English 154b/History 228b: Vikings!
Professors Roberta Frank and Anders Winroth
Essay Assignment
The essay should be approximately 1500-2500 words, footnotes and bibliographies excluded. Please indicate
your word count on the title page of the paper.
Berserk & Brothers Inc., Valhalla, N.Y., has decided to publish a brief source book or pamphlet with readings in
the culture, history, literature, politics, and afterlife of the Vikings. The format of the book is simple: a brief
introduction of 1500-2000 words is followed by selections from four or five representative documents
illustrating the Vikings. The publisher requests that you make the selection of documents and write the
introduction.
The editors of the series recommend that you think of a theme or a thesis or some idea that may help you
organize your introduction.
Please submit on paper and in your classesv2.yale.edu-drop box:
1.
An appropriate title for your book.
2.
A list of four or five short documents* about the Vikings that you would like to include in the book. The
documents should be no longer than 5 printed pages each. You can select these documents from among
those assigned for the course (as internet reading or in the required books), but you are also allowed to
select them from other books or from the internet.
Please indicate:
a.
The author (if known) and title of the document, e.g., "Oddr Snorrason,
Saga of Olaf Tryggvason" or “The Jelling Monument” or “Widukind of Corvey, The Deeds of the
Saxons 3.65” or “Egils Saga, ch. 12”.
b.
Where you found it, e.g., "Beowulf, trans. R.M. Liuzza (Peterborough, Ont., 1999), p. 181, lines
2038-49, or "https://classesv2.yale.edu/access/content/user/haw6/Vikings/Widukind.html".
c.
You do not have to hand in a copy of the documents you select, if your professors have access to
them; if your documents include excerpts from Victorian poetry or current novels or a
film/comic strip not discussed in class, please provide copies of the relevant pages or images
with your essay.** Whether you include copies of your selected texts or not, please take care
that your references are unambiguous.
3.
An introduction where you discuss your selections, explain to your reader why you have chosen exactly
these documents, and how they represent the Vikings. Do not divide this introduction into four or five
sections, one for each text; rather, write one continuous text in which you touch on all the sources. Try
to set your texts against the background of the greater picture. Remember that most of your readers
have very little, if any, previous knowledge of the Vikings. It is this introduction that should be 15002000 words.
When you write the introduction, it is important to observe fundamental rules of academic honesty.
These include:
-
You need to cite all sources used for papers and repeat the reference each time you use the source in your
written work.
-
You need to place quotation marks around any cited or cut-and-pasted materials, IN ADDITION to
footnoting or otherwise marking the source.
-
If you do not quote directly -- that is, if you paraphrase -- you still need to mark your source each time you
use borrowed material. Otherwise you have plagiarized.
* The publisher understands as “document” any text, visual representation, or image of an artifact relating to the
Vikings. If appropriate, a “document” may consist of a combination of text and image (e.g., an image of a rune
stone and its text, a film clip with written commentary), as long as the page limit is observed. At least three (3) of
the documents must be medieval, i.e., have been produced before 1500. Please do not include any text written by
modern scholars, such as your instructors.
** We realize that certain things you might want to include might be unpractical to hand in. The important point
is to make absolutely clear the nature and location of your document. We trust your research skills and
inventiveness.