The Vikings

Scope:

The Vikings have long conjured up images either of ruthless pirates ravaging the coasts of Europe or of heroic pagan warriors dedicated to Odin, god of ecstasy, poetry, and battle. These images, well attested in the medieval sources, are only part of the story of the impact of the Scandinavians on early medieval civilization. The first 12 lectures of this course deal with the evolution of a distinct civilization in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) on the eve of the Viking Age (790–1100). In 790, Scandinavians still worshiped the ancient Germanic gods and, thus, were divided from their kin in Germany or the former Roman provinces of Gaul and Britain who had adopted Christianity and Roman institutions. Breakthroughs in shipbuilding and the emergence of a warrior ethos celebrated in Eddaic and later skaldic verse turned Scandinavians from merchants into Vikings at the end of the 8th century.

The second set of 12 lectures deals with the course and impact of the Viking raids between the late 8th through the early 11th centuries. Danish and Norwegian raiders profoundly altered the political balance of Western Europe. Danes conquered and settled eastern and northern England, a region known as the Danelaw. They compelled King Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 870–899) and his successors to forge an effective monarchy. In France, Vikings under Rollo embraced Christianity and settled the fief of Normandy in 911, thereby founding one of the most formidable feudal states of Europe. Norwegian Vikings settled in the main towns of Ireland and braved the North Atlantic, settling the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as an ephemeral colony at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. In Eastern Europe, Swedes developed a major trade route from the Baltic to the Caspian, laying the foundations for the Russian principalities.

The last 12 lectures explain the passing of the Viking Age. Over two centuries of overseas raids, trade, and settlement altered Scandinavian civilization. Scandinavians accepted Christianity and gained the high culture of Latin Christendom. Christian Danish and Norwegian kings in the 10th century first harnessed the Viking spirit to establish monarchies. Cnut the Great (r. 1014–1035), king of Denmark, England, and Norway, briefly turned the North Sea into a Scandinavian lake. His institutions and example inspired the formation of Christian kingdoms in Scandinavia and turned Vikings into Crusaders. Yet perhaps the most enduring of achievements of the Viking Age were the sagas and verse of Iceland that immortalized pagan heroes and Christian kings, Norse gods and indomitable settlers of the remote island.

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Lecture One

The Vikings in Medieval History

Scope: The term Viking, originally used for a pirate who lurked in a cove (vik), came to designate the Scandinavians overseas engaged in war, commerce, and settlement in 790–1100. In popular imagination, the Vikings are cast as tall Nordic warriors, sporting horned helmets and wielding axes, who descended in longships to wreck havoc upon the civilized peoples of Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic world. Such perceptions are based on the hostile reports of monks, so often the victims of Viking raids, who penned the medieval chronicles. Since the Reformation, Vikings have been idealized as noble Germanic savages untouched by corrupt civilization—an image based on stereotypes created by Roman authors. In recent decades, revisionist scholars have minimized the destructiveness and, thus, the importance of the Vikings. Yet for more than 300 years, Scandinavians excelled in shipbuilding and dominated the sea and river lanes of Europe with their longships and commercial vessels (knarr). Their attacks on Western Europe dictated the future of feudal Europe. They braved the Atlantic Ocean to plant settlements in Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. In Eastern Europe, Scandinavians, known as Rus, extended the range of their commerce and created Orthodox Russia in the 11th century. Without the Vikings, the course of medieval European civilization would have been far different.

Outline

I.The Vikings had a far-ranging impact on medieval history, but before we begin to look at that history, it may be useful to look at some of the stereotypes about Vikings with which most of us are familiar.

A.The term Viking conjures up one’s worst nightmare of a Nordic warrior, sporting a horned helmet, slashing with a two-headed axe, and descending upon monks and peasants from longships.

B.The word Viking comes from Norse vik, meaning a cove or a small fjord, a place where pirates could lurk and prey upon merchant ships. The term was extended to apply to any Scandinavians living between roughly 790 and 1100 who were engaged in raiding or conquering overseas kingdoms or in establishing settlements, such as in Iceland.

C.But, the term should be used only to designate Scandinavians overseas, especially as raiders or attackers of Christian kingdoms; later, as merchants and colonizers; and eventually, as kings.

D.Viking was just one of several names by which Scandinavian raiders were known overseas.

1.Frankish chronicles often referred to these raiders as Northmen, from which derives the name Normans. A common prayer in the 9th century was “Oh Lord, deliver us from the fury of the Northmen.”

2.In England, where Danes were prominent, the Vikings were usually referred to as Danes.

3.The term Norman was used for those Scandinavians who settled in Normandy in northern France.

4.The Scandinavians from Russia were known as the Rus or Varangians, meaning “men of the pledge.” This term designated Swedes and other Scandinavians who came to serve in the Byzantine armies.

II.We have an enormous amount of information about the Vikings; unfortunately, most of it comes, at least in the early period, from their opponents.

A.We must balance the monastic chronicles and hostile reports of the Vikings’ victims against archaeology and the chronicles of the Scandinavians themselves in later generations, when they converted to Christianity.

B.This course, then, looks at three very different sets of evidence: the contemporary literary records, written by Christians and some Muslims, who see the Vikings as foes; the work that has been done in archaeology,

including the recovery of Viking ships and fortifications; and the sagas and poetry written in Norse in the 13th–15th centuries but reporting events that took place in the 9th century and earlier.

C.As mentioned, stereotypes color our notions of the Vikings to this day and were, perhaps, even more powerful in the 19th century.

