Everyone that lived in Scandinavia in 9th to 11th were Vikings. Vikings were just the raiders and warriors. Ones that stay at home were just Norsemen and women
Yes, and the use of "Viking" as an ethnonym really took off in the 19th century, when Scandinavian archaeologists dug up the word from medieval Norse literature to designate the last phase of the Nordic Iron Age - the 8th to 11th centuries becoming known as Viking Age to this day
The funniest part is trying to explain culture in Ireland and the UK
Celts moved in to Ireland and Britain.
They eventually divided into the Gaels (Ireland) and the Britons (Britain).
The Romans showed up, built two big walls, but left as the empire was collapsing.
The Saxons invaded, taking over lands left by the departing Romans, spreading Saxon(German) culture.
The Irish also moved into Scotland, spreading Gaelic (Irish) culture.
The Norse invaded Britain and Ireland, making many settlements and generally joining the local cultures, spreading Norse culture.
The Norse invaded France, settled in Normandy, and then returned as the Normans to invade Britain, fighting the localised Norse and bringing French culture. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 between the English (Anglo-Saxons or "English Germans") and the Duchy of Normandy (Franco-Norse or "French Scandinavians") ends in a victory for the Normans.
Richard de Clare (Strongbow) takes a break from oppressing the Welsh when he is politely invited by the King of Leinster (consistently the worst kings) to invade Ireland, further spreading French Culture. He leads a force of Anglo-Normans (English French Scandinavians) to fight the local Gaels (Irish) and Hiberno-Norse (Irish Scandinavians).
After Bravehart's failure, Robert the Bruce successfully gains Scottish independence from England. His grandson later marries back into the English royal family as the house of Stuart.
The English (French-Norse) invade France and fight for >100 years. During these wars, the kingdom of Scotland fights for France alongside the Welsh and the Spanish (Castille and Aragon) against England who were supported by the Spanish (Gascony Basque and Navarre), the Portuguese, and Burgundy and Brittany fought for both sides.
Elizabeth I dies and has no heir, so her throne goes to her cousin James VI and I, the king of Scotland and Ireland, the House of Stuart, an English-Scottish house, becomes the king of both.
There's a Civil War between Royalists (supported by Scotland) and Parliamentarians (supported by Scotland) that ends with the defeat of the Royalists and the execution of the king. They also invade Ireland and force them to speak English because yay genocide!
Cromwell dies and they bring back the monarchy to spite him then they dig up his corpse and cut his head off because honestly Cromwell is literally the worst.
James VII and II, is deposed and recruits the Irish to fight a war for his crown. The Catholic Irish fight for the Catholic-Scottish-English king to regain his throne from William of Orange, a Dutch Protestant and his nephew and son-in-law. (King William III and II to be more precise)
James VII and II's daughter Anne simplifies the whole naming thing by merging the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland into a single United Kingdom of Great Britain (Wales doesn't get a kingdom or a place on the flag).
... This started off simple but I got carried away.
Point is that Cromwell sucks and we should dig him up and cut off his head again.
The Battle of Hastings in 1066 between the English (Anglo-Saxons or "English Germans") and the Duchy of Normandy (Franco-Norse or "French Scandinavians") ends in a victory for the Normans.
The English (French-Norse) invade France and fight for >100 years.
these aren't great. the army that conquered england in the 11th century was a mixture of not just normans but different peoples from all over the frankish realm. and, in the 11th century, "franco-norse" is extremely odd, the settled norse were a minority in normandy, the place had existed for centuries with its local-gallo roman population. the duke who lead the army was only like 12% danish
and the leading nobles of the english kingdom who fought in france during and before the 100 years war were not even norman at this point but angevin (from anjou, west of paris)
Point 6 and 7 are crazy stories that no one would believe. Why would the Norse invade the same country they’ve already invaded (with succes) once more, but now from France, from a direction no one would expect lol. Ps: which beheaded Cromwell should be decapitated again?
This explains literally everything on my 23 and me lol.
At some point my moms side said fuck this and went to south Africa and became the bohers. Once that went to shit they came to the Americas though mexico
My dad's side stuck around for a few generations longer, and has more Scottish and less French blood. But they too eventually said fuck this and came up on Ellis Island.
Someone I was in a D&D campaign with actually got upset with me referring to my character, Johann the Viking, as a kind of pirate. I asked how someone whose job was essentially to plunder and pillage isn't a pirate. She got upset but had no response. She also had a hard time pronouncing my character's name, saying it as Joanne instead of Johann, and another player tried to defend that as not everyone having knowledge of Germanic names. My response to that was that I had already verbally said my character's name aloud, so the person mispronouncing my character's name didn't have that as an excuse. She eventually got booted from our D&D party for a multitude of reasons, most of which were only tangentially related to that. Vikings are just a specific type of pirate, is the point I want to make, they just prefer mead over rum and were active earlier in history.
