Orð Víkinganna. The level and scale of literacy in the Viking World : The cases of Birka and Sigtuna.

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to study the level and scale of literacy as it expanded in Viking towns during the 8th-12th century. In order to get an understanding of this spread, I have worked with two case-studies of Viking towns, as they were founded and prospered during and by the end of the Viking Age in Sweden; the town of Birka located in Björkö Island in Lake Mälaren, and the town of Sigtuna located in the province of Uppland, in central Sweden. Through the study of selected archaeological material, this paper aims to bring together scattered information and shed light on what we know about the level and spread of literacy in Viking society. The purpose of this endeavour, is to question not only the notion of an illiterate pagan society that the Viking Age Scandinavians are considered to have been, but also question both the methodology in which the scholarly archaeological community studies literacy, as well as the way literacy itself is defined in the study of the ancient world. The paper includes a bibliographic and a material-studying approach, as well as a section where digital archaeological research methods are used with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software in order to illustrate the level and scale of literary expansion in Viking Age Sweden.