You probably have an image of a Viking in your head – a fierce warrior from the icy north, clad in armor and furs, sailing in on a longship with a dragon carved into its bow. If you know a bit more about Vikings, you may know that they reached the Americas before Columbus, and that their battle helmets usually did not have horns on them. “Barbarian” raiders are super common in history – but barbarian seafaring raiders, not so much.1 And the Vikings sailed their longships really, really far from their Norse homelands. In fact, they reached four separate continents, and their descendants would (at least briefly) settle in all of them.
“Leif Eriksson Discovers America” by Hans Dahl
First, terminology. “Vikings” and “Norsemen” are both words invented long after the end of the Viking age, both deriving from older root words.2 Today, scholars usually use “Vikings” to refer to the people who came by sea and raided settlements, and “Norsemen” or “Norse” to refer to the North Germanic ethnic groups those people came from.
The story of the Vikings is one of a barbarian people from the North coming and sacking “civilized” settlements, and later being assimilated into that same culture they invaded, but retaining some of their old ways including their military prowess. If you’re a student of history, you might recognize other stories that parallel this one: the Mongols or the Manchu in Chinese history, the Germanic tribes around the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and even the Seljuk Turks in the Islamic world. But all those invaders came by land. Why were the Vikings different?
Europe: a peninsula of peninsulas
Europe is often called “a peninsula of peninsulas”. Just look at all those squiggly bits! The Vikings came in from the Northernmost ones – the Norwegians and Swedes from the Scandinavian peninsula, and the Danes from the Jutland peninsula across from it. But there’s also Iberia, Italy, Brittany, and the Balkans, plus large islands like Great Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and Sicily. It’s perfect for learning to be a seafarer, and perfect for raiding by sea.
Let’s start our story with the cast and the setting. There were various Norse kingdoms in history, but eventually they consolidated into Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Norse farmers became Viking raiders for a number of reasons, including that their homes were overpopulated and the rest of coastal Europe was lightly defended.3
The Norse homeland
The first major Viking raid, at the monastery of Lindisfarne in England, happened in 793. Elsewhere in Europe, Charlemagne was nearing the height of his power in France and Germany, most of Spain was firmly under Muslim rule, and the Eastern Roman Empire (aka the Byzantine Empire) was facing internal conflicts and threats from the Abbasid caliphate in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The end of the Viking age is less clear, but the Viking kingdoms were all officially Christian by the 11th century, when the Holy Roman Empire ruled Germany and northern Italy, the Reconquista was off to a strong start in Iberia, and the Crusades were just around the corner.
Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons, may contain errors.
Once the Vikings got going, they went far. They established kingdoms in England, Scotland, and Ireland, took political control of the famous Duchy of Normandy (named after its Norse rulers), successfully invaded Finland and the coasts of the Baltic, settled parts of Eastern Europe and an uninhabited Iceland, and built long-term settlements in Greenland and a shorter-lived one in Newfoundland.
The Norse were traders, too: they carried goods like beeswax and enslaved people as far as the Levant and Central Asia, bringing back goods like silver, spices, and silk.
And of course, there were the raids. Vikings raided Iberia and Morocco from bases in Western Europe. One future king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, spent several years in exile the 1030’s. He spent that time in service to the Byzantine Empire, taking his Viking band on raids throughout the Caucuses, the Arab world, and rebellious towns in Asia Minor.
Norse runic graffiti on the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul
Everywhere the Vikings went, they began intermarrying with the locals4 and forming a hybrid culture. The Normans in France are the most famous, but there are also the Hiberno-Normans in Ireland, the Norse-Gaels in Scotland, the Anglo-Scandinavians in England, the Varangians in Eastern Europe, and more. As a rule, these mixed ethnic groups were Christian.
These Viking descendants would rule more states across Europe and the Mediterranean. The Normans conquered Sicily between 999 and 1091, founded a short lived Kingdom of Africa on the North African coast in the 2nd half of the 1100s, and ruled over the Principality of Antioch in modern Syria in 1098, after the First Crusade. The Varangians created the powerful multi-ethnic Kievan Rus. Its founder Rurik lent his name to the Rurikid dynasty, which governed various Russian states until 1598. The Vikings and their successors started so many countries that I am running out of synonyms.
The Vikings never really died out. Instead, they became normal examples of the squabbling kingdoms of Europe. Arguably the Vikings were still raiding into the 1200s,5 but at some point it blended into the background rate of warring armies sacking each others’ cities.
So we know the Vikings were scary if you were a 9th or 10th century person living on any nearby coast. They changed the map of Europe, influenced the African and Asian coasts of the Mediterranean, and even brought knowledge of the Americas to Europe, although it didn’t spread widely.6 They were certainly an important part of European history, but so were the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantines and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Why do normal Americans or Brits or Germans have a mental image of Vikings but not Winged Hussars?
Winged Hussars: elite Polish cavalry
Blame the 19th century. The British started to look at their old Viking ruins with a new archaeological lens. The newly united Germans wanted to forge a national identity via the Germanic gods, which the Norse preserved the longest. Scandinavian immigrants to America wanted to rally around heroic figures like Leif Eriksson the way the Italians rallied around Columbus. Minnesota still has the largest Scandinavian-American population of any US state – it’s no coincidence that the Vikings play NFL football there.
So really, the Vikings are special because Europe is special. Europe’s abundant coastlines meant raiders came by sea instead of on horseback. Europe’s fractured politics meant those raiders established many small kingdoms instead of taking over one big empire. And Europe’s ascendance in the past few centuries etched the Vikings into the public consciousness deeper than the other “barbarians” the world has seen over history’s long arc. But hey, if people are going to only learn about one set of barbarian invaders, they’re certainly not a bad one to pick.
Coming Soon: Philosophy-shaped mind shards
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