditorio from a literary scientist who said that the
respondent, with her home-made methods of analysis, reminded him of the Siberian peasant,

1
Christensen, p. 42.
2
As is the case in Gahrn’s doctoral thesis.
3
B. Strand (now Sawyer), 1980.
4
Op.cit.; see also B. Sawyer 1985, pp. 33-40.
5
Cf. also Johannesson, especially ch. 6.

2
who thought that he had invented the bicycle and happily biked into Moskow, only to
discover that the bicyle had already been invented.

- and need for further education

Even if it was a certain comfort to have constructed a bicycle that despite its defects had
functioned, of course I felt the criticism, and blushingly I hurried to set about my further
education. I made acquaintance with structuralism and semiotics, theory of reception and
poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis etc. I do not know if my own bicycle
functions better now, but it is stimulating and useful to test others, and the great benefit with
such further education is that it diminishes our confidence regarding what is ¨the right”
interpretation of a text! All who work with written sources must now and then have reflected
over questions what is the meaning of a text, if it had been the author’s intention to mediate
this meaning, and if, on the whole, we can hope to understand literary works from another
culture, from another time and from another world of thought.
As historians we must of course believe that this is possible, otherwise the use of
medieval literature as a historical source would be totally meaningless. But it is useful to be
reminded how tied we are to our own time, of the risk of anachronistic outlooks and of the
importance of intimate knowledge of the authors’ world of ideas and view of history. What is,
above all, impeding an increased understanding of earlier times’ literature is the
condescending attitude, characteristic of much source-critical research. It is often said about
medieval historians that they were “uncritical”, and when they describe and judge the past
from their contemporary viewpoint, this is often explained by the authors’ lack of a developed
understanding of history’ and incapacity to enter into a past time.6
This is of course possible, but we cannot know anything about that, and what really helps
to increase our understanding of their descriptions is an explanation that does not seize upon
their supposed inability but on their ability, namely to use the past to suit their own special
aims. They were not more stupid or uncritical than us, but used their criticism in other ways
and had other purposes; to them the past did not have a value in itself; the past was something
that should directly cast light on and explain the present. In their works, facts and fiction were
often indissolubly intertwined in each other. I have a feeling that current source criticism (in
practice) does not always pay regard to this.

6
Cf. e.g. Weibull, p. 61.

3
 In order to understand our memorials we must look around. When these memorials are
literary works, it is, therefore, obvious that historians are helped by literary science. It is not
our task to become experts in methods of literary analysis, but we must learn enough to be
able to take advantage of relevant results in that field. Many exciting things have happened,
for example within the research of medieval Icelandic literature, not least within the area of
literary anthropology with new attempts to relate the contents of the Icelanadic family Sagas
to reality. The big question is what reality is reflected by the Sagas, as Carol Clover
formulates it:
we do not know whether the ‘reality’ they reflect is the reality of the
settlement period, or the writing period, or some period in between,
or all of these periods in a syncretic combination – or whether indeed
it is ‘reality’ at all, or some imaginative version of their pagan past to
which the medieval Icelanders collectively subscribed.7

One strategy is to concentrate on the importance the Sagas had for those who produced and
consumed them during the 13th and 14th centuries. No attempts are then made to reconstruct
real, historical events, but what is examined are values, ideals, social structures and causes of
conflict. Of historical interest is to relate these ideas to the contemporary political, social,
economical, and religious reality.

- and the need of Thorild’s ‘laws’

It is after all an elementary source-critical demand that we know – and respect – why and in
what context our sources were created; without knowledge about the authors’ situation and
special purposes we cannot know what kind of questions we can expect answers to, e.g. for
what kind of knowledge they can be used as sources. Perhaps this goes without saying, but is
often ignored. To take the Swedish historian Göran B. Nilsson’s drastic example, nobody
would think of using an Afghan pastoral song as a source to answer the question of the
Swedish reaction to the coup d’état of 1809.8 It is, however, actually bad enough – as has
long been done – to go to Roman and Byzantine propagandistic writings to answer questions
about conditions among the ‘Svear’ during the first centuries A.D. If material is forced to
function as a source for knowledge that it cannot give, the result is of course negative.
After critical investigation we know that the 6th-century author Jordanes’ information
about the peoples in ‘Scandza’ contains interpretations in several stages into
unrecognizability. This is a source-critical judgement. But from there totally to dismiss

