The Construction and Reconstruction of Regional Collective Identity in Viking Age Norway Ben Allport University of Cambridge The definition, identification and reconstruction of collective identity is, perhaps, one of the hardest challenges facing the medievalist; the pitfalls proceed from the disparate nature of contemporary sources, but quickly grow to encompass various idiosyncrasies of modern discourse, including disparities between disciplines, sociological preconceptions and political agendas. Consequently, general consensus in the scholarly community rapidly diverges beyond the broad agreement that collective identity of some form or another must have existed for the diverse communities of the medieval world. In considerations of collective identity, the Viking Age (800–1050) makes for a particularly fruitful, and yet typically fraught, case-study, as it reflects a meeting point of ideologies, both medieval and modern. During this period, the area now encompassed by Norway progressed from a collection of petty kingdoms, whose existence is only fleetingly attested in material and written sources, to a sometimes-unified proto-kingdom. It is also a meeting point of disciplines; the transition from the near exclusive realm of archaeologists to one that unifies archaeology with textual history. While most modern scholars would associate the ‘state formation’ stage of Norwegian history with the early