Deliver us, O Lord, from the ambiguity of the Norse: Who were the Vikings, really?
The Viking Age begins right meow
Let’s begin with the greatest tragedy of the Viking Age: Research on cat genetics is woefully underfunded.
A study of 15,000 years of feline genetics in Europe shows different waves of cat migration across the continent. It turns out, one of the big waves probably started in the late eighth century as viking longships departed Scandinavia, bringing with them chaos, death... and cats.
And those cats got busy during shore leave. Theoretically, a genetic study of Europe’s cats could reveal the routes and reach of the Norse during the Viking Age. Unfortunately, until this important work receives the funding it deserves, we’ll have to rely on historical and archaeological sources. Thankfully, there’s more than one way to skin a cat—as the Norse knew all too well.
So, the question becomes were they bloodthirsty raiders bent on chaos?1 Or did the vikings help launch a thousand cats and a transformation that pushed Europe, kicking and screaming, into the High Middle Ages?
There’s lots of exciting Viking stuff in popular culture lately. But the Viking Age is marginalized in world-history textbooks and state standards. It lasted nearly three centuries, and it’s part of the story of how systems restructured in Western Europe. It feels like the Dark Ages because of all the violence and chaos. But it’s also a story of political stability and economic growth. The Viking Age is a great way to complexify these OER Project lessons: Assessing the Dark Ages and Systems Restructure in Europe and China.
Who were the Vikings?
The word viking refers to the act of maritime raiding. It likely meant something akin to pirate. When used with a capital “V,” it refers to the people of Scandinavia who lived from the eighth to eleventh centuries. However, the people of Scandinavia didn’t think of themselves as Vikings. They were part of different chiefdoms, kingdoms, and clans. They were Danes, Swedes, Geats. The great majority of them never went on raids. Most were farmers. Calling them all Vikings is a little like calling everyone in nineteenth-century America cowboys.
For the rest of this blog, we’ll use Norse to refer to these groups of people. And when referring to the raiders, we’ll use vikings. But plenty of Norse people set off from their homelands on long voyages that had nothing to do with raiding. During the Viking Age, the Norse sailed, raided, settled, and traded from Canada to the Caspian Sea, from Iceland to Constantinople. The mighty empire of Charlemagne was powerless to stop them. The Byzantines were so impressed, they hired them to guard their emperor.
The Viking Age
Viking raids were part of a broader period of migrations and raids into Western Europe from the north, east, and south. In the east, steppe peoples called Magyars raided and migrated their way west, reaching as far as Burgundy. They settled and forced local lords to pay tribute. To the south, Muslim raids and invasions pushed north, into Spain, Sicily, Italy, and southern France. All raids were violent, but not any more so than acts committed by contemporary rulers like Charlemagne.
Although raids began earlier, historians date the beginning of the Viking Age to 793 CE with a shockingly violent attack on the Lindisfarne monastery in England. Vikings targeted monasteries because they were wealthy and poorly defended.
This raid is documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
AD 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.2
The “written evidence” bit is important. Even if we had fully funded feline fieldwork, the truth is, we’re often working in the dark when we talk about the Viking Age. Archaeological evidence can tell us only so much, and the Norse of this period left behind no written sources beyond runic engravings. Most of what we know about the vikings comes from their victims—not exactly an unbiased source. The written Norse sources we do have come from the sagas that were written down beginning in the twelfth century by Christians. These stories were passed down orally, and the authors made their own revisions.
What caused the Viking Age?
Stealing stuff with boats wasn’t new. But the prolific reach of viking raiders sets this period apart. Some scholars claim climate shifts or famine pushed young men out to sea. Others argue that political, economic, and social causes are to blame. Many parts of Scandinavia had limited farmland, and overpopulation might have meant limited opportunities for young men. The lack of written sources means we don’t know for sure. What we do know is that thousands of young men set out on longships seeking things they couldn’t get at home—treasure, glory, power, and land.
Another cause of the Viking Age was technology. Norse longships were innovative, and Europeans weren’t prepared. The ships were outfitted with huge sails and oars. They were lightweight and fast, with a shallow draft. They were double ended, which meant they could reverse direction without turning around. This was an effective combination for navigating rivers. Vikings sailed up rivers, deep into enemy territory, hit without warning, and escaped before anyone showed up with an army. But it also meant that these ships could sail deep into the European continent carrying trade goods up rivers like the Dnieper, Volga, Seine, Rhine, Danube, and Thames. The ships’ design and strong keel also made them seaworthy. Norse sailors voyaged across expanses of open water without a magnetic compass, settling colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and even reaching Vinland in North America—500 years before Columbus.
