Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 21
21A MutAtInG PeRIPHeRy
tive features of world history. As for more specific forms, the dynamics
and consequences of expansion are an especially rewarding theme for
comparative studies. Military expansion is a recurrent and prominent
aspect of the interaction between civilizations, but it often entails or
facilitates intercivilizational encounters of a less coercive kind; in some
cases, encounters of epoch-making significance occurred with little or
no military involvement.
An Abortive Scandinavian Civilization?
Having noted some basic points about the civilizational frame of reference,
let us now consider the case for a Nordic civilization, preceding Christianity
or at least in the making when overtaken by Christianization, and begin
with what seems to be (although often by hearsay only) the best-known
discussion of this issue. Arnold toynbee’s account of “the abortive
Scandinavian civilization” is perhaps most noteworthy for the discrepancy
between questions and answers. Toynbee’s way of posing the problem and
defining its context is still instructive, but the conclusion – his attempt to
identify the emerging distinctive features of a cultural world overwhelmed
by Christianity – is unconvincing, and the main lesson to be learnt from it
is negative: if the search for evidence of a nordic or Scandinavian civiliza
tion is to make sense, it must take a different line.
Abortive civilizations – mature enough to leave a historical record, but
thwarted by internal or external, natural as well as cultural forces – appear
in various places and periods on Toynbee’s map of world history, and two
such cases are located in the medieval north: the Irish and the Scandinavian.
The former was based on a local version of Christianity, and its fate was
decided when the Roman Church triumphed in Anglo-Saxon England in
the late seventh century. Here we are only concerned with the Scandinavian
one. As toynbee argues, its destinies can only be understood in the context
of interaction with the Roman world and its subsequent transformation.
this is a valid point, and still a useful reminder of the dimensions of the
problem to be discussed; it remains to be seen how the successive phases of
the story are treated. At the beginning, Scandinavia is a remote part of the
northern periphery, open to some cultural influence (for one thing, the