Tonicha Upham

“Very Unsatisfactory, Inaccurate, and Sometimes Entirely Fabulous”

Fact and Fiction in the Arabic Sources for the Viking World

Fimmtudaginn 13. mars 2025 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, March 13, 2025, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

Medieval Arabic geographical sources have become a popular source for the study of the Viking world, especially where the Rūs are concerned, and many of the surviving sources are incredibly rich. Nonetheless, scholars of the Viking world often voice concerns – about how much geographers and observers really understood when hampered by linguistic and cultural barriers, about the sources of the information used by geographers, and about the overall trustworthiness of these sources, especially when geographers begin to tell tall stories about the north. This leaves us with a huge amount of material that is neglected by scholars, both because it is not easily accessible, and because it is not considered trustworthy.

This lecture reckons with the line between fact and fiction, and the overall problem of source reliability, by exploring what the Arabic sources on the Viking world say and setting this against what scholars want them to say. Looking back to the earliest uses of these sources by Viking historians and antiquarians, and tracing layers of geographical transmission through understudied Arabic sources, this lecture offers an assessment not only of how Viking Studies can use and approach the Arabic geographical material, but of what it means for a geographer to write accurately about the far north.

Tonicha Upham is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age (WiVA), Uppsala University. She has a PhD in History from Aarhus University (2023), and an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies from the University of Iceland (2019). Her work deals with the Islamicate sources for the Viking world, and during her current project she is concentrating on the Arabic sources for Scandinavia.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.

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