A Brief History of the Vikings Read Online Free

the Muslims to obtain than captives from wars with Byzantium on the caliphate’s frontier. One Eastern European girl, known only by her Muslim name of Mukhâriq, was plucked from her homeland by Viking raiders, found herself in an Abbasid harem and eventually became the mother of a caliph. 15 The Muslim diarist Ibn Battúta, while staying in the remote Chinese port of Fuzhou after the Viking Age, reported that a friend of his was doing well for himself, with a household that boasted ‘fifty white slaves and as many slave-girls.’ Such was the eventual fate of many of the Vikings’ victims and their descendants. 16
    The Vikings, in their explorations and conquests, undoubtedly achieved much. However it must be admitted that the leading edge of their expansion chiefly comprised thugs, brigands and outlaws. Latter-day apologists have attempted to soften the image but, by definition, the word Viking refers to pirates. A Viking is categorically
not
a flaxen-haired maiden making attractive jewellery by the side of a picturesque fjord, no matter what some museum curators may imply. TheVikings were the rejects of Scandinavian society – forced to travel further afield to make their fortune. Some, of course, returned to claim their homeland as their own, applying their experience of foreign wars to internecine struggles.
    It was a Viking who kept his retarded son chained like a beast outside his house, a Viking who attempted to skin a horse alive, a Viking who hacked off a live pig’s snout to prove a point. 17 But equally, numerous claims made about Viking ‘atrocities’ need to be regarded in context. Almost
everyone
was atrocious back then – it was a Christian, Saxon king who ordered the ethnic cleansing of all the Danes in England. The Angles, Saxons, Irish and Scots were just as bloodthirsty with each other, and with their Scandinavian foes.
    The Vikings were often defined by what they were not. They were, to the contemporary chroniclers that hated and feared them,
not
civilized,
not
local, and most importantly
not
Christian. The so-called Viking Age petered out when these negative traits were annulled. Scandinavia was eventually Christianized, ironically in part through the experiences of its sons abroad, forcing the Vikings to rethink who constituted friend and foe. By the twelfth century, when Scandinavian crusaders converted Estonia to Christianity at the point of a sword, they were now not only raiding somewhere sufficiently out of the way of Western European consciousness, but doing so in the name of the Lord.
    The Vikings were a group created by circumstance, not blood – they were not a ‘race’, nor did they have any patriotism, any sense of ‘Viking-ness’. Although they were predominantly men from the areas now known as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, there are mentions in the sagas of Finns, Sámi and Estonians among them. A Welshman supposedly sailed with the Jomsvikings; Scottish scouts accompanied Leif the Lucky in his explorations, and the man who discoveredthe ‘vines’ of Vinland was German. When the Vikings prospered abroad, they were swift to throw off their ties to their homeland. Perhaps because of the settlers’ reliance on finding local brides, they were notoriously quick to adopt the language and customs of their new lands, so that the legendary Viking vigour was not so much reduced as rebranded. 18 In only a couple of generations, the conquerors of Kiev had taken local wives, and bestowed Slavic names upon their children. Now calling themselves Russians, they would jockey for a thousand years with their Swedish cousins over who ruled the area now known as Finland. Similarly the Norsemen who occupied north France were transformed in mere decades into the ‘Normans’ who claimed it as their natural home. Meanwhile, hundreds of square miles of the England that the Normans conquered had already been settled by Danes.
    Why, then, do the Vikings continue to exert such fascination for us? During