The word “Viking” is immensely frustrating.
Our grasp on the original etymology is tenuous at best, and Viking was barely even used to
label the people who went out to sea.
The Europeans on the receiving end of these spontaneous blade-wielding visitors called
them Northmen, Danes, Rus, or simply those jerks who trashed our monastery; and the Scandinavians
behind this violent tourism didn’t really tell us what they called themselves, because
our first good records from them don’t show up until centuries later.
But history is 20% iffy-nomenclature by mass, and the name has since stuck.
Still though, even our modern usage is problematic, because the term often gets applied as a catchall
for medieval Scandinavia when its meaning is rather narrow.
Viking is the act and the associated profession of raiding, just bein’ a pirate.
Vikings themselves were a small subset of Scandinavians, but their historical impact
and overwhelming Cool Factor earned them top billing in medieval history.
So although Scandinavian does not by-default equal Viking, we can describe their collective
ventures under the banner of The Viking Age.
To find out how it all went down and see just how ludicrously far these Norsebois got, Let’s
do some History.
In addition to a wibbly moniker, the Vikings are also a little fuzzy in the timeline department.
For narrative convenience, Historians often date the age from 793 to 1066, opening with
the sack of Lindisfarne monastery and closing with the Norman conquest of England.
But if Vikings are pirates, then their Age should be thorough in its coverage of involuntary-treasure-reallocation,
so really, we need to bump those numbers out by at least a few decades.
Scandinavians were trading, seafaring, and occasionally plundering long before Lindisfarne.
It’s always tempting to imagine a culture just kind of appearing onto history as a fully-formed
entity, but Scandinavia had several Viking traits from early on, and the society gradually
evolved through the first millennium AD.
Trade networks in the iron age reached into the Celtic and Roman worlds, and the maritime
culture was already fairly robust.
Scandinavia was a tough place to traverse, as inland areas were either full of trees
or covered in mountains, so people and supplies had to travel by water if they wanted to get
anywhere.
Luckily, these guys had Trees For Days, so they became wizards at woodworking and shipbuilding.
With the convenient training zone of the enclosed Baltic Sea, Scandinavians developed a truly
brilliant ship design, using an overlapping plank construction on a long, narrow, and
shallow hull.
This meant ships could sail the open sea and row along rivers, which, to the delight of
Scandinavians and the abject terror of Europeans, will make the Vikings quite versatile travelers.
While Scandinavia was outclassing the rest of the world in the seafaring skill tree,
their land situation differed from Europe’s Post-Roman Migratory Reshuffle.
Instead of kingdoms full of cities and shiny monasteries, Scandinavians lived on small
farmsteads and had no overarching government.
But who needs government when you have a boatful of warriors and the favor of Thor?
SO, by the 700s, Scandinavians were becoming familiar with the wider European world, sailing
eastwards in the Baltic, and hopping westwards to the Frisian coast.
This trading was sometimes a little aggressive, on the order of ‘buy these furs or so help
me Tyr I will axe you’, but that’s piracy for you, and it worked decently well.
However, the Vikings set themselves apart by just going for it.
Northwestern Europe and the British Isles happened to have some shiny monasteries, stacked
with treasure and utterly lacking any defenses.
Because who would be so craven as to plunder a monastery?
*cough…
Well, that polyanna delusion shattered like a stained-glass window when the Vikings rolled
up to the British island of Lindisfarne in 793 and trampled the place, stealing the artifacts
and selling the monks they didn’t kill into slavery.
Because, as they soon found out, the Muslim world was incalculably rich, and had a substantial
market for slave imports.
Christians weren’t supposed to be in the slaving business, but the markets in Frisia,
Rome, Venice and Constantinople clearly weren’t losing any sleep about it.
— Oh Cleo what are you Meowing about?
*meow* I know!
Slavery is bad.
C’mere!
Aaah, good cat!
Good cat.
Who’s a little floofy boot?
It’s you.
It’s you!
*Mwah.
So the Vikings of the early 800s enjoyed a stunningly efficient business model: Sail,
Sack, Steal, Sell, Celebrate.
And the Europeans were horrified.
This, dear viewer, is why our sources for the Vikings are so uniquely screwy.
Scandinavians left some inscriptions on runestones but otherwise didn’t write anything about
themselves during the Viking Age, so our documentation comes from the people who lived in constant
fear of being waylaid by a surprise fleet of longships.
Now, as a human with functional empathy, it’s obvious why the medieval accounts are so biased,
but as a historian who wishes we understood the Vikings a little bit better, it does me
a big sad.