7
Clover 1985, p. 254.
8
Nilsson, p. 175.

4
Jordanes as a historian, the step is too far, and so is sweepingly to generalize about his whole
Gothic history as a work of hastiness.9
When the source-criticism ends as a criticism in the sense of scrutinizing the reliabilitiy
of singular pieces of information and is transformed to criticism in the sense of blame of the
author and his work, then it is time to complete the source-criticism with self-criticism and
consider the possibility that the fault does not lie with the material but with our way of using
it. However rigorous, source-criticism is after all meaningless, if it does not take its departure
from the simple truth that we must take everything for what it is, which – to talk with the
Swedish 18th-century author Thomas Thorild – means that we 1) must know what we are
judging, 2) judge everything according to its grade and kind, and 3) keep in mind that nothing
is written for the sake of its faults but for the sake of its value.10
A view over current foreign research shows what the consequences will be when due
consideration is taken of these demands, when literary works are thus treated on their own
conditions. I will give two examples, relevant for Scandinavian history, the first about
Jordanes, who in the middle of the 6th century wrote about the Goths, the second about
Rimbert, who c. 879 wrote Anskar’s life.

Jordanes and his work

Many scholars have used Jordanes for information about the origin of the Goths and about
peoples in Scandinavia during the 5th century. He is not much esteemed as a historian; to most
scholars he appears as a naive and incompetent compilator, and the interest shown in him is
due to the fact that he mediates parts of Cassiodorus’ now lost History of the Goths. In his
analysis of Jordanes’ collected works, however, the historian Walter Goffart has turned this
view of him as a pale shadow of his great fore-runner upside down and shown that Jordanes
was really a very sophisticated author, whose intention was never only to abbreviate
Cassiodorus’ work but to use it for his own special purposes.11
While Cassiodorus (some time before 522) wrote his history when the Goths were
supposed to continue their rule in Italy, Jordanes (c. twenty years later) wrote in a totally
different situation, where the submission of both Goths and Romans under emperor
Justinianus was imminent. This is the background of Jordanes’ collected work, which as a
whole contains three parts: the two first form Romana, the third Getica, and together their

9
For such a devaluation of Jordanes, see Gahrn, p. 3 and Hyenstrand, p. 61.
10
Thorild, 1791.
11
Goffart, pp. 20-111.

5
purpose is to prepare the inhabitants of Italy (Goths as well as Romans) for Justinianus’
conquest. Justinianus needed the Goths for defence against other barbarian peoples, and
therefore it was important not only to work for a reconciliation between Goths and Romans
but also to “prove” that the Goths were in Italy to stay, and that there was no way out but for
them to remain where they were and to accept the situation.
Jordanes solved his task by presenting the history so that the unification of Goths and
Romans under the Byzantine emperor appeared as the best conceivable – and historically
given – solution, which is symbolized in Getica by the birth of Germanus, a child of mixed
Gothic and Roman blood. For the same purpose he must also extinguish all hopes that the
Goths would soon disappear from Italy and return ‘home’ again. That is why he seized upon
‘Scandza’ as the original home of the Goths, an area far beyond glory and honesty, at the end
of the world, an area he depicted as so inhospitable and terrible that everyone must understand
why the Goths had once fled from there and that no way back was conceivable.
Thus, the interest Jordanes showed Scandinavia was not geographic but was used to
refute all other theories about the origin of the Goths, at the same time as it offered an origin,
horrible enough.12 We have as little cause to use Jordanes as a source for Scandinavia’s
earliest history as to blame him for carelessness or incompetence.

Rimbert and his work

In contrast to Jordanes, Rimbert, the author of Vita Anskarii, has been held in high esteem in
Scandinavian research. This is above all due to the fact that his life of Anskar contains many
trivial and realistic details and that – to be a legend of a saint – it is perceived as relatively
‘sober’.13 Not even this traditional source-valutation is valid; in its ‘sobriety’ (= its low
frequency of miracles!) is far from unique; in hagiography there is a rich flora of legends
dealing more with every-day events than with miracles, and this characteristic of a style is of
course no guarantee of reliability.
Legends of saints were not only religious but above all church-poltical propaganda,
flourishing in times of conflict. An excellent example of this is the stream of legends breaking
through in England during the beginning of the 8th century, all of them part of an ideological
fight between two opposing ecclesiastical traditions, between the stricter Celtic and the more
extrovert, “worldly” Gallic.14 With the help of legends of saints the church tried to influence

