Viking Age

Background Faroese stamps celebrating the Viking voyages in the North Atlantic The Vikings who invaded western and eastern Europe were mainly pagans from the same area as present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. They also settled in the Faroe Islands , Ireland, Iceland, peripheral Scotland ( Caithness , the Hebrides and the Northern Isles ), Greenland, and Canada. Their North Germanic language , Old Norse , became the precursor to present-day Scandinavian languages. By 801, a strong central authority appears to have been established in Jutland , and the Danes were beginning to look beyond their own territory for land, trade, and plunder. In Norway, mountainous terrain and fjords formed strong natural boundaries. Communities remained independent of each other, unlike the situation in lowland Denmark. By 800, some 30 small kingdoms existed in Norway. The sea was the easiest way of communication between the Norwegian kingdoms and the outside world. In the eighth century, Scandinavians began to build ships of war and send them on raiding expeditions which started the Viking Age. The North Sea rovers were traders, colonisers, explorers, and plunderers who were notorious in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and other places in Europe for being brutal.

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Religion See also: Norse paganism and Norse mythology For most of the Viking Age, Scandinavian society generally followed Norse paganism. The traditions of this faith, including Valhalla and the Æsir , are sometimes cited as a factor in the creation of Viking warrior culture. [ 1 ] However, Scandinavia was eventually Christianised towards the later Viking Age, with early centres of Christianity especially in Denmark. ^ "Aesir | Norse gods, Asgard, Odin | Britannica" . www.britannica.com . Retrieved 10 November 2023 .

Culture The Viking Age saw many of the earliest Scandinavian cultural developments. The traditional Icelandic Sagas , still often read today, are seen as characteristic literary works of Northern Europe. Old English works such as Beowulf , written in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend , show Viking influences; in Beowulf , this influence is seen in the language and setting of the poem. Another example of Viking Age cultural influence is the Old Norse influence in the English language ; this influence is primarily a legacy of the various Viking invasions of England. [ 1 ] Women in Viking society According to archaeologist Liv Helga Dommasnes writing in 1998, although archaeological sources pertinent to the study of women's roles in Scandinavia were most plentiful from the Viking Age compared to other historical eras, not many archaeologists took advantage of the opportunities they represented. She alludes to the fact that the picture commonly presented of Viking society during the Viking Age was of a society of men engaged in their various occupations or positions, with scant mention of the women and children who were also part of it. [ 2 ] In her reckoning, given this basic flaw in the modern image of Viking society, how knowledge of the past is organised must be considered. Accordingly, language is an essential part of this organisation of knowledge, and the concepts of modern languages are tools for understanding the realities of the past and for organising that knowledge, even though they are artefacts of our own time and perceived reality. Written sources, although scarce, appear to have been prioritised, even though it is understood that these written sources are biased. Almost all of them originate from other cultures, as literature from Viking societies is sparse. Since it unambiguously transmits meaning in literary terms, it is fairly clear that this meaning is not derived from the ideology of Viking Age people, but rather from that of early northern Christianity. Medieval studies scholar Gro Steinsland argues that the transformation from heathen to Christian religion in Viking society was a "radical break" rather than a gradual transition, and Dommasnes says this should have bearing on consideration of the transformation of late Viking Age traditions before they were recorded in 12th- or 13th-century literature. By this reasoning, changing cultural values necessarily greatly affected perceptions of women particularly and of gender roles generally. [ 2 ] Judith Jesch , professor of Viking Age studies at the University of Nottingham , suggests in her Women in the Viking Age that "If historians' emphasis on vikings as warriors made invisible the women in the background, then it is not always clear where the more visible