Now that the election is over, it seems an appropriate time to talk about the Vikings. Why? Well, for one, like American progressives, they knew doom was coming. For the Vikings it was Ragnarok, the final battle between the Gods and the Giants which signals the end of the world. For us progressives, it is Friday, January 20th, 2017 when Trump takes the oath of office. In both cases, doom is foreordained.
Interestingly, depending on which source you are reading and how you interpret Viking mythology, there appear to be three different outcomes for Ragnarok:
- Everything dies. There are no survivors at all. All the Gods perish, all humans are slain, the Giants die and there is NOTHING ever again.
- Some Gods and a tiny human population survive and begin to remake the world anew.
- Everything returns to the very beginning where there is a potential for a new cosmos, a new universe with new beings and wonders.
Being a progressive, I’m hoping that our national Ragnarok ends with one of the last two options.
So what do you know about the Vikings? That they had horned helmets? That Viking women accompanied the men into battle? When they die, they go to Valhalla, right? Being Heathen, they picked on the Christians, monasteries especially. And they had dragon heads on their boats.
Not a Viking. Not even close.
What I am hoping to do in this series of diaries is introduce you to the world as the Vikings saw and experienced it, give you an insight into their mindset and way of life and finally, leave you with an impression of what life was like in Iron Age Northern Europe. I will also attempt to critically examine the Viking view of “race” as this is relevant to modern politics, in that many of the Neo-Nazi and Alt-right and Men’s Right’s movements have chosen Vikings as some sort of ideal. Lastly, I’ll give some thoughts about the role the Vikings play in the modern world.
Much better. Actually not horrific for television/movies. Needs more spears. And what are the extra metal bits on the shields? Oh, and the eyeliner. What the hell?
First, before we talk about the Vikings themselves, we have to discuss how we know what we know about the Vikings. For most Americans I think it is pretty safe to say most of their information about Vikings comes from:
- Television and movies about Vikings ranging from fictional (History Channel’s Vikings) to documentary (NOVA’s Secrets of the Viking Sword)
- Marvel movies and comic books
- Really damn hideous Halloween costumes
- Rare visits to museums
YES!! This is what most people in Scandinavia during the Viking period did when it was sunny. And they dressed like this!!
For academics, students, and idiots like me who spend all their spare time looking at a world a millenia gone, our sources are pretty varied:
- Archeological Sources:
- Excavated graves (we have identified over 500,000 graves from the Viking period in Scandinavia; over 10,000 have been excavated) – these graves are very… interesting… and we will discuss them at length in the future
- Excavated villages/market centers/industrial centers (mostly iron smelting sites)
- Settlements/Graves outside Scandinavia and Iceland – current UK, France, Germany, Russia and Canada
- Runic inscriptions/Stones/Picture Stones
- One off finds
- Textual Source from within the Viking world (Old Norse sources):
- Legendary Sagas/Stories – Beowulf, Volsung saga and others – these stories probably originated before/during the Viking period and survived as oral tradition until they could be recorded.
- Eddic Poetry (The Poetic Edda) – this is a book of poetry which contains the most thorough and complete cosmology and mythology of the Vikings. It is largely extracted from the Codex Regius which was likely written about 1270 – roughly 200 years after the end of the Viking Period
- Eddic Prose (The Prose Edda) – assumed to have been written/compiled by the Icelandic polymath Snorri Sturleson around 1220. The six surviving copies we have were written at some point in the 1300s, 1400s and 1600s
Codex Regius of Eddaic Poems and Flateyjarbok
- Skaldic poetry – poems delivered in Royal Courts which are essentially flattery to kings
- Icelandic Sagas – stories which tell the history of Icelandic families over generations; from these we have learned about voyages to North America and Greenland, encounters with Native Americans, the Christianization of Iceland, and other historic events. These are easily read and are compelling tales filled with love, ambition, treachery, politics, poetry… wonderful tales.
- Textual Sources from the victims of the Vikings (Anglo-Saxons and Continental sources)
- To a large degree, a series of whines and complaints about the Vikings, and a compilation of names of the worthies the Vikings poked fatally with various sharp metal objects (arrows, spears, axes, swords, seaxes and occasionally even more bizarre and interesting objects)
- Observers of the Vikings from outside the Viking world (Byzantine and Arabic sources)
- Byzantine records on the Varangian Guard which was largely composed of Vikings
- Really interesting accounts by Arab diplomats/traders/geographers and explorers who encountered the Vikings in a variety of locations and recorded what they saw in reports which were sent back to their countries rulers.
