The Vikings - A Brief Overview

RELATED LINKS:

This Columbus Day, forget everything you learned in school about Christopher Columbus--or at least the bit about him discovering America. It's now officially a fact that Leif "The Lucky" Eriksson got the jump on the Genoese mariner.

Five hundred years before Columbus considered sailing off the map's edge, a crew of Norse adventurers came to Canada's northeastern coast. Amazed by the sight of green grass in winter, they made camp and set about exploring. Excursions turned up timber, wheat, butternuts, streams full of salmon, and to the south, something even rarer--wild grapes.

For guys used to snow and seal meat, grapes were a real find. So they built a settlement meant to last, with great halls, a forge, and comfortable huts. Yet after only a few years, the small colony faded away, and history's official memory of "Vinland" faded with it. Columbus got all the glory, and the Vikings got a football team.

Official history is one thing. Rumor is another. Even after Viking power faded, Europe's rumor mill was churning out gossip about a rich country somewhere in the North Atlantic. In 1075, a Danish king told German historian Adam of Bremen that he'd heard of a place west of Greenland where grapes and wheat abounded. A 12th-century history of Iceland added more detail--native settlements along Vinland's coast.

As time passed, the Vinland tale grew taller. Scandinavian sailors probably swapped yarns about their ancestors' accomplishments at sea. Traders might have bragged a bit as they journeyed from port to port. Some historians think these stories made an impression on at least one ambitious young mariner. Columbus's son said that his dad made a trip to Iceland 15 years before setting out to find a passage to the West Indies. Did he gather facts about lands to the west?

Maybe. Icelandic sagas certainly have the most tantalizing account of Vinland's discovery. A collection of intricately rhymed poems celebrating Norse gods, kings, and warriors, the sagas were written down in the 13th and 14th centuries after being spoken aloud for centuries. Today, scholars regard the stories as heavily embellished accounts of real events. Modern historians combine elements of two sagas written in the early 1200s--The Greenlanders' Saga and Erik the Red's Saga--to get the most accurate portrait of Vinland.

The Greenlanders' Saga describes five separate expeditions and credits Leif Eriksson with the discovery and naming of the new territory. Erik the Red's Saga condenses all five voyages into one, made by the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni. But both sagas tell the same basic story.

After discovering Helluland (Flat Slab Land) and Markland (Forest Land), the Norse found a warm, green place to the south, where they set up one or more camps. More than 100 men and 15 women came to live in Vinland, collecting grapes, fur, and lumber for export to Greenland and Europe. The sagas even record the birth of Vinland's first Norse citizen, a boy named Snorri, and tell of hostile encounters with the natives, whom the Norse called "skraelings."

Iceland's sagas remained obscure until 1837, when a Danish professor published the first translations to find a popular audience. America was stunned--and delighted to have found a new hobby. Suddenly, Viking artifacts were turning up in every New Englander's backyard. None proved genuine.

From the detailed topographic descriptions in the sagas, historians had a good hunch that Helluland was Baffin Island (in the Canadian Arctic) and that Markland was southern Labrador. So Vinland was probably somewhere farther south. Throughout the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, archaeologists scoured Canada's northeastern coast for proof of a Viking presence. They came up empty.

Then, in 1960, Norwegian historian Helge Ingstad and his wife Anne found the sod foundations of Norse longhouses in Newfoundland. The couple soon traced eight buildings that were the spitting image of Norse structures in Iceland and Greenland. Excavations yielded Viking artifacts dating to around the year 1000. Evidence of iron-working and a forge supported the theory of a small colony, and the discovery of a soapstone spindle whorl suggested women weavers.

It was a lost Viking settlement. But was it Vinland? According to the sagas, the Vikings had made trips from their base camp to collect butternuts, grapes, and timber. Today, butternuts and wild grapes only grow as far north as New Brunswick, the part of Canada just above Maine. Many historians think the Newfoundland site was the gateway to Vinland, a region that may have extended to the St. Lawrence River, New Brunswick, and possibly even Maine.

Despite Vinland's good vibes, the Norse quickly packed their bags and headed for home in Greenland (settled just decades earlier by Leif Eriksson's daring dad, the sagas' Erik the Red). They probably stayed in Vinland for about a decade. Unfriendly skraelings may have forced them to skedaddle. Or perhaps they figured that, now that they knew where to look, they could plunder grapes and timber just as easily on journeys from home.

