

Did the Vikings Get a Bum Rap? - Thevet
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140926-vikings-norse-raiding-berserkers-scandinavia-winroth/

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darkFunction
I stumbled across a video on Youtube some time ago which demonstrates sword-
and-shield tactics likely used by the vikings, backed up by well thought out
and credible explanations. It's a fascinating watch and for me it really
brought home the fighting intelligence and elegance of viking warriors:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkhpqAGdZPc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkhpqAGdZPc)

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Zaephyr
Great video on the bio-mechanics of round shield fighting. At 33m I wasn't
sure I was going to watch it all; turned out it was fascinating.

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autokad
the article does a lot of discounting 'the vikings where no more "bloodthirsty
than other warriors of the period" over and over, and then contradicting it by
"pope placed limits on Christian warfare and threatened excommunication for
leaders who became unduly aggressive. The Vikings had no such inhibiting
force".

they also minimize raids, ransoms, and murders by saying : well there were
witnesses left. plenty survived the death camps but that made them no less
brutal.

in short? nothing the author writes is quantified. how often did they go to
war, raid, etc? how often did the ones 'no more then other warriors of their
time' do the same, and how much vs the christian nations, etc.

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rmc
The Vikings are an example of history written by the losers. The people who
lost the battles (literate Christians) wrote the history. The Vikings didn't
have nearly that much writing, so they came off very bad in European history.

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Htsthbjig
History was written by the winners, as Christians WON most of the battles.

Vikings principal weapon was surprise. Their objective was not winning battles
but loot and pillage as much as they could before withdrawal.

Their idea was not to invade and conquer populations that were stronger than
them if they had time for responding the attack.

If they found resistance they simply changed their objective to some weaker
population.

E.g First time Vikings attacked the north coast of what now is Spain they
surprised people there. They won in some cases and withdraw. Years later they
tried again, but people were prepared and Vikings lost hard.

The same happened on what is now UK coast, first time the surprised and won
over the people living there. Next time they lost.

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vidarh
Here [1] is a map outlining Viking expansion / settlemenets.

Note England, coast of Ireland, Normandy, Southern Italy, the Baltics, Russia.
Of these, you may argue that South/South-Western England and Southern Italy
was Normans, who, while they had substantial viking ancestry were not all of
Scandinavian origin, but the idea that they did not invade and conquer and
settle is nonsense.

Certainly they did carry out attacks where the intent was just to pillage too,
but they went much further.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings#mediaviewer/File:Viking...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings#mediaviewer/File:Viking_Expansion.svg)

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Htsthbjig
In your own map you see they did not conquer much. The places they
settled(vikings) were unpopulated and tremendously cold. They settled there
because nobody else wanted to live there.

Those places were very poor, nothing compared with France or Italian, Spanish
peninsulas. Places like the South of Spain Sicily or Egypt which food outcome
could sustain dozens of times the native population.

Scandinavia could be rich today, but before industrial revolution was very
very poor.

The former commentary talking as History written by those who "lost" is non
sense. In all the green areas of your map, the Vikings eventually lost.

I know nationalism exist today in Scandinavia, like in the rest of countries.
They have quality of life today and could idealize how the past was, but
Vikings lived a very hard life at the time, and were not that important.

And yes, Normans were not vikings.

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vidarh
I find it amusing that you keep dragging out Spain, and now Sicily when your
earlier comment started with:

> History was written by the winners, as Christians WON most of the battles.

You do realize that Spain, Sicily and Egypt was under Arab during the viking
age?

And while you may disagree with including the Normans with vikings, they
certainly started out with a large contingent of vikings taking substantial
parts of Normandy.

I also don't see how poverty is at all relevant to the discussion.

As for idolizing the viking age, I see more of that from outside of
Scandinavia, than within. For starters this idea that the defining aspect of
the vikings were raids. The vast majority of Scandinavians during the viking
age were farmers and fishermen. And the majority of shipping was trading. Some
fringe nationalist segments use viking symbolism, but the vast majority
Scandinavian nationalists couldn't care less about the viking age.

