“Tracking North” explores the ways that works of art, figured as contested resources, acted as key witnesses and actors within shifting dynamics of authority in the Nordic Middle Ages. Bound together by the wider network of cultural production and craft, contested resources were involved in complex negotiations within local contexts with emerging structures of power. By grounding artistic practices in ecocultural histories, and tracking their traces, we draw nearer to subsumed or obscured narratives embedded in the land of the medieval north, as well as intersecting medieval worlds. 

The first chapter is a glocal art history of hoards, which introduces the way a cultural field produced through imported wealth might function within and between opposing communities amid shifts in long-distance trade. Archaeology on Gotland has uncovered more historical silver from the Middle Ages than anywhere else in the world. Rather than regarding hoards as the buried treasure of a forgetful or unfortunate individual, this chapter investigates the ways hoards mediated the multigenerational relationships between landowning Gotlandic elite and their property. The chapter analyzes law codes, chronicles, and the hoard as corpus, a collection of objects buried together and curated by time. 

“Antler Chronologies,” the project’s second chapter, pushes the theme of relationships between modes of authority and land in a consideration of antler working. Shifts in access to land, brought about by expanding and centralized power over forests, caused antler to dwindle as a material in early medieval craft practice, while antler used for hunting trophies and marvels projected a ruler’s command and knowledge of his dominion. Though examples of prestige objects made from antler in the Middle Ages are few, the remarkable ornamented moose antler (c. 1100) now held by the Rijksmuseum can provide important insights into the properties and significances of this long-overlooked material. 

Chapter three figures the wealth of the Norwegian forests against the ruined corpus of carved wood on Iceland to consider the contested resource within dynamics of abundance and scarcity. Forestry practice and an arboreal theology made meaning in church construction and decoration across contexts, shaping colonial hierarchies between Norway and Iceland. After the foundation of a Norwegian archbishopric in 1163, the figure of Saint Olav as a flowering tree became a key image in consolidating the church’s power across Norway. For medieval Icelanders, many of them settlers from Norway, essential timber could only be acquired through import from Norway or as driftwood. Iceland’s increasing dependence upon Norwegian ships carrying timber contributed to its eventual concession to the Norwegian king in 1262, as well as, as the project suggests, the island’s own gradual yet cataclysmic deforestation. 

The final chapter represents a culmination within this Nordic history of the contested resource, probing an early instance of Arctic resource exploitation in the Greenlandic walrus ivory trade. For its 500 years of settlement, Norse Greenland was a remote outpost where a small population survived in a harsh and unpredictable environment. Essential to maintaining their important economic ties to their cultural homelands was the annual walrus hunt in northern Greenland. In the 11th and 12th centuries particularly, walrus ivory was a highly valuable trade good in western Europe. Anchored by the archaeological walrus ivory crozier from Greenland’s medieval cathedral, this chapter traces the development and scope of the walrus ivory trade in medieval Greenland, following the walrus tusk from the hunting ground shared with the Inuit to the Norse settlement, to the European market and beyond.

The project concludes at a much later moment, when the contested resource is brought into a symbolic role which attempts to render it uncontestable. The epilogue explores the visual program of the 1671 anointing ceremony for Denmark’s first absolute monarch, in which ideas about resources rooted in medieval histories were recruited to image the perfect authority of the Danish throne. However, viewing this absolutist pageantry through the lens of Nordic artistic legacies exposes the operations of local creativity and adaption amid attempts to exert perfect control over resources. In this way, the epilogue, and “Tracking North” as an intellectual program, subverts the epistemological assumptions of display to reveal the anxieties that underpin all modes of authoritarianism.

University of Pennsylvania
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2022–2025

Upon receiving her PhD in May 2025, Robyn A. Barrow will take up the position of visiting assistant professor at Middlebury College and prepare her book manuscript for publication.