Page 21 - TLU magazine - The Way to The Top

OURVIKINGSWEREMUCH MOREMAGNIFICENT
Marika Mägi who was awarded with the national research award for her monograph on the Viking Age fights against the opinion spreading in the academic world that a significant part of Vikings’ deeds in this region are attributed to the Russians.
who sincerely write that if boat rivets are found in burial sites in Estonia, which are actually a normal find on coastal areas,” explains Mägi, “then this points to the presence of Scandina- vians because there is no way the locals knew
how to build boats.”
However, it was clear as day for the researcher who studied
the topographic and lo- gistic factors that almost none of the mentions of
Austrvegr – this is what they called both the path to the east and the regions on that path – is
considered as a men- tion of our people. “A
considerable part of what is attributed to the Russians
must in reality also be from Estonian and Latvian coastal
areas because the Russians of the time simply did not have a coastline,” Marika Mägi says. “Actually, Russia became a maritime force on the Baltic Sea only in the Modern Age.”
Breaking the old views
Marika Mägi hopes that her book steadily breaks the simplified view prominent until now. This hope is enforced, for example, by the award won in the United States in 2018 for the best book on earlier Eastern European his- tory. “But the paradigms are slow to change in humanities,” Mägi says, “and adding the lands on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea to the discussion on the period might not be person- ally acceptable to all researchers.”
Communication specialist
their neighbours is still alive. “There are authors Merit Tupits 21
School of Humanities research track associate professor Marika Mägi received the national research award for monograph “In Austrvegr: The Role of the Eastern Baltic in Viking Age Com- munication across the Baltic Sea” The book is unique because it is the first time that
the Viking Age Baltic sea eastern shore lands are observed as
a single region. Until now, studies of the Viking Age
have had strong ethnic undertones, mainly due to the popularity of the topic.
However, the region-
based view of the Vi-
king Age, which Marika
Mägi combined into a
single book, provides a more wholesome image of the past
and surprised even the researcher herself who has been studying the Viking Age for at least the past 35 years.
They were behind!
Marika Mägi, who devoted ten years from her researcher’s career to the awarded book, was intrigued by the fact that the world knows little about the Viking Age on the eastern shore of the Baltic sea. Firstly, items were rarely put in graves at the time in Estonia or elsewhere in the Baltic-Finnic lands, which is why there are little material findings. Secondly, the Viking Age
has been covered solely from the perspective of relations between Scandinavia and Russia, seemingly leaving the Baltic states out.
However, the presumption that the people in this
land were behind in development compared to
TALLINN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE / NO. 14 / SPRING 2020
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