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MrJagil
History channel's "Vikings" is actually a quite good remedy for your GoT
withdrawals. As a Dane, and even after reading this article, I find the series
very accurate, only embellished in obvious places (blood eagle, mushrooms
etc).

At the least they got the scandinavian personality traits right.

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rmc
It's a great show and I love it. But apparently it's historically inaccurate
about the "there are no lands to the west" (the norse knew about Britain
before the raid on lindisfarne), and apparently Viking society wasn't that
totalitarian, and had a bit more of a democratic system

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mercurial
Well, obviously the vikings didn't besiege Paris just because they wanted to
visit the museums, but they also traded quite a lot, something which is often
overlooked. They also made up the Varangian Guard, the reputedly incorruptible
bodyguard of the Eastern Roman emperors. There is also little doubt that the
Christian sovereigns of this time period (and later) were not shy about the
occasional gruesome slaughter against defenseless civilians, so I'd say the
point made in the article about their brutality being a feature of the times
is pretty accurate.

I can recommend Northlanders [1], by Brian Wood of DMZ fame, on this topic.
Fairly well-researched and with good characterization.

1:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northlanders](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northlanders)

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mhd
Vikings enjoy a huge popularity amongst lay historians and the general
populace. We've got a "Vikings" TV series, not a "early Danish kingdoms"
series. There's "Viking metal", not "Calmar union metal". Every friggin'
fantasy setting has Viking expies, even if the rest is positively Renaissance.
When people think of Scandinavian history, it's primarily bearded raiders, not
Gustavus Adolphus.

I'd say the only historic stereotype that is more popular are knights, and
they share a lot of the same "bad history" characteristics.

So, "bum rap"?

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alricb
Another reason the Vikings were successful was that in many places they
attacked polities that were momentarily weak. They might not have won in
Nantes if Charles the Bald hadn't been busy fighting a civil war against other
members of his family. Karl der Große's empire was falling apart, and like the
Roman Empire had been vulnerable to the raid of Karl's ancestors, so was
Karl's empire to the raids of the Vikings.

Don't weep to the Franks, though: in the end, it was just a phase, and they
were able to hit the Middle East during a period of weakness just a few
centuries later.

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scottlocklin
TLDR: "Yale lemming tries to make Vikings seem safe and nice." There's a
reason the Byzantine emperor used Varangian guards. It wasn't because they
were safe and nice.

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BugBrother
Scandinavia at the time (and a few centuries after) was a violent clan
society. War, raids etc were what people did instead of playing football and
ice hockey. And business.

The trips to (e.g.) England were business, it is documented that boats were
recruited from all over Scandinavia.

The "real" Europe at the time had [to a large part] gone on beyond that stage
[of clan societies].

What to learn from this is not to be neighbour with violent clan societies.
Think old Scandinavia or in the present day -- Afghanistan, Somalia and
eastern Iraq.

(Incidentally, Sweden has the world's largest refugee immigration per capita
from exactly those places... We will see how that ends up.)

Edit: I guess the down votes are my parallel with modern clan societies? Time
will tell, I hope I'm wrong.

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rmc
_The "real" Europe at the time had [to a large part] gone on beyond that stage
[of clan societies]._

What was the real Europe in (say) 850? The (Eastern) Roman Empire (aka
Byzantine Empire), with it's head quarters in modern day Turkey?

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BugBrother
I was talking about the destinations "visited" in West Europe by vikings at
the time. That was what the quote marks indicated. (It is a bit simplified,
Ireland still had partly a tribal society of course.) Sorry I was unclear.

If I should say anything else on the subject, it is that the frustration about
all this, like most history, is all the things we will never know.

I read ~ 10 years ago a fascinating theory about berserkers using self
suggestion and being influenced by Roman warrior cults (the Roman empire had
camps quite close to Denmark a few centuries before the viking age.) It was so
frustrating that we almost certainly never will know.

