It begins with screaming and blood.
A house by the sea, somewhere in Norway
Inside the screaming of one becomes the screaming of two. The baby is a boy.
They wrap him in soft wool.
His parents are no one special,
No scald will sing of his deeds and history will not remember his name.
His family are not lords or warriors.
Yet, he and people like him will spread Scandinavian influence
From Constantinople to Western lands unseen by Europeans,
For this village prizes one skill above all others.
The father takes his newborn son and lays him in a crib; a crib shaped like a boat.
*Intro music*
Between the eighth and the tenth centuries, a startling event occurred in northern Europe.
Throughout the whole of Scandinavia, men and women took to the Seas with the intention to raid, settle and trade with new lands.
Within three centuries, they would trade goods in Constantinople,
build the city of Dublin,
establish a dynasty in France, found a kingdom in England and give Russia its name.
And famously, this Viking expansion would culminate in a series of voyages that left settlements on Iceland, Greenland and briefly North America.
Medieval Scandinavians achieved this through superior technology, flexible tactics and business savvy, but surprisingly
also without central leadership or even a common vision.
Instead it was a distributed effort where groups of adventurers
struck out into Europe's waterways in search of profit, power and fame.
And in this series, we'll chart the most successful of those efforts and how they changed the face of Europe
But before we get to that, let's take a look at Scandinavian society,
Specifically what motivated medieval Scandinavians to take to the waves and, once they did, why were they so successful?
That question of motivation is actually tough to answer
One school of thought holds that overpopulation or climate change led to resource scarcity and food shortages
Causing Scandinavians to seek out new lands or, at least wealth to buy land back home.
Others say the consolidation of political power and Scandinavian society
(Basically the rise of powerful kings) created a class of displaced warrior nobles looking to recapture wealth and status
Still others point out that by the eighth century Europe had finally begun to recover from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire
Complex trade and monetary systems were on the rise
meaning that after centuries of existing via the barter system people in Europe finally had goods that were, well actually worth stealing
Moreover, these new luxury goods were portable.
After all, Vikings weren't going to cross the North Sea and sack an English port just to steal all of its cows.
Silver and precious stones though, those were easy things to loot.
But in all likelihood,
There was no single event that drove the Viking expansion.
The evidence points to a combination of factors that convinced Scandinavians to strike out with the sail and the sword.
As to why they were so successful, for that,
Let's go back to the same house we visited earlier.
The child who lay in the boat-shaped crib is now 13 and getting ready to accompany his father to sea.
His is a nautical family. The house he grew up, indeed every house in the village is shaped like an upturned ship.
They live on the coast of Norway with the North Sea on one side and a great ridge of mountains
Known as the keel on the other as a boy
He learned to sail small craft in the sheltered fjords fishing and ferrying passengers
But this will be his first time sailing to foreign lands.
He is well-prepared.
Years of helping his mother handle farming and livestock have made him strong and village leisure activities have reinforced the importance of physical fitness
He spends his summers in wrestling contests mock sword fights boxing and foot races
Unusually for a medieval European he can swim for several miles in the depths of winter
He spends his time playing music listening to and reciting poetry matching wits over board games and drinking
Vast quantities of mead this isn't all fun and games though these games songs and tales weigh nothing
cultural comforts that can be carried across the world while taking up no cargo space and
Under his boat roofed haul heavy with snow
he learned how to exist in a small space with other men for months at a time without
descending into violence
When the village needs to build or repair a boat,
He assists the craftsman selecting Greenwood and learning how to cut with the grain to give the timber strength
Boatyard elders work him until he memorized each angle and spar of the clinker style construction
forming mental blueprints of the craft
Now if he and his crew are wrecked on a foreign Shore they can build a new boat from memory
But now his training is over he and his father set off in their vessel armed not with swords
but with furs, honey, and walrus ivory
They are not Vikings in fact very few
Scandinavians were and
Viking is actually a verb to go on a raid is to go Viking and a person who goes Viking is a
Viking er, but the boy and his father are not Vikingrs and their ship is not one of the famous long ships
They sail akun are a trading vessel that is shorter and wider than its warlike cousin
It has decks and a hold that can carry 30 to 40 tons
But a draught of only 5 feet meaning it can navigate even shallow rivers
Its keel keeps it steady during the crossing to the British Isles and as it navigates its first storm
the boy no longer has to wonder why skaldak poems refer to ships as serpents the
Flexible hull twists in the water bending where other ships would break
the Navigator shows the boy how to orient himself on the open sea how to chart by the Stars and look for telltale signs of
Land in cloud formations and passing birds, they count oar strokes to determine their speed. They average around five knots
Respectable but under optimum conditions. The thinner flat-bottomed long ships can make three times that speed
They pull into the long port at their destination the Kingdom of Dublin a trade city founded by Norwegian Vikingrs
There standing on deck the boy sees foreign people for the first time their dark haired and dark eyed men and women
Standing on the shore chained together with iron manacles
Irish slaves
The boy learns to barter fur and ivory for human beings and sets off on the next leg of the journey
These Irish will fetch a good price at the emirate of Cordoba
Muslim Spain where merchants offer silver coin from the Middle East in exchange for human cargo
Usually traders only handle one leg of the trade
But the boy's father is savvy alongside silver in the Arab territories
They barter for pottery and glass in what is now Germany and silver jewelry with the Franks
In the Mediterranean, they buy spices and a Persian leather
their shallow-draft ship can navigate most major rivers in Europe and
Most major cities are built on rivers and at times they meet up with the great long ships the Vikingrs
The first time the boy fears the fierce captain with his iron helmet and sword
But he soon learns that fellow Scandinavians are also open to trade
sometimes his father swaps supplies for looted items and at other times he takes silver in exchange for
Intelligence about the lands. They've just visited were there guards at the port a monastery
Did they cite any army camps or cavalry along the shore?
At other times they give fellow Scandinavians a wide berth. Not everyone can be trusted
over the years the boy learns that people in trading ports consider all
Scandinavians the same the Irish call them the dark and fair foreigners and the Franks refer to them as North men
Though their crews hail from Norway the English see no distinction and refer to all Scandinavians as Danes
But the Scandinavians themselves see a great deal of difference the Norwegians and Danes often feud.
After all, geography often shapes culture and there's little similarity between mountainous Norway and the flat river lands of Denmark
The Swedes largely control trade into the waterways of Eastern Europe and dislike others encroaching on their territory
At times a great leader might unite a coalition of war bands from different places
But it was tempting fate for a Norwegian trader to pull up alongside an unfamiliar Danish longship
In time the boy became a man. He learned his father's trade well and married
He too would lay his sons in a boat shaped crib and take them to sea
teaching them to barter in the trading ports and once even taking them on a risky venture to the lavish markets of
Constantinople, the man was not rich though full of profit a lifetime of trading on the sea also exposes a
family to loss
storms, bad investments and raids by fellow Scandinavians blunted his fortune
Long voyages make for rocky marriages and after 20 years his wife declared divorce
Claiming half his property. He accepted this and remarried his former wife had after all followed the law
When he died, he could not be buried in the lavish style of the wealthy Lords
instead his sons dug him a simple grave and filled it with his favorite possessions and to
Mark the spot to honor the man who had crossed the ocean and exchanged goods across the world
They laid him to rest inside a ring of stones a ring
Shaped like a boat