12
Ibid.. pp. 84-96.
13
So e.g. by Gahrn, p. 3.
14
Goffart, pp. 235-328.

6
contemporaries by versions of the past, arranged to suit its purposes. Here, as 400 years later
in Scandinavia, the domestic history writing is thus born out of the literature about saints.
Vita Anskarii is also a contribution to an ongoing church-political debate. When Rimbert
wrote, the contested unification of the bishop-sees in Hamburg and Bremen still needed to be
justified, and the English historian Ian Wood has shown how Rimbert constructed his account
to satisfy those who had worked for this unification.15 The legend is an artfully arranged story
about the expansion of the church, its decline and renewed expansion.
At the centre we read about the creation of the unified see Hamburg-Bremen, and in order
to place this exactly in the middle of the legend, Rimbert dates the papal approval incorrectly
(by fifteen years). Ansgar’s successes and set-backs as a missionary are moved from their
temporal context to fit the pattern that Rimbert is following. We are, however, dealing not
only with chronological changes but also with reconstructions of contents; Wood’s analysis
shows the importance of finding what factors might have affected every single section before
using the work as a historical source.
The excursus about Sweden is not at all reliable; it consists of religious themes (God’s
revenge, stability in faith, God’s protection of those who suffer in his name), which are
illustrated with different typical examples for the edification of readers, above all of the
missionaries.

The need for a general perspective

The studies referred to here are examples of current foreign research, relevant to Scandinavian
history. There is a large amount to use – not least international Saga-research – that should
stimulate Scandinavian medieval history. I am thinking not only of the results of this research
but also of what such studies can do to increase our understanding of what functions history
writing had in the past. A part of what I here want to present is not new but not enough used
by Scandinavian historians.
Time and again we are reminded how important it is to be well acquainted with the
historical background of a work in general, and its situation of creation in particular. The view
of medieval historians as uncritical compilators who tried to preserve as much as possible to
posterity must give way to the view of deeply committed debaters of the problems of
contemporary society. They had much more short-term and concrete aims and, above all,

15
Wood, pp. 36-67. See also Knibbs.

7
wrote to influence their own time. Their aspiration was not to preserve but to create a memory
of the past, a memory in line with their purposes.
The fact that most medieval historians do not treat their own time must not mislead; for
authors who criticized current conditions the past was of course a safer arena than their own
time. It is worth noting that most Scandinavian historians avoid their own time: the
Norwegian monk Theodoricus, writing in the 1180s, has his history end c. fifty years earlier;
Saxo, working from the middle of the 1180s to c. 1215-20 (?) ends his history 1185, and the
Icelandic works from the 1220s to the 1230s, Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and Snorri’s
Heimskringla, end 1177, i.e. the year from which king Sverre’s (contemporary) saga begins.
Further it is important to observe the title of the work that not seldom conceals the sight
of what it is really about. Despite its title, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, Bede’s
history is not about the English people and its church but about the Northumbrian church and
its leaders. It is especially dangerous when a work has become known under a title that its
author had not intended; so, for example, Gregorius of Tours’ Historia Francorum is not a
history about the Franks but a manual about Christian faith, and the title is a later invention.16
What Saxo Grammaticus really called his own work we do not know either, its title Gesta
Danorum is likewise a later invention; to judge by its contents the work is rather a King’s
Mirror, a manual in statecraft than an account of “the deeds of the Danes”.
Authors’ prefaces can give clues – but only in the light of the works as wholes. When
they carefully present their informants, commissioners or protectors, already this ought to be a
warning signal: in many cases this is done for tactical purposes, namely to let others take
responsibility for the contents of the work or have a well-known authority stand as a guarantor
for the veracity and quality of the work, a move not unknown from the prefaces in modern
(academic) theses… Saxo, for example, says that he has ‘written everything down’ what has
been told him by archbishop Absalon, ‘as if it were a divine revelation’, and with that he
could free himself from all responsibility for the end result. Sometimes we encounter direct
polemics, as in Jordanes’ case, when he claims to relate a source but is actually changing and
even revoking its original message. When the named source is no longer preserved, such
polemics are of course difficult to discover, but we must watch out for the use that Saga
authors made of skaldic poetry: they treated the sequences of the strofes high-handedly and
could move them from their original context to illustrate something totally different.17 And
what use was made of Sæmundr’s now lost Norwegian kings’ history (from the first half of

16
Goffart, pp. 112-328.
17
For skaldic poetry in Old Norse Sagas, see Frank, pp. 157-196

8
the 12th century)? The fact that later authors during the 12th and 13th centuries refer to earlier
sources is no guarantee that they are faithfully reproduced.18
The way in which authors begin their accounts could be revealing, for with that the tone
is set for the rest of the work: while Saxo begins his history with the election of the first
Danish king, his contemporary Sven Aggesen begins with the heredity of the Danish
kingdom, and thus, from the start, this illustrates the different views that each work is
propagating. By beginning his history with a long description of the Amazones, said to be
Goths, Jordanes sets the tone of his work: in his – ironic – perspective all Goths are to be
placed on an equal footing with Amazons, i.e. in their generation of power they have behaved
unnaturally, and in relation to the – manly – Romans they represent female submission and
dependence, which is accentuated at the end of the work, where a Gothic woman and a
Roman man are united in marriage. And when Snorri Sturluson begins his Heimskringla with
‘Ynglingasaga’, this reveals that he does not consider the Norwegian kings to be worth taken
seriously: the Saga (of the Ynglings) ridicules their ancestors who almost all meet far from
glorious deaths: one drowns in a beer barrel, another boozes himself to death, a third is killed
by his slave etc.

