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Who Were the Vikings?
In Norse, Viking means piracy, and for
centuries -- indeed, ever since Viking raiders savagely
attacked England's Lindisfarne monastery in A.D. 793 -- the
Vikings have seemed to many to have been little more than
blue-eyed barbarians in horned helmets. But archeological
investigations of Viking sites stretching from Russia to
Newfoundland have revealed a more human (if not altogether
humane) side to the Viking character.
NOVA: What must it have been like for the monks at
Lindisfarne to be suddenly attacked out of the blue?
Fitzhugh: For them, the attack represented the
vengeance of Satan on the Christian outposts of Europe. It was
a terrible event, because the monks and the church centers had
set themselves up in small, fortress-like places where they
could pursue their studies and writings in peace, and it was
an invasion of the sanctitude of Christ and their religion.
This was totally unlike anything that had happened before.
There had been outlaws, but to have shiploads of brawny
characters show up at your isolated, supposedly sacred center,
this was the ultimate horror.
NOVA: What did the Vikings actually do in these
attacks?
Fitzhugh: Well, the attacks were very diverse. I
mean, one misconception we have is that swarms of Vikings
raided constantly all over the place, and it really wasn't
that way. For the most part, the raids were totally
independent. They were not the result of national armies or
navies moving down into Europe, but rather the actions of
individual Viking chieftains who grouped together followers
and had one or maybe several boats. Occasionally, as in some
of the invasions of Normandy, they organized whole flotillas
and made a purposeful kind of attack, but generally they were
much more individualistic. They had to find food, and they
couldn't carry their food with them. They had to live off the
land, so they drove people out and took whatever money and
other valuables people had. And, of course, the church centers
and monasteries like Lindisfarne constituted the major sources
of wealth at that time.
NOVA: Did they kill a lot of people in these raids?
Fitzhugh: In many cases they did. I think they were
relatively ruthless, but remember, this was a ruthless age
with far more than just peaceful farmers living peaceful
lives. All sorts of things were going on in the British Isles
and mainland Europe, including constant battles between rival
princes vying for kingship and control of local regions. The
Vikings were just another crowd, though a crowd that was
non-Christian and had no compunction about killing churchmen
or women or children.
That said, in general I think the victims were men, because
the Vikings were great at absorbing people. They needed
slaves, they needed people to help row, they needed people to
help maintain their lifestyle. They regularly set up small
villages and centers where they could over winter or stay for
months at a time, and they needed people to help run these
establishments. So I think if you were able to put yourself
back into the camp of a raiding Viking group, you probably
would find Italians and Spaniards and Portuguese and French
and Russians -- a very diverse group built around a core of
Vikings from a particular region, say, southern Denmark or an
Oslo fjord. It wouldn't be just be blond, blue-eyed Norsemen.
NOVA: So what are the main challenges in finding the
truth about the Vikings?
Fitzhugh: Well, one of the major problems in Viking
studies is that we're biased towards the historical accounts
-- early chronicles that all came from the church centers or
official reports to the kings or regional authorities. It's
always been that way. Only in the past 20 years or so have
archeological and other studies begun to provide information
that fleshes out and in some cases contradicts or even
replaces the historical record. These findings are giving us a
totally different view of the Vikings. We see them
archeologically not as raiders and pillagers but as
entrepreneurs, traders, people opening up new avenues of
commerce, bringing new materials into Scandinavia, spreading
Scandinavian ideas into Europe. For instance, we see silk that
originated in Asia appearing in archeological sites such as
that at York. This contrasts sharply with the early accounts,
which were all from Europe, were inevitably based on victims'
reports, and were extremely one-sided.
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The Beginning of the Viking Age Copyright -
Jim Cornish, Grade Five
Teacher Gander, Newfoundland, Canada.
Historical ages are seldom pinned down to specific dates like
the Viking Age. Usually, the influence of one group over the
history of another is gradual, spread out over a few decades
or hundreds of years. But the change in how the Vikings dealt
with others in Europe can be pinned down to a single event, an
attack on a monastery in England, and is widely accepted as
the start of the Viking Age.
The Vikings Attack Lindisfarne
On the 8th of June in the year 793, a group of Norsemen
attacked an unsuspecting 6th century monastery on the island
of Lindisfarne, off England's east coast. It was the first
recorded attack by the Norse on England. A surviving monk
wrote the following in his account of the raid:
"The same year the heathens arrived from the north to Brittany
with a fleet of ships. They were like stinging wasps, and they
spread in all directions like horrible wolves, wrecking,
robbing, shattering and killing not only animals but also
priests, monks and nuns. They came to the church of
Lindisfarne, slayed everything alive, dug up the altars and
took all the treasures of the holy church".
The next year these Northmen, as they were also known,
returned to raid and plunder the convent in Jarrow, just 50
kilometres from Lindisfarne. Over the next few decades other
monasteries in England, Scotland and Ireland would also be
attacked and looted. The raiders became known as the Vikings
and thus began three hundred years of terror that marks the
Viking Age.
Raids along the coast of England and Ireland by these warriors
were not that unusual. But, the Lindisfarne attack was
different. It was against a monastery. Many of the defenseless
monks, priests and nuns were either killed or captured as
slaves and the gold, silver and religious treasures of their
churches were stolen.
When news of the attack reached the cities of Europe, people
were shocked. It was generally agreed that even in war,
Christian properties were to be spared. But the Vikings, it
seemed, knew of no such agreement or choose to ignore it. For
three centuries, they would continue their raiding and
pillaging over most of Europe and as far south as the city of
Jerusalem.
Until 793, the Vikings had not strayed too far from their
communities along the coasts of Norway, Denmark and Sweden or
raided settlements beyond nearby England, Scotland and
Ireland. Why they decided to extend these raids further south
and east into mainland Europe in 793, is not completely
understood. Some historians think the Vikings believed
stealing the wealth of others to become rich was easier than
working for it themselves. More likely, however, were the
effects of a sudden increase in population among the Vikings.
Confined to narrow strips of land along the mountainous coasts
in Norway at least, the prosperous Vikings quickly ran out of
room to support their growing numbers. Many young men who
wanted their own land moved and settled in areas the Vikings
had conquered. Another reason for their movements may have to
do with their skills as merchants and traders. Europe was a
great market for their wares and at the turn of the millennium
few others were doing business there. |
