KLAVS RANDSBORG AND THE NINTH CENTURY AD

Archaeology over the past fifty years has shown that in the early 9^th century Western Europe experimented with a coalescing of states affirmed by a common reform ideology and with it increased communication to regions beyond. At different speeds, regions of Western Europe adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’ economy and significantly a new regionalism. The archaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and losers in these fast‐changing regions. The losers, in many cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their altered socio‐economic condition to the Others of the time, not least because the Others were leading exponents of the post‐correctio economic agenda. This paper revisits Klavs Randsborg's groundbreaking book, The Viking Age of Denmark, in the context of post‐war approaches to Europe's post‐classical narrative.