"Seeing the Sky with Nordic Eyes: Archaeoastronomical Perspectives on the Stars and Planets of the Medieval North"
Co-sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies
For thousands of years, the night sky represented a powerful repository of mythic knowledge, a canvas on which to paint and preserve a community's sacred history. On the northern periphery of Europe, where winter nights stretch in length to nearly continuous darkness, Germanic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric cultures interacted, recording milennia of cultural contact and conflict in the stories they told about the sun, moon, planets, stars, and constellations. Around the turn of the first millennium AD, Christianity introduced into the region new ideas of the heavens as well as Mediterranean lore regarding constellations and astrology. In this presentation, Thomas DuBois examines what can be said about the medieval pre-Christian astronomy of Nordic-Baltic peoples based on evidence drawn from medieval texts, archaeology, and post-medieval astral traditions.
Thomas A. DuBois is director of the Religious Studies program and professor of Scandinavian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Folklore Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He researches and teaching in the area of medieval and modern Nordic cultures, particularly Finnish, Sámi, and Norse. His medieval studies books include Nordic Religions in the Viking Age, Lyric, Meaning and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe, and the edited volume Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia. He is the outgoing co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore and current president of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.