The aims and target groups

As shown by Goffart and Wood, we cannot use any part of a work without controlling what
function it has in the work as a whole. By analyzing Getica together with Romana Goffart
showed how Jordanes had adapted his account to satisfy both Gothic and Roman interests; for
the Romans he had to recall the time before the barbarian invasions and show what a
parenthesis they were – there was no question about glorifying the Goths; on the contrary. But
for the Goths he had to walk carefully, and in order to be accepted by them he presented
himself as an unlearned man, himself of Gothic origin, who mediated Cassiodorus’ history
about their past greatness to his fellow contrymen. How easily he lends himself to be
considered a clumsy and naïve mediator of another author’s knowledge is illustrated by the
traditional view of him. His contemporaries were, however, not as gullible, because if that had
been the case it would be very difficult to explain all the clues that he has left: subtle hidden
meanings, ironies and ambiguities. Jordanes, like many of his colleagues earlier and later
obviously addressed two different groups of readers, one more educated, one less, and the
former understood how to read between the lines. They cannot have been as inclined as the

For a detailed discussion about Sæmundr’s alleged influence on later saga- and history
18

writing, see Andersson, pp. 198-221.

9
readers of later times to believe that men, who mastered several languages and composed
comprehensive history works, were nothing but naïve relators of other people’s knowledge.
Thus, we ought to beware of viewing an author as ‘naïve’; there is always the risk the the
naivity is our own!
Also in 12th and 13th century Scandinavia we must imagine two groups of audiences, i.e.
one of readers and one of listeners; it is clear that the Saga authors expected to be both read
and heard.19 It goes without saying that many of the qualities of the text, hidden meanings and
ironies, must have been lost in oral performances, but they cannot have escaped the audience
who had time and ability to scrutinize the written texts and study the works as wholes. As
important as it is to analyze every work in its entirety, it is to investigate in what larger
context it is part. All too often the great authors are treated as isolated, elevated and timeless,
although they were really deeply involved in an ongoing and heated debate. “The venerable
Bede” wrote his history to pot an end to rivalling views, and Saxo polemized against both
forerunners and contemporaries. As far as the Icelandic Kings’ Sagas are concerned, Snorri
Sturluson’s political aims have been the object of many studies, but it is remarkable that more
has not been done to his forerunners. What is needed are systematic studies of values and
tendencies in the Norwegian works Historia Norwegiae, Ágrip, and Thodoricus’ Historia de
Antiquitate Regum Norwagensium, as well as the Icelandic Morkinskinna and Fagrskinna.
The main question is still why so many authors, roughly at the same time, treat the same
history time and again. It is now a long time ago that the Norwegian historian Halvdan Koht
showed the way, when he wrote:
[---] we know that the time when Saga-writing flourished was a
period of violent social conflicts and I think we dare say that the
conflicts in themselves contributed to the sagas being written at all
[---]20

Historical sources as a symptom of crisis

A general perspective of not only the Norse Sagas but of our earliest history writing as a
whole can actually give us a key to understand the single works. If we ‘look around’ in
medieval Scandinavia, we discover that the very presence or lack of history writing is in itself
a monument: it began in Denmark (c. 1100) and then as a response to the ecclesiastical and
royal need for a native royal saint. It was most flourishing in Denmark, Norway and Iceland
during a very limited and intensive period, c. 1170-c. 1230, which is symptomatic, since it

