THE CHALLENGES OF QUANTIFYING YOUTH AND AGE IN THE MEDIEVAL NORTH Shannon Lewis-Simpson What, if anything, did it mean to be young and old in the medieval north? Age is ‘an organising principle that we all of us live with all of the time’, 1 but to define youth and age today, let alone in society of a thousand years ago, is dif fi cult indeed. Although the study of the medieval life cycle has advanced in recent years, the focus has been on aspects of youth and age in high and late medieval societies, mostly within southern Europe. 2 With some notable exceptions, little dedicated work has been accomplished on the concepts of youth and age in the medieval north, 3 here defined as encompassing the geographic northern 1 A. Blaikie, ‘Whither the Third Age: Implications for Gerontology’, Generations Review, 2/1 (1992), 2–4 (p. 4). 2 For medieval Europe in general, see J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medi- eval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1986); Michael E. Goodich, From Birth to Old Age: The Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought, 1250 –1350 (Lanham, MD, 1989); Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990); Ageing and the Aged in Medieval Europe, ed. by Michael M. Sheehan (Toronto, 1990); Joel T. Rosenthal, Old Age in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 1996); Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages: ‘Winter Clothes us in Shadow and Pain’, trans. by Yael Lotan (London, 1997); Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (Yale, 2001); Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West From Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge, 2001); Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. by P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (York, 2004); P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Life and Death: the Ages of Man’, in A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 413–34, 501–02. Concerning this southern high and late medieval hegemony, Edward James suggests with tongue half in cheek that Shulamith Shahar’s Childhood in the Middle Ages ‘should more honestly be retitled, as so many books of this kind should, Childhood in the Last Third of the Middle Ages, between 1150 and 1500, Mostly in France’: Edward James, ‘Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages’, in Youth in the Middle Ages, pp. 11–23 (p. 14). 3 Aside from specific works listed in the notes of each contribution to this volume, see Arkeologi om barn, ed. by Barbro Johnsen and Stig Welinder (Uppsala, 1995); Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud, 1999); Children and Material Culture, ed. by Joanna Sofaer Deverenski (London, 2000); Ármann Jakobsson, ‘Snorri and his Death. Youth, Violence, and Autobiography in Medieval Iceland’, Scandinavian Studies, 75/3 (2003), 317–40; Miðaldabörn, ed. by Ármann Jakobsson and Torfi H. Tulinius, (Reykjavík, 2005); Ármann Jakobsson, ‘The Specter of Old Age: Nasty Old Men in the Sagas of Icelanders’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 104 (2005), 297–325; Anna Hansen, ‘Representations of Children in the Icelandic Sagas’, in Sagas & Societies. International Conference at Borgarnes, Iceland, September 5.–9.2002, ed. by Stefanie Copyright © ${Date}. ${Publisher}. All rights reserved.