We do eventually get Scandinavian sources on their history and culture, but they’re
about three centuries late, and were all written post-Christianization, so we’re 0 for 2
on original Norse works.
And this is where archaeology especially has come in clutch for us, because settlement
remnants and burial patterns across Europe have been doing the heavy lifting in recent
scholarship.
As it happens, our newest discoveries are coming from Eastern Europe, which had long
been sidelined in the Viking narrative and was inaccessible to research because of that
pesky Iron Curtain.
Yeah I know there were bigger problems in the 20th century but Viking stuff, man, c’mon!
Anyway, the earliest evidence we have for the ol’ Raid-and-Trade routine comes from
this system of waterways, running from the Baltic, down the Volga, and to the Caspian
sea.
The swindle here wasn’t in sacking monasteries (because there weren’t any), but in trading
furs lumber amber and wool, plus capturing local Slavic people and selling them into
slavery.
The morality of that last operation was rather bankrupt, but the economics were quite the
opposite.
The only problem was the Vikings had to work with middlemen in the Bulgar and Khazar Khaganates,
so in the mid-800s they bopped westwards, away from the Volga river and onto the Dnieper.
This route fed into the Black Sea and landed them right on the doorstep of the biggest
and shiniest city in the Christian world, Constantinople.
This being the Vikings, they tried to sack it, but the Byzantines had the benefit of
actual defenses and were able to hold out just fine.
They did, however, become fascinated by the Vikings, whom they called Varangians, and
hired some for the emperor’s personal guard.
Scandinavians were thrilled to deal directly with Constantinople, and built up trading
towns along the Dnieper river, such as Kiev.
The demographics at work here are a little murky, because it seems like the Scandinavians
of the so-called Rus become a minority population among the native Slavs and Finns, but research
is ongoing.
To the collective thrill of the Byzantine empire, the Rus adopted Orthodox Christianity
in 989, and this becomes a recurring plotline elsewhere in Europe.
So let’s jump west and look at the Carolingian empire.
After some raiding in the early 800s, the Vikings figure out that they can make significantly
more cash from gently sacking a place and then ransoming the loot and captives back
to locals.
They also start extorting entire cities for payment of Danegeld in exchange for not attacking.
This process was made significantly easier by the near-constant civil warring between
the three Frankish kingdoms after its partition in 840, so there was zero coordinated resistance
to the raids.
By 865 the Vikings had cleared out central Europe a little too well, so many hopped the
channel to go bother the Isles instead.
We’ll go ravage England in a second don’t you worry, but at the turn of the 10th century
our beloved Northmen doubled back over to France, and the Frankish king was flat broke,
so he paid them off with land.
The Vikings gained the County of Rouen, which was later promoted to the Duchy of Normandy.
This was great for everyone, because Vikings stopped sailing down the Seine to make a mess
in Paris, and the newly settled Normans got comfy in their new digs: speaking French,
adopting Christianity, and cooperating with the church administration to more effectively
govern.
The Normans quickly stop acting like your typical Vikings and go off on their own historical
trajectory, but safe to say they become a big deal.
Ok so NOW let’s destroy the British Isles.
In the early 800s they were prime targets: kingdoms were small and weak, and Irish monks
prepared a buffet of beautifully-sackable monasteries.
We had the standard Viking playbook until 865, when the Great Army arrived from Francia,
Denmark, and Norway to absolutely wreck shop.
In the span of a few years, a Scandinavian army makes a base in East Anglia, marches
north to conquer York and the kingdom of Northumbria, swoops down to take half of Mercia, and loops
back to East Anglia to make it over half of the Saxon kingdoms stomped, the only full
survivor being Wessex.
Unlike in Normandy, the Vikings weren’t able to establish a proper state, but they
did set the rulebook for this big new land, so we call it the Danelaw.
Meanwhile, back in Wessex, king Aelfred knew that it was nut up or shut up so he reformed
his state to meet the Scandinavian threat, and his successors later conquered up to create
the Kingdom of England.
And the Anglo-Danish hybrid culture in the north seemed pretty chill with the arrangement,
what with all the easily-arable land and good royal administration.
Then there’s Ireland, which didn’t end being a place where Scandinavians came to
live, but it did become the money-pot of the Viking world; because after they cleaned out
the countless monasteries, they built up coastal merchant towns at the bases of rivers to raid
inland in for slaves to sell at markets in Spain (of course, they raided some Iberian
towns along the way but what did you expect).