female counterparts of the new urban vikings have come from." She says it is impossible to study the Vikings without a conception of the entire historical period they lived in, of the culture that produced them, and of other cultures they influenced. By her lights, not accounting for the doings of half the population would be ludicrous. [ 3 ] Published in 1991, Women in the Viking Age develops Jesch's thesis that the texts of the Icelandic sagas ( Íslendingasögur ) are recordings of mythological narratives preserved in the forms in which they were written by 13th-century antiquaries in Iceland. They cannot be interpreted literally as the "authentic voice of Vikings", embodying as they do the preconceptions of those medieval Icelanders. These sagas, formerly believed to have been based on actual historical traditions, are now commonly regarded as imaginative creations. With their origins in oral traditions, there is little confidence in them as historical truth, but they express what they tell more directly than "the dry bones of archaeology" or the brief messages on runestones. The modern view of the Viking Age is completely entwined with knowledge imparted by the sagas, and they are the main source of a broadly held belief that women in the Viking Age were independent, assertive, and had agency . [ 4 ] Jesch describes the content of runic inscriptions as connecting people who live in modern times with women of the Viking Age similarly to archaeological evidence, often telling more about the lives of women than the material remains revealed in archaeological excavations . She considers these inscriptions as contemporary evidence originating within the culture instead of from the incomplete or prejudiced viewpoint of the cultural outsider, and sees most of them as narratives in a narrow sense that supply details illuminating the overall picture derived from archaeological sources. They allow actual persons to be identified and reveal information about them such as their family relationships, their names, and perhaps facts concerning their individual lives. [ 5 ] Birgit Sawyer says her book The Viking-age Rune-stones aims to show that the corpus of runestones considered as a whole is a fruitful source of knowledge about the religious, political, social, and economic history of Scandinavia in the 10th and 11th centuries. Using data from her database she finds that runestones cast light on settlement patterns, communications, kinship and naming customs, and the evolution of language and poetry. Systematically researching the material leads to her hypothesis that runic inscriptions mirrored inheritance customs entailing not only lands or goods, but also rights, obligations, and rank in society. [ 6 ] Although women in Viking society, like men, had tombstones over their graves, runestones were raised primarily to memorialise men, with the lives of few women being commemorated by runestones (Sawyer says only 7 per cent), and half of those were with men. Because there was a much larger per centage of women's graves with rich appointments in the Iron Age, the comparatively smaller number of runestones memorialising women indicates that the trend reflects changes in burial customs and religion only in part. Most of those honoured with runestones were men, and the emphasis was on those who sponsored the monuments. Typical medieval grave monuments name only the deceased, but Viking Age runestones prioritise the sponsors, first and foremost; therefore, they "are monuments to the living as much as to the dead ". [ 7 ] Language The 12th-century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws ( Icelandic : grágás ) state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders, and Danes spoke the same language, dǫnsk tunga ("Danish tongue"; speakers of Old East Norse would have said dansk tunga ). Another term was norrœnt mál ("northern speech"). Old Norse has developed into the modern North Germanic languages : Icelandic , Faroese , Norwegian , Danish , Swedish , and other North Germanic varieties of which Norwegian, Danish and Swedish retain considerable mutual intelligibility while Icelandic remains the closest to Old Norse. In present-day Iceland schoolchildren are able to read the 12th-century Icelandic sagas in the original language (in editions with normalised spelling). [ 8 ] Written sources of Old Norse from the Viking Age are rare: there are rune stones , but the inscriptions are mostly short. A good deal of the vocabulary, morphology , and phonology of the runic inscriptions (little is known definitely about their syntax) "can be shown to develop regularly into Viking-Age, medieval and modern