University of Melbourne cancelling its Viking Studies program

Melbourne's Vikings get the axe
Katherine Kizilos
21 November 2007
The Age


The long boats will sail no more. For 63 years Melbourne students have travelled in them with the Vikings: exploring ice-strewn wastes, fighting bloody battles and witnessing other acts of medieval derring-do.

But the University of Melbourne has decided that Viking Studies has no place in its future. No more will the Icelandic sagas be taught in Old Norse, which has been offered by the university since 1944.

And no more will this language be taught in tandem with a history course covering the often surprising things - colonising Iceland and Greenland, travelling to Newfoundland, Canada and the coast of Maine - that the Vikings managed to do.

Dr Katrina Burge, who has taught the subject to second and third-year arts students for five years, knows that the world will go on without Viking Studies. Yet she says: "When people ask me what I do, they feel that the world is a slightly better place because Viking Studies is in it." She concedes that the reasons for this are hard to explain and impossible to quantify, yet believes they can be easily understood by anyone who likes to read and learn about the human story.

Dr Burge doesn't blame the restructuring of the university, known as the Melbourne model, for the death of her subject. Actually, she doesn't know why Viking Studies was cancelled because she was not consulted about the decision. As far as she knows, the subject wasn't losing money and last year attracted 31 students in first semester and 24 in the second. Her understanding is that the number of students studying Old Norse at Melbourne was one of the highest in a universitry in the English-speaking world.

"At Oxford, they will run it for two or three students," she says. "Other universities were staggered that it was being shut down with 31 students. They think they are in clover if they have a dozen students."

Over the past century, perhaps the best-known Viking enthusiasts were J. R. R.Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Both were members of an Oxford group called the Coalbiters, which read the Icelandic sagas in Old Norse. After fighting in World War I, both men found a refuge of sorts in the remote world of the Vikings.

Both writers derived inspiration from the sagas, and the fables they wrote were embraced by a modern audience.

Dr Burge also believes the Vikings have much to teach us, if only we are prepared to listen. She is studying climate change in the Viking era, particularly a period called "the little climactic optimum", during which both Greenland and Iceland were colonised."

We look back at those people for being primitive barbarians, but they thought they were as good as it got. They were reasonably technologically competent and faced enormous challenges from their environment." Dr Burge says that when the weather became colder again, "the social elite died out" because conditions became tougher.

Asked why Viking Studies was being axed, Melbourne University released a statement saying the university was gradually reducing subjects in the arts faculty: last year 1536 arts subjects were offered, next year it will offer 1241, including 108 new subjects. Veryan Croggon, who studied under Dr Burge this year, says Viking Studies "was the most enthusiastic class I had at uni. People were so excited to do the subject and all the different elements of it".

She went into the course knowing little about Vikings except for the idea (a false one) that they wore horned helmets. By the end of the course she had formed the view that the Vikings were wonderful people. "We have this idea that they were barbarian berserkers and fighters but they had an extremely complex society".

Ms Croggon was particularly enthused by the powerful women portrayed in the Icelandic sagas. She says if she had to be a woman in medieval times, she would choose to be a Viking.

Vikings may not be at the forefront of modern thought, but they are part of our shared heritage. Dr Burge says: "If you can't do obscure languages at Melbourne University, where can you do them? If you are only going to teach languages that people speak, you will be wiping out the whole field of historical philology. Here is a strand of knowledge that has been around for a 1000 years that is being let go."

The last Vikings Studies symposium, Vikings and their Enemies, will be held at the University of Melbourne on Saturday, November 24. For information call 0431 871 367.