Replica of Viking ship. Academics have uncovered complex social networks within age-old Icelandic sagas, which challenge the stereotypical image of Vikings as unworldly, violent savages. (Credit: © pemabild / Fotolia)
Replica of Viking ship. Academics have uncovered complex social networks within age-old Icelandic sagas, which challenge the stereotypical image of Vikings as unworldly, violent savages. (Credit: © pemabild / Fotolia)
Most Vikings were victims. Victims of Travel Agents who sold southern vacation trips but never got the destination accommodations negotiated.
Given that the ATMs of the day were Monasteries, the poor vikings made ATM withdrawals to be able to exist until transportation home could be arranged.
It's all a great misunderstanding.
It’s my understanding that when my ancestors were drunk, they were a pretty fun lot.
Short, though. I was AMAZED to see the door of a stave church and hear that it was actually person-height.
“Academics at Coventry University have uncovered complex social networks within age-old Icelandic sagas, which challenge the stereotypical image of Vikings as unworldly, violent savages.”
Who are these “academics” and where did they get their (apparently) worthless degrees? I ask because historians have already known this for a heck of a long time.
Seriously, have these people never studied prosopography before?
At our recent Scandinavian picnic here in St. Louis, I met a professor who actually is an expert in Icelandic and Old Norse.
The Vikings ruled their realms like the Mob, La Cosa Nostra. As long as they got their cut, usually 10%, of all economic activity in the area they left everybody alone. Everybody had to kick up, right up to the boss (The King). However, when the envelopes were light, well my friend, that’s when they got violent. People got whacked, until they stopped holding out.
I dated a Swede that was a Social Savage.
Vikings May Have Been More Social Than Savage
May be........ EXCEPT for the rape, pillage and mass murders..
And then theres the slavery, hostage taking, ransomes, and arson..
The Vikes were pretty liberal in the sense of todays liberality..
They could have been democrats.. very progressive were they..
In the sense of social corruption, bribery, ideology and Mob Rule..
You know.................................. by Mobsters.. i.e. democracy..
Socialist and savage. Still are. Bane of Christianity and Jews everywhere.
sailing that thing across the ocean with only a primitive compass, no charts, the mind boggles.
Everything that anyone could conceivably want to know about the Vikings has already been described in that epic work, Hägar the Horrible.
The are many words of Norse origin that remain in spoken English today.
While many have their history in warfare, a very many of them are about are about everyday life:
The following link lists some of the English words of norse origin. You can see in the list that many are not about war. The lists expresses the result of settlement by and intermarriage with the norse in parts of northern and eastern England.
Of course the biggest tales of the “Vikings” told in England and later recorded came from the Anglo-Saxons who had just a few centuries earlier been invaders to the British Isles from the east.
Um, I think that stereotype would still hold if you were among the raidees rather than the raiders.
