This page contains links to PDF files of my Ph.D. dissertation Formation and Resolution of Ideological Contrast in the Early History of Scandinavia which was submitted and approved for the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic (Faculty of English) at the University of Cambridge in 1999. (I officially received my Ph.D. in July 2000.)

Most Ph.D. dissertations make terrible books, and mine is no exception! It would need a lot of work were it going to be published as one. Besides the standard problems -- like spending a lot of space demonstrating I've read the obligatory background material and not spending enough space talking about genuninely interesting and topical things -- this dissertation would have been better if I had either focused it more narrowly or had enough space to talk about everything I wanted to :) And ye gods! it could use some maps …. But I still think it's got a lot of good ideas and good work in it. Maybe someday I'll try to fix it up, or at least pull some articles out of it, but meanwhile people might as well get some use out of it as it stands.

You can download my dissertation as a single PDF file, "AndersonCE_1999_PhD.pdf" (about 1.3 MB), which for ease of navigation includes PDF bookmarks for all the chapters, sections, and subsections.

If that's too much all at once, you can also download my dissertation in smaller chunks:

• Abstract
• Title Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One
  (Aspects of Political and Social Developments in Germania and Scandinavia during the Roman Iron Age)
• Chapter Two
  (Aspects of Political and Social Developments in Scandinavia during the Early Germanic Iron Age)
• Chapter Three
  (Aspects of Political and Social Developments in Scandinavia during the Late Germanic Iron Age and Early Viking Age)
• Chapter Four
  (The Scylding-SkjǪldung Historical Legends: Some Historiography and Considerations)
• Chapter Five
  Reassessing the Scylding-SkjǪldung Historical Legends)
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography (Primary Sources)
• Bibliography (Secondary Sources)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

For both the single file and the chunks, the numbers on each page of the PDF matches those in the printed, bound version officially kept in the Cambridge University Library, so if you want to make references to the text in your own work, you use this online version without the hassle of getting at the archived hardcopy version in Cambridge, UK :)

Bonus Tracks

I've recently dug out some more short pieces of not-quite-completed and generally unpolished research that sprang from my Ph.D. research but had to be cut from the final 80,000-word submitted version (as linked above).

Lastly, I highly recommend this fine use of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for writing a Ph.D. dissertation :)