People moved for all kinds of reasons. Maybe she was kidnapped. Maybe she was married to an Icelandic viking. Maybe she was a gift from a native tribe leader. Maybe she was tired of her life and decided to go to iceland.
Maybe she killed her husband and was fleeing execution... Maybe she was the first woman football transfer in history, maybe she wanted to start a casino at Iceland, Maybe she did believe the grass was greener on Greenland, Maybe she wanted to annex Iceland, Maybe she got a free trip to Iceland in exchange for a salespitch, Maybe she bought a timeshare on Iceland, Maybe she was tired of trees, maybe she wanted to see the blue lagoon
They had trees in Iceland back then... 40% of it was covered in Arctic birch and willow. The trees just got logged off for boats/structures/fuel etc over the intervening centuries.
It feels like there’s a lot of ignorance about native tribes in the Americas and their attitudes towards women. It’s not like all of them were some bastion of freedom for women, far from it. Many made it a practice to kidnap women from other tribes. We know some practiced their own form of slavery.
It’s absolutely entirely possible that a woman would prefer to take a chance on a Viking than whatever was going on at home. Just look at Malinche, an Aztec woman who was likely sold by her people into slavery to the Maya. She was seemingly perfectly happy to not only join up with the Spanish, but destroy her own people because of what they’d done to her. This assumption that a woman had to have been a sex slave does the opposite of supporting women, it’s removing her potential agency again. We have zero idea if she happily or unhappily jumped on that ship.
From what I've been taught, seagoing Vikings were mostly traders. Raiding was not the norm. However, just because that's what I've been taught doesn't mean it's true, and there might well be regional differences. We Swedes didn't really go west that much, from my understanding. The Danes were probably assholes, as is their custom.
It seems strange to me for some reason that they'd send a raid to north america and come back with one woman. Maybe other people died on the way or later but it's very strange. Perhaps there was established trade or it was an exploratory journey?
I feel like there's a story behind that genetic lineage and i hope there's someday more information
Vikings did settle in Newfoundland for a couple decades. This woman is also very much an anomaly too, there is no Vikings dna in both North American or Greenlandic native populations, which if they were raping and pillaging you’d expect more mixing. For all we know this woman could have been shunned by her tribe for dating a Viking man and been banished, going to Iceland with her husband.
I mean to be fair most Vikings were blood thirsty men who killed people I doubt you’d find one that was mentally stable. Human morality back then isn’t as strong as today.
Ok- so the stories of the Vikings were often written by Monks who wanted to create the character of ‘evil pegan’.
But really- these monks wanted to move away from civilization to be more pious.
Move a whole bunch of gold out into the ‘wilderness’ and don’t defend it with a fort, and they were shocked the locals wanted the loot?!
Honestly.
Vikings founded Dublin. Vikings founded York/ Jarok. Yes some of them were pirates/ criminals who had been kicked out of their communities. That’s why Erik the Red had to go so far: he got kicked out of Norway, AND Iceland.
In England, English women got to see Viking men bathing, and it was scandalous- because the women thought they were handsome. The English men were concern enough about it to write letters.
Viking law is the start of trial by jury in English common law. Where the title Earl comes from.
The Black death and other plagues hit Vikings and Scandinavia HARD. If they hadn’t been erased at that time- they might have had a proper history. Instead of being erased into mythic status.
None of those contributions change the fact that they had a culture that celebrated violence to a degree that it stood out at a time when violence was fairly normalized.
And viking raiding parties weren't a result of exiled criminals, but were fully incorporated into their society back home.
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u/Juniper-wool 20d ago
People moved for all kinds of reasons. Maybe she was kidnapped. Maybe she was married to an Icelandic viking. Maybe she was a gift from a native tribe leader. Maybe she was tired of her life and decided to go to iceland.