In fact, evidence suggests that the Norse did make trips to America long after the collapse of their colony. Icelandic annals record that a ship laden with timber from Markland made berth at Iceland in 1347. A 13th-century Inuit artist on Baffin Island carved a man dressed European-style. Columbus admirers tend to say his voyage counted most, because it led to permanent colonization, but Viking fans have more than a hunch on their side. History is a-changing, and the Vikings of Vinland are finally getting their due.

--Claire Vail

Known as Vikings, Norsemen, and Northmen, the Scandinavian raiders who attacked Northern Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries were, for the most part, fierce and effective warriors and sailors. Boarding their longships in search of loot and plunder, Norwegian and Danish Vikings sailed to the west while the Swedes remained in the Baltic region. Why these raids began are unclear. However, their actions shifted the course of history dramatically by ushering in the era of feudalism in Western Europe.

Investigations undertaken on the Viking Age have been focused on the two hundred years or so the Vikings spent raiding Europe. The first attacks on England took place in AD 793, and they continued intermittently until around the mid-11th century, when the last Viking king Harald was killed and nation states were assembled in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

Most of the archaeological investigations undertaken on the Viking Age have been focused on the two hundred years or so the Vikings spent raiding Europe. The first attacks on England took place in AD 793, and they continued intermittently until around the mid-11th century, when the last Viking king Harald was killed and nation states were assembled in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

Viking Characteristics:

Longships. The most famous characteristic to modern readers is the longship, the Drakkar' which were used for war and exploration.

They used another craft, the Knarr, for trading.

Navigation. The Vikings were one of the few peoples of this age able to sail and navigate at night.

No horned helmets. One 'well known' characteristic of the Vikings, horned helmets, is actually entirely false.

Famous Vikings:

King Canute the Great

Eric the Red, settler of Greenland.

Leif Ericsson, settler of Vinland

Sweyn Forkbeard, King of England and Denmark

Brodir, active in Ireland.

They plundered, pillaged, burned and raided. They also explored, colonized, founded and settled. They were the Vikings, those versatile voyagers of icy oceans and eastern seas alike.

In Scandinavia, farming settlements with early Viking artifacts were in Jutland by the 4th and 5th centuries AD. The Viking language was carved into stones (called rune stones), woven into textiles, molded into brooches, and carved into wood. The Vikings were master ship-builders; boats were used for important burials such as Oseberg.

by Robert Wilde

*********************

The Vikings were a Scandinavian people highly active in Europe between the ninth and eleventh centuries as raiders, traders and settlers. A mixture of population pressure and the ease with which they could raid/settle is commonly cited as the reasons why they left their homeland, the regions we now call Sweden, Norway and Denmark. They settled in the Britain, Ireland (they founded Dublin), Iceland, France, Russia, Greenland and even Canada, while their raids took them to the Baltic, Spain and Mediterranean.

The first Viking raid on England is recorded as being at Lindisfarne in 793 CE. They began to settle in 865, capturing East Anglia, Northumbria and related lands before fighting with the kings of Wessex. Their regions of control fluctuated greatly over the next century until England was ruled by Canute the Great who invaded in 1015; he is generally considered one of England's wisest and most able kings. However, the ruling House which preceded Canute was restored in 1042 under Edward the Confessor and the Viking age in England is considered to have finished with the Norman Conquest in 1066.

The Vikings settled the south and west of Greenland, supposedly in the years following 982 when Eric the Red – who had been outlawed from Iceland for three years – explored the region. The remains of over 400 farms have been found, but the climate of Greenland eventually became too cold for them and the settlement finished. Source material has long mentioned a settlement in Vinland, and recent archaeological discoveries of a short lived settlement in Newfoundland, at L'Anse aux Meadows, have recently born this out, although the topic is still controversial.

As well as raiding in the Baltic, by the tenth century Vikings settled in Novgorod, Kiev and other areas, merging with the local Slavic population to become the Rus, the Russians. It was through this eastern expansion that the Vikings had contact with the Byzantine Empire – fighting as mercenaries in Constantinople and forming the Emperor's Varangian Guard – and even Baghdad.

by K. Kris Hirst

Enter content here

To post your opinion regarding this page, please click on

A POINT OF VIEW, and post your opinion in my Forum.