Much Ado About Vikings

Today, as a break in the Canadian War History series, we'll be talking about vikings. The Scandinavian ones that is, not the Minnesotans. You know, if we were talking about the latter I'd probably have more to write about. The history of the vikings is sparse at best; it relies heavily on archaeological evidence (which allows your history to be more of an educated guess), the vikings didn't have a written word beyond runestones that were more for everyday markings rather than full stories (and if you're hoping for reliable oral history, well, ask yourself why the game "telephone" is played) and what is written about it comes from people writing semi-mythological accounts literally hundreds of years later. So, as it turns out, most of the really cool viking stuff? A lot of it is fluff, stuff that's wormed its way into popular culture one way or another. Heck, they don't even wear horned helmets.

A replica viking longboat. I hope the real vikings
had cooler emblems than "elderly person with hobo-stick".

Minnesota, you've lied to me.

Let's talk about what we do know. Most of this comes from written works of the people they've attacked or from archaeological evidence proving that they were at least existing in certain places, if not much else.

Who are these guys?

First, lets clarify the term "viking". Vikings are Scandinavian (plus Iceland). That's common knowledge, but there's a little bit more to it here. The word viking is strictly an English term, and not so much the language but the people from England that were being raided at the time. They would refer to these large, blond-haired seafarers as vikings as they came from the ports in Viken, a Norwegian district. The vikings themselves wouldn't have called themselves vikings, nor would the French, the Romans, or anyone else save for the English.

Complicating things is that "viking" refers just to these raiders. If you were Scandinavian, but a farmer, heck, even a king that's hanging out there, you're not really a Viking by this standard. You didn't sail from Norway to attack Britain. Nevertheless, the catch-all term has become commonplace enough to work across the board.

Runestones: they might look super cool,
but not really doing too much in the
"explaining your people's history"
department. Plus, they're probably cursed
or something.

As for who these people were, it covered a bit of a spread. Many were exiled from the Danish lands and could choose raiding as a lucrative and exciting option, in many ways hardly a punishment at all. Many others sailed across to new lands because Norway, a mountainous and cold climate, was running out of proper farmland and some sought a new life elsewhere. Others just wanted plunder because there was a heck of a lot of it.

While people know vikings for the raiders, it's a bit of a misnomer (half-nomer?). Yes, they raided - but that was only a portion of the viking age. Typically, they would come over, raid relentlessly, steal a bunch of crap, and then settle down on a pleasant farmland in Britain, France, Scotland, Ireland or what-have-you, find a nice wife and live a quiet life. Really. The average progression for vikings finding new land was as follows: raid, extort, trade, settle. Once they raided enough they had a bit of a namesake and would be able to extort their way through the following few times. Eventually the kings would get word and send a large enough army to not make it worth the bloodshed to raid/extort, so they would trade instead. Once trading was lucrative, well, you might as well set up a trading post. Boom. Settlement. If you're wondering how you go from having a civilization relentlessly destroying your villages to giving Sven some silver for a top-fashion goat-fur blanket, just remember that this is happening over almost three hundred years. Think of it like this. Remember Germany? We're cool with them now. Have been for a while. It makes sense for them too.

So these raiders/extortionists/traders/settlers really got around. Iceland became a permanent settlement, Greenland was home for a good 300 or so years, and many permanent and eventually assimilated Scandinavian cities (many still bearing vaguely Scandinavian names) exist all over France and the U.K.. The vikings even sailed as south as Constantinople to do mercenary work for the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. They likely founded Kiev on the way. Then, of course, there's the recently discovered North American connection - but we'll get back to that later.

What I'm getting at here is the vikings had a massive influence that stretched many borders, leaving their influence as they went. Raiders they were, but that's hardly the full story.

A Viking in London:

793 was the true beginning of the "viking age". The first victim was the Lindisfarne monastery, which, upon meeting the vikings, was promptly plundered. Monasteries were the standard target, and while the vikings were pagan, it wasn't because they wanted to destroy the Christian religion. Rather, it was because the Christian people had a tendency to store all their pretty, shiny things in places that were typically defended only by monks, and by that I mean not really defended at all. Strangely, it kind of worked out for England; the vikings would take these things and later trade them, meaning that wealth that was all stored in the churches ultimately got delivered to the merchants and thus distributed across the land. Kind of a bloodthirsty, innocent-holy-man-killing Robin Hood (new HBO series?). Oddly enough and in spite of everything, the vikings really took to Christianity, many of them becoming Christians themselves.