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1.For example, the operatic cycle of Der Ring der Nibelungen, composed by Richard Wagner in 1848– 1874, is based on the Norse version of the legend of the Volsungs, the earliest set of heroes known in Scandinavian literature.

2.The heroic and idealized image of the Vikings was also captured in paintings epitomizing the primeval barbarian, untouched by civilization.

3.Unfortunately, this image was later combined with German political theories at the end of the 19th century, resulting in the Aryan ideology of the early 20th century. Some of these myths and legends were invoked by the Nazi regime in ways that would have stunned most Viking kings and warriors of the Middle Ages.

D.Modern scholarship since World War II has taken a new look at the Vikings. A great deal of work has been done in archaeology and in understanding both the Scandinavian and Western European sources.

1.Some scholars have shown a revisionist tendency in this work. Professor Peter Sawyer, for example, in his seminal history of the Vikings, tends to downgrade the size and monetary rewards of the raids. This, in turn, has led to revisions in our understanding of the impact and importance of the Vikings in Europe.

2.Revisionist scholars have also stressed the continuity between the Viking Age and earlier periods. Agricultural change, for instance, is almost nonexistent. The pattern of agriculture seen in Scandinavia in the Viking Age is very much the same as that seen 700 years earlier.

3.Several good studies have also stressed the importance of trade; the Scandinavians were probably more often engaged in trade than in raiding or attacking.

4.Some of this scholarship may have gone a bit too far, however. It tends to downgrade the significance of the Scandinavian impact in medieval Europe by stressing social and economic patterns—more “ordinary” developments—over political and military matters, which are, by definition, “extraordinary.”

III.Given the nature of our sources, this course will take a broad perspective in looking at the age of the Vikings.

A.For the first third of the course, we will look at three related subjects.

1.The first of these is the importance of the people, geography, and early culture in Scandinavia, going back to the Bronze Age, particularly the period between 1550 and 1100 B.C. (often known as the Northern Bronze Age). In this period, many of the cultural foundations of later Viking Age Scandinavia are laid. We will come to understand the extraordinary continuity and the ancient quality of Scandinavian civilization at the time of the Viking Age.

2.We shall also stress the importance of the ancient Scandinavian religion and its heroic, martial ethos. As a result of the survival of manuscripts in Iceland, we have the best evidence for a pre-Christian

religion in medieval Europe from Scandinavia. We will look particularly at two works: the Poetic Edda, a collection of poems that may date back to the 9th century, and the Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson (1179–1242), an Icelandic chieftain, which records many well-known Scandinavian myths.

3.The last topic in the first part of the course will be the breakthroughs in shipbuilding and warfare that are an integral part of the Scandinavian background.

B.In the second third of the course, we shall look at the Viking impact on the wider medieval world.

1.The Vikings’ impact on the Carolingian Empire, what was essentially Western Christendom in the 9th century, was profound. It revealed the weaknesses of the empire of Charlemagne and lead to the emergence of feudal states.

2.The Vikings also had a great impact on England; we shall look in particular at the movements and attacks of the Great Army from 865–878.

3.We shall also examine the far reaches of Viking activity, in Ireland and Russia. Remarkably, the experiences of Norwegians in Ireland and Swedes in Russia were quite comparable in many ways, although the results of these experiences were quite different.

4.As we close the second part of the course, we shall look at the most daunting and impressive of all the Viking achievements—their tackling of the North Atlantic. The Vikings were the first people to sail beyond the sight of land, and the settlement of Iceland by the Norwegians during the period 870–930 represents the first European colonial endeavor.

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C.The last third of this course will shift back to the Scandinavian homeland and assess this experience in the wider medieval world for the Vikings themselves. Here, we shall look at two important developments.

1.First, we shall examine the creation of the classic Scandinavian kingdoms. At the start of the Viking Age, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden did not exist as we understand them today; the region was politically divided. By the end of the Viking Age, the kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden had come into existence as a direct outcome of the Viking experience.

a.The overseas ventures of the Vikings in the 9th and 10th centuries netted an enormous amount of booty and wealth and led to the creation of ever-more professional armies and better ships.

b.Using this wealth and these fleets, sea kings imposed their control over chosen regions and set up territorial kingdoms. We see this first in Norway with King Harald Finehair (r. 880–930). Less than a generation later, the same is achieved in Denmark by Gorm the Old (r. c. 936–958), who created a kingdom in Jutland.

2.The emergence of these territorial kingdoms went hand-in-hand with the second important development—the reception of Christianity, which helped end the Viking Age. We shall look at the slow Christianizing of the society, which saw the substitution of the ancient martial ethos with the acceptance of Christian doctrines and the establishment of Christian institutions.

3.The Scandinavian Christian kings after 1100 reinvented the earlier martial ethos as a crusading mission. Our final two lectures in this course will look at Scandinavia in the immediate aftermath of the Viking Age and show how these Christian kingdoms redefined themselves in attempting to redirect their energies toward the Crusades.

Further Reading:

John Haywood. The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Peter Sawyer. The Oxford History of the Vikings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Questions to Consider:

1.What accounted for the stereotypical images of the Vikings since the Middle Ages? How did these perceptions influence interpretations of the historical importance of the Vikings? How have these perceptions had wider ramifications in Western history?

2.How has the nature of the sources, both literary texts and archaeology, influenced our understanding of the Vikings? What are the value and limitations of these sources? What accounts for the current scholarly debate on the significance of the Viking Age?

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