Norse diaspora and the Silk Roads
Perhaps the biggest misconception of the Viking Age is that the vikings were a single group—that “the Norse” decided one day to embark on an agenda of robbery, conquest, trade, and exploration. Archaeologist Neil Price argues that we should rethink the Viking Age: This wasn’t a unified movement. These were different families, crews, and individuals making decisions for themselves.
Through that lens, Price suggests, the Viking Age looks more like a diaspora of Norse merchants, sailors, slavers, mercenaries, farmers, and settlers stretching 6,000 miles, from North America to the Caspian Sea and beyond. If you’re familiar with the concept of diaspora, you know that they’re incredibly useful for long-distance exchange. It turns out, the Viking Age might have helped rebuild the Silk Roads. Increasingly, scholars like Price believe it likely that some Norse traders traveled into Central Asia and India—and perhaps, even into Tang Dynasty China.
What’s the evidence? Well, unfortunately, it’s got nothing to do with cat genetics (someday, Fluffy, someday). But we do have accounts from Abbasid writers like Ibn Khordadbeh. In his 840 CE Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms, he writes of the Norse, whom the Abbasids called Rus, and describes their routes down the Volga to the Caspian Sea. He also writes of their land routes to Egypt, Morrocco, Spain, and France to the west, and to Baghdad, Basra, Iran, India, and China (al-Ṣīn) in the east.3 We also have archaeological evidence. In digs across Scandinavia, archaeologists have found silk cloth, recurve bows, a Buddha statue, jewelry from the Islamic world, shells from the Persian Gulf, coins from India and China, and more. Scandinavian amber has been found in tombs in Mongolia and Korea. But it was silver that was most impactful. The Norse trade in enslaved people and Arab silver helped launch Europe into a new age.
Vikings: Medieval midwives
The Viking Age is partly responsible for launching the High Middle Ages, a period of political centralization, cultural flourishing, economic expansion, and the emergence of a merchant class. The Norse helped birth the medieval period of powerful kings, knights, and innovations by forcing political and military responses to their attacks, and they forged new linkages with their trade, settlements, exploration, and cultural proliferation.
In particular, the Norse in the east traded huge numbers of enslaved people in exchange for silver coins (dirham) from the Abbasid Caliphate. They imported so much silver, it became a major catalyst for the medieval European economy. Arab silver helped intensify exchange networks in northern and western Europe; it made long-distance trade more feasible; and it made it easier for rulers to collect taxes and fund infrastructure projects.
The raids and migrations of this era set the stage for new growth in Europe. Muslim kingdoms in Iberia built impressive cities filled with architectural marvels. The Magyars built the kingdom of Hungary. And across eleventh-century Western Europe, political stability began to return, laying the foundations of many modern nation-states. Viking raids helped solidify feudal dynamics across Western Europe, as commoners increasingly turned to local nobles for protection. As viking raids became larger and more deadly, kings had to raise money to pay soldiers or extortion fees. In many places, this increased political centralization. By the eleventh century, rulers—many descended from vikings—clawed back authority from local lords, centralizing feudal power under the crown.
Norse conquests established dynasties in Western Europe and built large trading cities like Dublin and York. In the east, they founded the Kievan Rus and established Novgorod as a center of trade. An important part of the legacy of the Viking Age is that the influence of the Norse extended far beyond its conclusion. The Duchy of Normandy in France was established when the Frankish king granted it to a viking warlord named Rollo. Rollo’s descendent, William the Conqueror, conquered England in 1066. Every English monarch since has traced their lineage to him.
Other Normans set out on opportunistic conquests across the Mediterranean, particularly in Sicily and southern Italy. When Pope Urban II called the First Crusade—the call for Christians to board ships and raid foreign lands far from home—among the first knights and lords to answer were Danes and Normans. Norman lords established several of the Crusader States.
As you work through OER Project lessons on collapse and restructuring, the Viking Age offers a useful conundrum and a great chance for some informal writing. Like other successful foreign invasions—including the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, and the Germanic migrations that helped weaken the Roman Empire—the Viking Age looks at first like a catastrophe of violence and destruction. But examined more closely, these invasions were also watershed moments that forced the world to change in ways that shaped history for centuries.
This is a great chance for some informal writing. Ask your students to decide for themselves: Was this a dark age for Western Europe or was it the spark that lit a transformation? What evidence can they find? Hold on to their answers, and when you get to lessons on the Mongol Empire, you could repeat this exercise, and then ask students to compare the impacts of the two invasions. While students will have to wait for evidence from the world of feline genetics, they can supplement with mouse mitochondrial DNA. Despite the hard work of viking cats, it seems plenty of Norse mice survived the journey to Britain, Iceland, and Greenland.
About the author: Bennett Sherry holds a PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh and has undergraduate teaching experience in world history, human rights, and the Middle East. Bennett writes about refugees and international organizations in the twentieth century and is one of the historians working on the OER Project courses.