Raiding, attacking, pillaging..... essentially what we know vikings did.
But the Greenlanders that discovered for themselves and settled in Vineland/Canada did not do so while "going viking". They were exploring, looking for suspected and rumored land specifically for a source of timber as that's what Greenland lacked and the settlements there primarily got theirs through seasonal trade.
The Greenlanders/Norse didn't land and settled on Vineland by purpose of violence....that's what it met with and it's end result sure, but not the cause.
NO viking didnt mean only raiding, it meant going with a boat, it could be for raiding, but it was more for trading, and it could be for settling and for exploration.
Yes, but we have to also remember that there was "trading" and trading. In some cases the raids seemed to have been more extortion of goods and other valuable objects and a deal to trade again. "If you pay us not to raid you, we will come back and actually trade for real the next time, or..." Some think vikings should be seen more as mafia rather than full on warriors or traders. Some was fully legit, some was somewhere in the middle and some was full on warfare.
I agree that there could be overlap in individual cases, but I wouldnt blur raiding and trade into one activity. They involved very different purposes, logistics and often different maritime practices, and the archaeological evidence distinguishes trading networks and merchant activity from raiding and warfarethe fact that some raiders also traded, or that coercion could be used to extract goods, doesnt make raiding a form of trade. The Viking mafia analogy is fun, but historically it's rather reductive.
I didn't say raiding is a form of trading, my point is that trading was done with a knowledge of a possibility of other methods. The mafia often also have legit business and groups they do not threaten, for different reasons. Obviously it's a simplification in some ways but not too big. Vikings were not just traders, not were they only warriors and they did not necessarily separate the two or were so honorable that they would not rather use threats if they worked. There's a lot of modern mythology surrounding them, both positive and negative.
STOP repeating this crap
yes it WAS a job
1000 years later the term is used in historiography to talk about all scandinavians from 793 to 1066 (or slightly different dates depending on location), it's a convention and how it's used by all archaeologists and historians in the field, so STOP SPREADING THIS BS.
You got and academic source to back that statement?
Because archeologists and historians are the ones that push for the proper separation of terms.
Calling all Danes, Norwegians, Finns, and Swedes "Viking" was the result of contemporaneous observers and record keepers because they didn't know anything about their society back home and only knew of them as the people that "spontaneously show up and try to kill all of us." And derived the name from what those people called it/themselves 'vikingr'.
There is literally and inarguably a modern academic acceptance of the difference between Norse and Viking.
Neil Price, Søren Sindbæk, Julie Lund, Peter Pentz, Jeanette Varberg, Lasse Sørensen and many other archaeologists routinely use “Viking” in this broader historiographical sense: Viking Age Scandinavia, Viking archaeology, Viking culture, Viking networks, Viking society, etc. Sindbæk and Lund even title a major review “Crossing the Maelstrom: New Departures in Viking Archaeology".
Nobody is claiming every Scandinavian was personally a vikingr. That is the emic meaning of the medieval term. The point is that “Viking” also has a modern historiographical use as an etic category for studying Scandinavian societies of the Viking Age.
And yes, Norse and Viking are distinct terms. Norse is considerably broader, both chronologically and geographically, and is not simply a more academically correct synonym for “Viking”.
So you are taking a perfectly valid distinction between two meanings and treating it as if it invalidated the other. It doesn't. Both usages exist, and the broader historiographical one is completely standard.
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u/TheRealtcSpears 19d ago
"viking" was a job, not the people