Scotland's mysterious Picts and Iceland's Saga Vikings: How Sources and Contexts Shape Research Agendas

This article compares the research traditions surrounding the Picts of early medieval Scot-land to those concerning Icelandic society in the 9th to the 13th century. The aim is to illustrate how the different types of written sources that have survived from these two areas have created diverging research agendas. This is studied through the two main issues that have been prevalent in research, i.e. the origins of the people and the date of the emergence of their culture.