Scandinavian reflexes ", says Michael Barnes. [ 9 ] According to David Arter, Old Norse was for a while during the Viking Age a lingua franca spoken not just in Scandinavia but also in the courts of the Scandinavian rulers in Ireland, Scotland, England, France and Russia. The Norse origin of some words used today is obvious, as in the word haar referring to the cold sea mist on the east coast of Scotland and England; [ 10 ] it derives from the Old Norse haárr . [ 11 ] Old Norse influence on other languages The long-term linguistic effects of the Viking settlements in England were threefold: over a thousand Old Norse words eventually became part of Standard English ; numerous places in the East and North-east of England have Danish names, and many English personal names are of Scandinavian origin. [ 12 ] Scandinavian words that entered the English language included landing, score, beck, fellow, take, busting , and steersman . [ 12 ] The vast majority of loan words did not appear in documents until the early 12th century; these included many modern words which used sk- sounds, such as skirt, sky, and skin ; other words appearing in written sources at this time included again, awkward, birth, cake, dregs, fog, freckles, gasp, law, moss, neck, ransack, root, scowl, sister, seat, sly, smile, want, weak and window from Old Norse meaning "wind-eye". [ 12 ] Some of the words that came into use are among the most common in English, such as to go, to come, to sit, to listen, to eat, both, same, get and give . The system of personal pronouns was affected, with they, them and their replacing the earlier forms. Old Norse influenced the verb to be ; the replacement of sindon by are is almost certainly Scandinavian in origin, as is the third-person-singular ending -s in the present tense of verbs. [ 12 ] There are more than 1,500 Scandinavian place names in England, mainly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (within the former boundaries of the Danelaw ): over 600 end in -by , the Scandinavian word for "village"—for example Grimsby, Naseby , and Whitby ; [ 13 ] many others end in -thorpe ("farm"), -thwaite ("clearing"), and -toft ("homestead"). [ 12 ] According to an analysis of names ending in -son , the distribution of family names showing Scandinavian influence is still concentrated in the north and east, corresponding to areas of former Viking settlement. Early medieval records indicate that over 60% of personal names in Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire showed Scandinavian influence. [ 12 ] ^ Herring, Susan C.; Reenen, Pieter van; Schøsler, Lene (2001). "On Textual Parameters and Older Languages" . In Herring, Susan C.; Reenen, Pieter van; Schøsler, Lene (eds.). Textual Parameters in Older Languages . John Benjamins Publishing. p. 22. ISBN   978-90-272-9960-4 . ^ a b Dommasnes, Liv Helga (1998). "Women, Kinship, and the Basis of Power in the Norwegian Viking Age" . In Hays-Gilpin, Kelley; Whitley, David S. (eds.). Reader in Gender Archaeology . Routledge. pp.  337– 338. ISBN   978-0-415-17359-9 . ^ Jesch, Judith (1991). Women in the Viking Age . Boydell & Brewer Ltd. pp.  3– 4. ISBN   978-0-85115-360-5 . ^ Cite error: The named reference Jesch1991 was invoked but never defined (see the help page ). ^ Jesch, Judith (1991). Women in the Viking Age . Boydell & Brewer Ltd. p. 42. ISBN   978-0-85115-360-5 . ^ Sawyer, Birgit (2000). The Viking-age Rune-stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia . Oxford University Press. pp.  1– 3. ISBN   978-0-19-820643-9 . ^ Sawyer, Birgit (2000). The Viking-age Rune-stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia . Oxford University Press. p. 20. ISBN   978-0-19-820643-9 . ^ Sanders, Ruth H. (2021). The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North . University of Chicago Press. pp.  63– 64. ISBN   978-0-226-75975-3 . ^ Barnes, Michael (2008). "Language" . In McTurk, Rory (ed.). A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture . John Wiley & Sons. pp.  173– 174. ISBN   978-1-4051-3738-6 . ^ Sullivan, Eric (2020). Marine Encyclopaedic Dictionary . Taylor & Francis. p. 498. ISBN   978-1-000-28815-5 . ^ Arter, David (1999). Scandinavian Politics Today . Manchester University Press. p. 9. ISBN   978-0-7190-5133-3 . ^ a b c d e f Crystal, David, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language , CUP, 2001 edition, ISBN   0-521-59655-6 , pp. 25–26. ^ "The -by ending is almost entirely confined to the area of the Danelaw, supporting a theory of Scandinavian origin, despite the existence of the word by "dwelling" in Old English." Crystal, p. 25.

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