19
See Clover 1982 (‘The two audiences’), pp. 188-204.
20
Koht, p. 77; my translation.

10
was exactly during this period when both the Danish and the Norwegian royal power was
consolidated after several decades of civil wars.
Thus, the production of Kings’ Sagas and royal chronicles can be seen as symptoms of
crisis, as a response to the political reorganization and a reaction to the social and economic
upheavals that followed. In the various works side-takings in contemporary conflicts are
taken; in Denmark Sven Aggesen runs the errands of royal power and its adherents, while
Saxo expresses the reaction of church and aristocracy. In Norway King Sverre himself – and
probably also the author of Ágrip – give the royal view of the developments, while
Theodoricus presents that of the church, and the author of Historia Norwegie that of the
church as well as that of the aristocracy.
The character of history writing as a symptom of crisis also helps us to understand why,
on one hand, the Icelanders were so active in the genre, while, on the other hand, The Swedes
did not produce anything. The unique literary activity of the Icelanders has been explained in
many different ways, among other things love of story-telling as the national character of the
Icelanders, the breeding of sheep, rendering rich supplies of parchment, isolated farms and
long winter nights as incitements to entertainment (!). More than such factors, however –
which do not either explain why the historical activity is so time-limited – I think that the
perspective of crisis is better suited to cast light on their interest in the past.
From the end of the 12th century onwards the Icelanders became more and more
dependent on Norwegian central power, and much of their literature appears to have answered
a need to maintain an Icelandic identity and express the reaction of the Icelandic chieftains to
the increasing influence and demands of the Norwegian church and royal power. It is also
symptomatic that the Family Sagas, which all take place in the childhood of the Icelandic
‘free-state’, flourished during a period, when the Icelanders were losing their independence.
The Family Sagas are an expression of nostalgic retrospection on a time, when everything was
better than the present, and when their ancestors mostly set good examples. The reason why
Sweden stands outside the production of history writing during the 12th and 13th centuries
does not necessarily mean that it was a cultural ?U-land?, but that there was still no political
need for it; here was no royal power yet strong enough to challenge other social groups.
When, from the end of the 13th century, that happened, the history writing began also here.
The general perspective as well as the perspective of crisis cast interesting light on our
earliest written sources: the rune-stones. Surprisingly enough historians have not used this
material very much; the kind of interest has normally been shown in single, spectacular
inscriptions, while the rest – the great majority – have been dismissed as “pure memorials”

11
without relevance to our political history. But a systematic research of all rune-stones in
Scandinavia has shown that they are more than memorials after the dead: they were at the
same time public announcements. The sponsoring of the late Viking-period rune-stones was a
response to dramatic social changes, and seen together in a Scandinavian perspective the
inscriptions are monuments after the political and religious rearrangements during the 10th and
11th centuries.21

Summing up
By way of introduction I said that there was not much left of our earliest history after the
break-through of modern source-criticism. With what I have recommended here, i.e. deeper
analyses of our sources as survivals, even less may remain: there is a risk that not even the
meagre skeleton of ‘ascertained facts’ that were left by the source-critical research, will stand
renewed scrutiny. This, however, will be compensated for, not only by the more nuanced
picture of the time when the sources were created but also by the greater possibilities they
render to understand the past to which the medieval authors had to relate. Augmented
knowledge of the authors’ material, methods, situation and purposes will make us more
attentive and more inclined to see even ‘distorted’ data and descriptions as clues to something
we must continue to look for. Even if we do not find answers, the clues can help us to
formulate new questions, and in order to answer them we must of course use other kinds of
source material, e.g. archaeological, linguistic, numismatic, and anthropological. But, to sum
up: the earliest written source material that we have, rune-stones, legends, Sagas, and history
works, are not emptied, not even fully used, at least not if we look around!

21
B. Sawyer 2000/2008.

12
 Litteratur
Andersson, Theodore, M., “Kings’ Sagas”, Clover & Lindow
Christensen, A. E. Kongemagt og Aristokrati, Copenhagen 1968 (1945)
Clover, Carol, The Medieval Sagas, Clover & Lindow
Clover, Carol & Lindow, John (ed.) Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: a Critical Guide, Ithaca &
London 1985.
Frank, Roberta, “Skaldic Poetry”, Clover & Lindow
Gahrn, Lars, Sveariket i källor och historieskrivning, Gothenburg 1988
Goffart, Walter, The Narrators of Barbarian History, Princeton 1988, spec. the chapters
“Jordanes and His Three Histories”, pp. 20-111; “Gregory of Tours and the Triumph of
Superstition”, pp. 112-234; “Bede and the Ghost of Bishop Wilfrid”, pp. 235-328
Hyenstrand, Åke, Forntida samhällsformer och arkeologiska forskningsprogram, Stockholm
1982
Johannesson, Kurt, Saxo Grammaticus; komposition och världsbild i Gesta Danorum,
Stockholm 1978
Knibbs, Eric, Ansgar, Rimbert and the Forged Foundations of Hamburg-Bremen, Farnham
(UK) 2011
Koht, Halvdan, “Sagaenes opfatning av vår gamle historie”, Innhogg og utsyn, Kristiania 1921
Nilsson, Göran B., “Om det fortfarande behovet av källkritik”, (Swedish) Historisk tidskrift
1973
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