Mass Production and Mountain Marketplaces in Norway in the Viking and Middle Ages

AS HUBS IN STABLE ECONOMIC NETWORKS, mountain¹1 The Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, PO Box 6762, N-0130 Oslo, Norway. kjetil.loftsgarden@khm.uio.no marketplaces are seen as integral to the increase and eventual mass production of iron in the Viking period and Middle Ages. The amount of iron produced exceeded local and regional demands, and constituted a valuable commodity from the inland areas of Norway and Sweden. This paper shows a dynamic trade network — one that was adaptable to trade patterns and surplus production. The marketplaces enabled an inland population to obtain both the products they needed and those they wanted, and gave the populous communities along the coast — the medieval towns, the royal and ecclesiastical elites — access to the resources and commodities from the hinterland via trade networks flowing through these marketplaces. This integration of inland resources into domestic and international trade can be considered to be part of a functioning market economy in the western Scandinavian inland from the late Viking period.