After the successful first raid, many more would follow. They were so successful that they started setting up camp so they could attack more easily, as trade eventually became more lucrative than raiding. It's interesting; they actually controlled a massive part of England. They destroyed two whole kingdoms and all but annihilated a third, leaving only Wessex. Around then the vikings became a strong political force, influencing how England was run for many years to follow. As time went by, what really ended the viking run wasn't being cleared out but more of an eventual assimilation.

Forays into France:

During the beginning of the 9th century (bear with me, I know that's a boring start to a sentence) France wasn't really France. They were the Franks, an empire stretching far and wide across what would be Germany, Austria, Switzerland and most of Italy. Descendents of Charlemagne, their leaders were rich and powerful.

But not so great at defending their coastlines.

A depiction of vikings attacking Paris. The French, armed
with baguettes and a saucy attitude, would eventually
have to pay them large sums to leave.

It seems the vikings most likely had traded with the French before their raids began around 830 A.D., but at one point they realized something. They were given two options: "trade some items for some money", or "take all items for no money". They decided on the later. The reason the powerful Frankish empire couldn't stand up to these raiders was because they kind of caught them at a bad time. Right in the middle of a civil war, the empire was split between a number of warring factions that couldn't coherently fight them all at once until 862 when everything came together again. However, at that point the damage was done. During that century 30,000 pounds of silver was paid just in extortion fees to the vikings, some of which by Paris itself. Yes, the vikings could very well have taken Paris. Who knew?

Similar to England, they followed their raid, extortion, trade, settlement pattern. The region of Normandy - and it's interesting writing about this after having read a bunch of World War II stuff, because you hear words like Normandy and the Somme except in reference to vikings - was actually a viking settlement, and the name is in reference to this. Think about it. Normandy - land of the northmen.

Christopher Columbus? Phff.

The Scandinavian people moved west piece by piece. First, they went to Iceland because the mountainous Norway was getting crowded, and with things getting overpopulated the farmland became a little too tight.

The story of finding Greenland was a little more interesting, but take it with a grain of salt as this would have been written literally hundreds of years later.

A wild, violent man named Erik the Red was exiled from Norway and made his way to Iceland. After getting in a fight over farmland (a fight that ended with a man dead) he was exiled once more and sailed west, fortuitously stumbling upon Greenland. It's said that he called it Greenland to entice people from Iceland to come settle there.

In the 12th century they had not
yet discovered how to paint things
to look frightening or intimidating.
These viking raiders can only be
described as "derpy".

Erik the Red then had a son, and seemingly one with a wanderlust that wasn't due to being kicked out of his country. Leif Erikson sailed further west, likely upon hearing tales of lost sailors who saw land. Venturing out, he found his way to North America and was impressed; plenty of trees, many places to set up camp, hockey... a good home. On the next trip he brought settlers to get things started, and settled in a place in Newfoundland which he named Vinland. Leif Erikson was then the first European to reach North America, hundreds of years before Columbus, around 1000 A.D.. It was, however, an ill-fated adventure, but we're not entirely sure why. All we know is the archaeological evidence has proven that there was indeed a small viking settlement, possibly destroyed after war with the natives. There has been no solid proof that there is anything else - except for a single viking penny, found in Maine. As a fun fact, they did stay just long enough to have a kid. Snorri, the first North American European.

In addition, the vikings of Greenland (which due to a slowly changing climate lasted only about three hundred years before disappearing) seemed to have occasionally traded with the inuit of the Baffin Island. There have been small metal tools and other viking-esque materials found in and around there, and while the trade didn't seem substantial, it's certainly substantial from a historical perspective.

Closing Out:

If I learned one thing it's that the majority of what I knew about the vikings was from television, or perhaps more accurately, kids cartoons that had characters based on vikings. Horned-helmet boat people. As it turns out, their influence was substantially more than raiding and greatly changed the political and sociological landscape in Europe. The raids themselves were actually somewhat inconsequential; the countries they were taking from were wealthy and highly populated, and the raids were more of a nuisance. It was the lasting settlements that made the real difference, and while we might not notice it, the vikings substantially influenced much of the world we know today.

Plus, there's a football team named after them now.

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The information for this blog was taken from Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. It's... dense. It's kind of like reading a textbook and I can't honestly recommend it unless you're really into the whole cultural world of the vikings rather than just the parts where they're raiding and pillaging. You know, the fun parts.