When Janet Abu-Lughod sketched the contours of a medieval “world system” in 1989, she located most communication networks in the southern hemisphere. In recent decades, however, new trends in research and new forms of evidence have complicated, enriched, and expanded this picture, geographically and chronologically. We now know that vast portions of the world were interconnected throughout the Middle Ages and, moreover, that the entire circumpolar North was a contact zone in its own right. In this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines explore the boreal globe from the late Iron Age to the seventeenth century, offering fresh perspectives that cross the frontiers of national historiographies and presenting new research on migration, trade, mapping, cultural exchange, and the interactions of humans with their environment.

Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Carol Symes is the Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the history of documentary practices and communication media in medieval Europe.

Editor’s Introduction, by Carol Symes
Contesting Marginality: The Boreal Forest of Inland Scandinavia and the Worlds Outside, by Karl-Johan Lindholm
The Findings of the Scandinavian Circle Antiquities from Staraja Ladoga as Evidence of Cultural and Trading Contacts, by Natalja Grigorjeva
Consider the Walrus: Gunhild’s Cross and the North Atlantic Trade Sphere, by Robyn Barrow
Islands in the Ocean: The Far North in the Eyes of Adam of Bremen and the Anonymous Author of Historia Norwegie, by Tatjana N. Jackson
The Multi-Layered Spatiality of the Global North: Spatial References and Spatial Constructions in Medieval East Norse Literature, by Alexandra Petrulevich
Military Migration in the Baltic Sea Region, ca. 1400–1650, by Martin Neuding Skoog
Old and New Land in the North and West: The North Atlantic on the Medieval Globe around 1500, by Felicitas Schmeider