Before we begin this journey, I’m going to ask you to keep some things in mind throughout the series, and I will remind you of these as we go along.
First, the Vikings were human, with all the wonderful and horrible potential that that implies. The people who mourned the death of the Birka Girl, who loved her, missed and prayed for her, gave her toys, made her clothes, are also the same people who are responsible for the map further below.
Reconstruction of Birka Girl by the Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Each dot represents a raid on France in between 800 – 900 A.D. To paraphrase Dr. Neil Price – for every dot on that map you need to picture a burning village, bodies in the street and a stream of desperate refugees fleeing in one direction while a few men and many women and children were marched at spearpoint to longships in the other direction – destined for the Scandinavian slave markets.
France was not the best neighborhood in Europe between 800 and 900 AD.
These were the wide ranging explorers to leave European shores for coasts not yet imagined (by Europeans anyway). At a time when exploration for exploration’s sake seemed to be an alien concept, they went from Norway and Sweden to Africa, Iraq, Russia, and many further places. These are the same Europeans who were the first to visit North America… and to find it so underwhelming they did not return.
In other words, they were fully human and very complex.
Second, the world they lived in was devoid of virtually everything we take for granted. There was no science to explain cold fronts and heat waves – the vagaries of weather were mysterious, explained by mythical forces. There was no germ theory, so illness might be a curse or a spell. Things that are obvious to us were unknown to them. It’s not that they were dumb; it’s that they did not have the foundations of science and knowledge we do. So when something seems ridiculous, remember the world they lived in.
Lastly, the world they lived in was almost completely oral. Runes existed and there was some writing. But for the most part information was passed on verbally. And this means that stories and myths changed and evolved continually from place to place and time to time. What we have now in the written poems, stories … this is only a frozen snapshot of a body of tales that was once alive and evolving. Even worse, those snapshots were mostly taken a couple of hundred years AFTER the end of the open transmission of these myths, recorded after a complete change in religion and philosophy took place in the Scandinavian culture. At best, we have blurry, out of focus, partially photoshopped snapshots to go by. It is contradictory, incomplete and sometimes confusing – but fascinating.
Here is my current plan for the diaries going forward:
- Viking Cosmology, Mythology and the World they Lived In
- Northern Europe before the Vikings
- Gods and Giants
- Viking History – An Overview
- Viking Technology – Weapons
- Viking Technology – Ships
- The “invisible” Vikings – Women and Children
- Vikings and Race
- Modern Heathens and Vikings
DISCLAIMER: I am not a historian, archeologist, linguist, or academic of any stripe. I’m just a dude who does blacksmithing, and has an obsession with swords, spears and axes, Bronze Age through Viking Period Europe. However, I have had the distinct privilege of visiting many museums in Europe, reading many of the original archeological papers, and speaking to several archeologists who specialize in Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Early Medieval Culture in both the United States and Europe. I WILL make mistakes and am open to correction – but I do ask for citations so that I may read/listen/view and learn.
Source Material for These Diaries (Citations are half-assed. I’m not an academic, I don’t get paid to do this, nor do I get a grade. You can find the sources. That’s good enough):
The Viking Mind: Messenger Lectures by Neil Price at Cornell University 2012 (each link opens a YouTube video of an hour long lecture. Very worth seeing though.)
The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. Price, Neil S. Published by the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala 2002
Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. H.R. Ellis Davidson. 1965
The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes. Translated and edited by Jackson Crawford. 2015
The Poetic Edda. Translated by Lee M. Hollander.
The Prose Edda. Translated by Jesse L. Byock.
The Saga of the Volsungs. Translated by Jesse L. Byock.
Egil’s Saga. Translated by W.C. Green. Accessed at: sagadb.org
The Story of Burnt Njal (Njal’s Saga). Translated by George W. DaSent. Accessed at: sagadb.org
The Laxdale Saga. Translated by Muriel A.C. Press. Accessed at: sagadb.org
Beowulf. Translated by Seamus Heaney. 2001.
Vikings, Life and Legend. Edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz, Matthias Wemhoff. The British Museum Press. 2014.
Woden’s Warriors: Warriors and Warefare in 6th – 7th Century Northern Europe. Paul Mortimer. 2011. (Good luck finding a copy of this...)
The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England. Hilda Ellis Davidson. 1998. (First published in 1962).
http://www.hurstwic.org/
http://www.vikingsword.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Wulfheodenas/
The Viking Answer Lady
Northvegr Home - all kinds of primary source materials here
Book of Settlements
