A Brief History of the Vikings Read Online Free Page A
Author: Jonathan Clements
the the Viking Age, Western Europe was a backwater. The most powerful and cultured civilizations on Earth were China, Byzantium and Islam. As Christianity struggled amidst the ruins of the Roman Empire, yet another group of rough barbarians stole and murdered on the margins. Why do we still care?
For some, the tale of Viking expansion is one of incredible bravery and dynamism as, after centuries of timidly hugging the coastline, men in fragile wooden ships sail into a watery void, eventually discovering a New World. Then again, almost three
million
Scandinavians emigrated between 1815 and 1939. 19 Such settlers are why Minnesota’s football team is called the Vikings, and why the Viking Age continues to interest a large proportion of the American populace – not all white Protestants are Anglo-Saxon. But although the Vikings’ landings in America are no longer disputed, the extent of their sailing skills still is. Were the Vikings pioneers of maritimenavigation, or is it fairer to describe them as foolhardy blunderers, who made the majority of their ‘discoveries’ by getting lost and crashing into previously unknown coastlines?
For others, the Viking Age is a tale of supreme victory, not for the Vikings, but for the Christian world they sought to plunder. Within a few generations, the savage marauders were brought into the fold of Christianity, turned into respectable Europeans, vanquished in the war of the soul, even as they bragged of their physical conquests. Modern scholarship finds much to debate here, since the nature of famous conversions is still open to question. Were the Vikings savage beasts tamed by the love of God, or opportunists who paid lip-service to convenient local customs, while still keeping several concubines, owning slaves and killing their enemies?
As supposed rule-breakers, explorers and anarchists, they have injected a barbaric frisson on the cultures of the Europe their attacks helped create. Their martial prowess has become legendary, although their most humiliating defeats were at the hand of Finnish archers and Inuit fishermen. The Vikings have become symbols of all that is dangerous and exciting in the European soul – an attitude that gains even more credence in modern times as DNA tests establish exactly where they went. In many cases and many countries, our enemies did not go away. They stayed, and prospered, and eventually became part of us.
1
SONGS OF THE VALKYRIES
MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF SCANDINAVIA
The Vikings appear in the accounts of their enemies as fearsome invaders, devoid of culture or conscience, prepared to commit the outrageous sin of killing Christian monks. They were the savage heathens that Christianity sought to convert, symbols of the Other and the Devil. Such accounts may present a realistic vision of the terror the Vikings could instil, but reveal little about them personally. Of the Vikings’ own literature, we have a rich inheritance of saga narratives, but most date from the later Middle Ages, when the distant descendants of the original Vikings huddled around a fireplace in an Icelandic winter, and told and retold tales of the glory days.
Before the modern age, the most important man in the transmission of Viking culture was arguably Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), a wealthy Icelandic politician who committed many such oral traditions to paper for the first time, accompanied by remarkably astute editorial observations and criticisms.Snorri’s work preserves the mythical
Edda
, and the
Heimskringla
, a long cycle of biographies of Norwegian kings. Both works are crucial to any study of the Vikings, although they present many methodological problems of their own, since even the original material was ‘spun’ in a way designed to please crowds. Snorri collated kingly biographies sung by
skalds
, the court entertainers of the Vikings – to draw modern parallels, one might imagine Hollywood film-makers, commissioned by modern dictators to tell the story of
For some, the tale of Viking expansion is one of incredible bravery and dynamism as, after centuries of timidly hugging the coastline, men in fragile wooden ships sail into a watery void, eventually discovering a New World. Then again, almost three
million
Scandinavians emigrated between 1815 and 1939. 19 Such settlers are why Minnesota’s football team is called the Vikings, and why the Viking Age continues to interest a large proportion of the American populace – not all white Protestants are Anglo-Saxon. But although the Vikings’ landings in America are no longer disputed, the extent of their sailing skills still is. Were the Vikings pioneers of maritimenavigation, or is it fairer to describe them as foolhardy blunderers, who made the majority of their ‘discoveries’ by getting lost and crashing into previously unknown coastlines?
For others, the Viking Age is a tale of supreme victory, not for the Vikings, but for the Christian world they sought to plunder. Within a few generations, the savage marauders were brought into the fold of Christianity, turned into respectable Europeans, vanquished in the war of the soul, even as they bragged of their physical conquests. Modern scholarship finds much to debate here, since the nature of famous conversions is still open to question. Were the Vikings savage beasts tamed by the love of God, or opportunists who paid lip-service to convenient local customs, while still keeping several concubines, owning slaves and killing their enemies?
As supposed rule-breakers, explorers and anarchists, they have injected a barbaric frisson on the cultures of the Europe their attacks helped create. Their martial prowess has become legendary, although their most humiliating defeats were at the hand of Finnish archers and Inuit fishermen. The Vikings have become symbols of all that is dangerous and exciting in the European soul – an attitude that gains even more credence in modern times as DNA tests establish exactly where they went. In many cases and many countries, our enemies did not go away. They stayed, and prospered, and eventually became part of us.
1
SONGS OF THE VALKYRIES
MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF SCANDINAVIA
The Vikings appear in the accounts of their enemies as fearsome invaders, devoid of culture or conscience, prepared to commit the outrageous sin of killing Christian monks. They were the savage heathens that Christianity sought to convert, symbols of the Other and the Devil. Such accounts may present a realistic vision of the terror the Vikings could instil, but reveal little about them personally. Of the Vikings’ own literature, we have a rich inheritance of saga narratives, but most date from the later Middle Ages, when the distant descendants of the original Vikings huddled around a fireplace in an Icelandic winter, and told and retold tales of the glory days.
Before the modern age, the most important man in the transmission of Viking culture was arguably Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), a wealthy Icelandic politician who committed many such oral traditions to paper for the first time, accompanied by remarkably astute editorial observations and criticisms.Snorri’s work preserves the mythical
Edda
, and the
Heimskringla
, a long cycle of biographies of Norwegian kings. Both works are crucial to any study of the Vikings, although they present many methodological problems of their own, since even the original material was ‘spun’ in a way designed to please crowds. Snorri collated kingly biographies sung by
skalds
, the court entertainers of the Vikings – to draw modern parallels, one might imagine Hollywood film-makers, commissioned by modern dictators to tell the story of
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