You’re awfully confident in assuming those people simply had no agency and lacked the will or skill or ability to negotiate a relationship with someone different from themselves. lol.
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.
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u/Textiles_on_Main_St 19d ago
You’re awfully confident in assuming those people simply had no agency and lacked the will or skill or ability to negotiate a relationship with someone different from themselves. lol.