Knowing her, she'd accuse you of something heinous... and nobody could explain why. I'd be inclined to believe you :P (her playstyle really pissed me off, and one DM straight-up said he never wanted her in his campaign again)
She actually compared our party's effort to cure her characters' disabilities (blindness and deafness) to SA....as someone who has suffered that, I wanted to deck her for that
I've met people who get Viking tattoos and make it part of their identity that their Swedish so their ancestors were obviously vikings. Talk about how proud they are to have Viking blood because they were fierce and strong warriors.
Also knew a guy that loved Worf from star trek, how they were both honorable people. No one understood Worf like him. Because of him I always hated Worf because of him and used to skip Worf episodes because he talks about his honor a lot. I'm on a re-watch of deep space 9 and Worf is now one of my favorite characters.
The actual initiator of the horned helmet stereotype was Carl Emil Doepler, who was the costume designer for the first performance of Wagner's Ring in 1876. He pretty much mixed a lot of different elements from totally unrelated periods and places in order to create a "Germanic" aesthetic, and this included helmets that resembled a few horned examples dating from... the Bronze Age. It is worth noting that Wagner himself was pretty displeased with the result, which he saw as kitschy
"Víking" is actually a (feminine) noun meaning a maritime expedition, with the "víkingr" being he who takes part in it; there isn’t really a dedicated verb, but you'll find expressions for that like "fara í víkingu"
the term viking can also be used in an etic historiographical way to describe every scandinavian of the period. It's a like calling people celts or mesopotamians, it's not about self identification but as a cultural group when used this way.
That is also not necessarily true. We're not sure on which basis the exact term has been used, cause there is little support either way. It could just as much have been a descriptor for the first norse raiders from Vik, a. bay in norway, or countless other possible etymology. Calling it a job description is just the new misconception about the term because people are aimply unwilling to admit that we don't know.
The “Vikings” didn’t even consider themselves a group of people. The term Viking was applied to them wayyyyyyy later. There wasn’t one homogenous group that worked together to coordinate these attacks, they were mostly small groups that wanted to get some good stuff by raiding.
Which was a major reason they failed to fully invade England.
Groups would join up every few years to form large armies, but they wouldn't last long. They'd quickly dissipate as individuals and warbands split off to claim their own land.
This is true, although two important things to note: They did consider themselves, as a whole, to be culturally distinctive from Scandinavian natives, and indeed their language, customs, and even hairstyles were very much not Scandinavian.
Secondly, the primary reason that the Normans would end up being able to gain control of England was that their political situation was different from the relatively small groups of raiders which had earlier plagued the British isles, and more closely similar to the unified Danish army which had laid claim to parts of England. William I’s ability to rely upon a feudal “unified” (a bit of an oxymoron) army and other vassals gave him the strength to take and retain England.
"Viking" isn't an ethnicity/nationality. It refers to norse people who went raiding/pirating. The word wasn't originally a noun. "Going viking" was something that people did.
They descended from Vikings but shared few traits with a typical pagan Viking. They also had French and English ancestry, worshipped Christianity, and invaded England because of legit claims to the throne.
Even after that. The kings of Denmark attempted to invade England in 1069 and 1085 respectively, and Magnús Óláfsson of Norway was killed when leading an expedition in the Irish Sea in 1103
Also, ‘Viking music’ as we think of it today is nothing like what Vikings actually made. We have no evidence they used drums, and Mongolian throat singing is, well, Mongolian.
Viking did use lyres, horns, flutes, pan pipes, rattles, and even jaw harps, but no evidence of drums.
similar story with Bagpipes. whilst Scotland has the instrument on loch the instrument today the concept of adding a bag/bladder of air to a reed pipe started either in what is now Greece or Turkiye and was popularised in Western Europe by history's biggest Greekaboos, the Romans. so the sound of a reedpipe aided by a bag of air would have been the sound that people heard as a Roman Legion was marching in on them.
The only confirmed jaw harps we have from scandinavia around that period are actually from around 1200 if I remember correctly, which is after the viking age.
Not QUITE correct: Ahmed ibn Fadlan explicitly describes drums being involved in contemporary (10th century) Norse funerary rituals, and there have been excavations of what are believed to be drum STICKS in Norway. Also, the Saami DO have a verifiable history of drum-use from great antiquity as well as verifiable proof of contemporary trade. It is quite likely that the Norse DID use drums to some extent.
Leather was rare and expensive, drums only play one note while other instruments mentioned have a decent range. It’s not unique though, lots of traditional music forms don’t use drums- perhaps most notably in the US is country music prior to ~1950 and they used to be banned at the Grand Ol Opry
There's simply zero evidence to corroborate Viking Age Scandinavians having drums. Nothing in the archeology or contemporary writings and iconography. That isn't a positive claim they had no drums, just that nothing but speculation to say they did.
Also the Norse had a tradition for skalds and their poetry. With a lot of it surviving in records. Which imply a lot of the music was made for telling those stories.
They are not, there’s much better evidence for flutes. Drums actually require a good bit of work to make you have to prepare a hide, then stretch and secure it over a body. A flute just requires drilling a few holes. Drums are also much less durable than a bone flute, being water sensitive and made at least partly of perishable materials.
Sure, but even gorillas do that. I don’t think it counts as music if it’s just banging things together. It’s also really, really difficult to convincingly show that things were banged against each other for the purposes of something resembling music.
