Hey everybody, and Happy Good Friday! Wait, I don’t think
you’re supposed to be happy, cause Jesus is being crucified, and stuff. But on
the other hand, some of you get a three-day weekend (not me, but somebody out there is getting one), so there’s that. Also,
it was warm enough today that I could open the window, thereby distracting the
cat from chewing on my feet while I write this.
I decided to blog about Vikings this year because I already
blogged about Easter
and Easter bunnies last year. Besides, if you read
that post, you’ll already know that Easter is named after the Norse or old
Germanic goddess Eostre or Ostara, so that Vikings are a completely normal and
natural thing to associate with Easter.
 |
| Something like that. |
The word “Viking” did not originally belong to any
particular ethnic group and was not used to describe a distinct culture. In
Old Norse, the word “viking” was originally a feminine noun and meant “an
overseas expedition.” The masculine noun “vikingr” was used to refer to the
expeditioners themselves, and was also used as a personal name, so there you
go, parents who want to be unique and creative – name the rugmonkey Vikingr and
see if he still speaks to you when he grows up.
Later, the word “Viking” would take on connotations of
piracy and raiding, but would remain largely neutral in its connotations
throughout the Viking Age. The Vikings were known by many names
in the lands that they raided – Lochlanach by the Irish, Ascomanni by the Germans,
Dene by the Anglo-Saxons, and Rus by the Arabs, Slavs and Byzantines, probably
after Roslagen, the area of Sweden where most of the Vikings who raided these
lands came from. Vikings would form settlements in Belarus and Russia, lending
their name to those nations.
The Viking Age is the period of early Medieval history which
lasted from about 790 until 1066, when the Normans conquered England. During
this period, Vikings traveled as far east as the Volga River in Russia, as far
west as Newfoundland (with stops in Iceland and Greenland), and as far south as
what is now Morocco.
The Vikings established settlements in the Orkney, Faroe and
Shetland Islands, as well as on Iceland and Greenland; the latter were the
subject of a thoroughly depressing novel I once read, The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley, in which everyone starved at the
end, that is, if they didn’t get murdered or burned at the stake or otherwise
brutally executed first. It was rough, is what I’m saying.
The Vikings managed to establish at least one colony in the
New World, L’Anse
aux Meadows, on the northernmost coast of Newfoundland.
 |
| Here. |
It was probably established around the
year 1000 AD, and may have been just one of many Norse settlements in the
region; at the very least, it was probably a base camp for expeditioners wishing
to head south and check out the rest of northeastern Canada. While the area
surrounding the L’Anse aux Meadows today consists of, you guessed it, meadows,
1,000 years ago it consisted of dark, scary forests which the Viking settlers
would have used to build boats and houses. Eight sod and wood homes and
workshops were uncovered in archeological digs that occurred throughout the
1960s and 1970s. The largest building in L’Anse aux Meadows was 94.5 ft by 51
ft (28.8 m by 15.6 m) and contained
multiple rooms. The community enjoyed a smithy, a carpentry workshop, and a
dock for repairing boats. The discovery of artifacts like needles and spindles
suggests that women
lived alongside men in the settlement, because some badass bearded Viking
dude wasn’t going to darn his own socks, I guess.
Contrary to popular belief, the Vikings
didn’t wear horned helmets, as this would have been really inconvenient in
battle, where your opponent could easily pull your helmet off by the horns and
then cave your stupid skull in. This idea was promulgated in the 19th
century by members of the Gothic League, a Swedish group of authors and poets
and not, it should be noted, historians. Bronze Age horned helmets have been uncovered
in archeological digs, but their use was probably ceremonial.
Nor were Vikings particularly barbarous;
they didn’t learn to write using the Roman alphabet until they became
Christians, so much of what we know about their conquests comes from records
written by the people they harried and raided, and these accounts are, ahem,
biased. Their Anglo-Saxon neighbors in what is now called England considered
them excessively clean, due to their habit of washing themselves every Saturday
and coming their hair regularly. Persian explorer Ibn Rustah records the
Vikings’ habit of frequently changing their clothes, and his contemporary Ibn
Fadlan records the Vikings’ habit of washing their faces and blowing their noses
each morning.