Norse settlers had more long-term luck in the wider Celtic world, like the Isle of man,
the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands, and Lowlands Scotland.
But if we want to talk about settlement colonization, we’ve got to go off the edge of the known
world for the A-tier Viking accomplishment: Iceland.
Situated smack in the middle of the North-Atlantic, Iceland is a little out of the way, and seems
to have been discovered by accident, when some poor sailors overshot the Faroe Islands
and presumably freaked the Hel out when they discovered a giant uninhabited island about
2 post codes out from Niflheim.
Setting aside the nonzero chance of veering wildly off-course while sailing over, it’s
easy to see why Iceland instantly became prime real-estate: tons of good land, no locals
to fight, and the Valkyries put on a light-show every winter [Aurora].
Dinner and a show, what else do you need?
After Iceland’s discovery in the 870s-ish, fleets of Norwegians sail in to settle, and
create a quasi-democratic island assembly.
As centuries go by it remains a fairly insular corner of the Scandinavian world, and the
old oral storytelling tradition gets put to writing, resulting in one of the most stacked
literary cultures anywhere.
The myths and historical sagas we have aren’t perfect, history is embellished and mythology
is through a post-Christian lens, but they’re THE source for our understanding of Viking-Age
culture.
So as we’ve seen, the Scandinavian diaspora covered… pretty much everywhere, but the
Viking Age itself eventually wrapped up.
Y: Hey Blue, this next part is insanely complicated, mind if I step in?
B: Oh my word, friend of the channel Yellow AKA “LudoHistory”!
Y: That’s me!
B: You my good sir have two whole degrees in this field.
Which means on average we each have one degree in this field!
Y: That’s definitely not how math works.
B: Oh I studied Classics, Red’s the one with the Math Degree
R: Don’t you dare bring me into this.
B: Yellow, why don’t you take it from here?
Y: So Christianity was interacting in much more interesting ways than mere victimhood
in the Viking Age!
It’s not like Norse people had no clue what this Christianity was – traders had been
marked with the sign of the cross from early on, full-scale missionary attempts had happened
as early as the 820s, and raiders in Europe would convert, sometimes even voluntarily.
But the big wave of conversions among the Scandinavian elite happens in the late 10th
century.
Now, you’d think this would stop raids, but no.
Knutr the Great was baptized in 1014 and he gets the distinction of Most Successful Viking,
actually becoming King of England in 1016.
And hell, the Patron Saint of Norway was a mercenary and raider in England in the 1010s
too.
So, not exactly an ending.
Christianity’s link to the “end” of the Viking Age is even more tenuous in the
Baltic – Sweden and Denmark kept raiding in the Baltic well into the 12th century,
though it was eventually justified as a Crusade.
What Christianity did do is let local leaders use Christian models and tools, such as the
tithe, to justify and consolidate their power.
Doing so allowed for more centralization than was possible before, and models of sacral
kingship assisted in state-building in Scandinavia and the forming of the countries into very
roughly the shapes they have today.
This is a slow process, though, and it wasn’t 1066 hit and like DING “We’re now a well-behaved
Christian Kingdom”.
In fact — uh oh, I’m running out of time, uhhh: Phew, nailed it.
*DING
Whoopsies that’s the Late Medieval alarm, which means if we go any further I’m gonna
start compulsively talking about Florence, so let’s wrap it up here.
Thanks so much for stopping by Yellow!
So it’s clearly hard to put a firm end-date on the Viking age, because the methods, motivations,
and goals all changed during that time, but 1066 does have a nice irony to it.
King Harald of Norway tried to conquer England using some classic Great Army tactics, but
was defeated in battle.
But then one month later, Duke William of Normandy led an army of knights at Hastings
and won himself a kingdom.
The Scandinavians who played by old rules were left out in the cold, and the Scandinavians
who adapted to their new homes and a changing world did a lot better for themselves.
So all told, the Viking age is a class above simple piracy because it effectively terraformed
the landscape of European politics, economics, and culture.
And though their legacy has been appropriated in ways ranging from dubious to flat-out dangerous,
the Viking Age proves that history only gets cooler the more we learn about it.
Thank you so much for watching, and special thanks to Yellow for both helping out with
the research and jumping in to talk about the lengthy denouement to the Viking Age.
You can see Yellow analyzing the historical chops of popular videogames over on Twitch.tv/LudoHistory.
And as always, thank you to the Patrons who make this show possible.
I’ll see you all in the next video.