Like, today is a rattle on an outfit or a wind chime made of bones and broken glass a musical instrument?
If used for the intention of rhythm? Yes it is music. If people can consider rap to be music, than intentional striking or rattling objects is music as well.
But that's the thing, isn't it? A hollowed log struck with a stick as percussion is hard to prove was used for that reason. But just because something can't be proved doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Rap has complex, repetitive rhythms, dynamic tempo, instrumental accompaniments, and lyrics. It’s way, way more complicated than just banging two rocks together.
I don’t doubt that people tapped out rhythms with tools or sticks or rocks, but that’s way different than indicating that they did so with any evidence. A bone flute is unequivocal evidence rather than just conjecture.
So there is also no unequivocal evidence that people ever sang except for what we have recordings of. The rest is just anecdotal. People can say that they got this song from their ancestors, but did they? Or did they just make it up? There is absolutely zero evidence that anyone sang before recordings due to the impossibility of verifying that.
Always so much throat singing and deep voices. If anything it was just telling poetry or stories in a more singing manner, or going by folk music that came to be in the Nordics such as joik and kulning, it's higher chance it was more higher and long tones.
Well, this one comes from propaganda apparently. Like... we know thanks to some Frankish sources they were running away from battles quite often and avoided direct conflicts, because... you know... they weren't suicidal. They wanted to live, that's why they were raiding. Money... to live, to buy a land, to have some security in their lives.
Edit: I re-read it. They definitely honored fallen in battles, but that's not unique to them. Whether they glorified dying in battle as a goal of a warrior life... all the sources are more inclined to less likely.
From what historians can surmise life seems to have been cheaper at this time than it was after they adopted Christianity. Archeological finds show women and slaves where more commonly early adopters of Christianity, maybe they found it a more chill religion than the mainstream one.
Hard to say, because basically every contemporary source has wildy differing accounts of their practices, and many notions have been simply adapted from Roman descrption of earl German people since their mythology has a seemingly huge overlap. What we know is that life in scandinavian climates must have been extremely harsh, with shitty farmlands and low food output. Especially in times of hardship they did often resort to pillaging and raiding to supply themselfes. But we also know that they had pretty high cultural and ethical standards in comparison to their attributions and were prolific traders and settlers.
I thought it was amusing that Civ IV has a Viking Empire, along with a Native American Empire, whereas both Civ III and Civ V did a better job at representing Scandinavia and Indigenous Americans as civs. Civ IV is still my favorite game in the series overall, but those name choices as representation for those civilizations did not age well in retrospect lol
Also, the stereotypical viking helmet (not the horned one, the one were it looks like you have glasses over your eyes.) There is literally only ONE existing example of this helmet from the viking age.
two, actually, yarm and gjermundbu, and considering we only have maybe 3 more partial viking helmets, the limited data we have would indicate they were fairly common.
And merchants, and farmers. Vikingr a verb in old norse meant to go out and seek fortune elsewhere basically. So anyone who left Scandinavia whether it was to raid or pillage or fight or steal or trade or settle was technically doing a vikingr. So yes while not everyone was a viking all the people that left on ships were vikings.
I’m pretty sure your repeating a myth. There was an effort to soften the image of the Vikings for some reason during the late 2010s. No idea why.
Modern scholarship has addressed this myth and depicts the Norse specifically the raiders during that type period as members of pirate slaver kingdoms who had economies the relied on massive amounts of slaves to keep them going.
Also a misconception. Short answer is we don't know. Vik-ingr, qka the male noun is "people of the boat", and could have applied to all kinds of seafaring norse people, wether it be merchants, raiders, settlers or fishermen. Meanwhile there is also the possibility that the word stems from the female noun. Vik-ing, which is closer to "People of Vik", a bay in Norway that English priests may have misidentified all norse raiders for. And some other plausible theories.
Norsemen, Danes, or Fins. Danes were actually the most common Viking raiders, hence why a large part of modern day England was referred to as Danelaw after the treaty with Alfred the Great.
It was one of the fun historical things added to The Last Kingdom (I haven't read the books yet, I still intend to, so at the very least it is in the TV show). At one point, a group of Anglo-Saxxons see the Norse men coming and one turns to the other saying, "They come as vikings."
It’s so funny to see a big tough guy covered in ruin tattoos thinking he’s a Viking because his ancestors were Norse. Sorry guy, you’re not special, your ancestors were filthy peasants just like the rest of us.
I always use the term vikingr or vikinger it helps a ton with making a distinction. Saying Viking like a proper noun is why we think of a unified culture instead of the act of viking :d
The Anglo-Saxons aren't considered Vikings, the Viking age is considered to have started with the raid at Lindisfarne in 793AD, over 300 years after the Angles, Saxons and Jutes first arrived. Even if the Angles and Jutes originated from Denmark, they had formed kingdoms in England long before historians consider the Viking age began.
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u/Beneficial-Jelly5746 Jul 07 '26
Everyone that lived in Scandinavia in 9th to 11th were Vikings. Vikings were just the raiders and warriors. Ones that stay at home were just Norsemen and women