Starting today (25th of March, 2016), I will begin a series of posts regarding Viking History. I have noticed that I have failed to present Viking History in a more condensed and unified way, and so I hope these posts will help solve that. I will do my best to post a lesson each Friday at 9 p.m. EST. (See my ‘about me’ section if you’d like to know my degree of credibility and background).

The Viking Age

The Viking Age lasted between 793–1066 CE. The definition of this period is a modern invention that historians have used to describe the heightened activities of the northmen during the Early Middle Ages. It was a very dynamic period in which the people of Scandinavia restlessly expanded their activities outward, quite to the surprise of the rest of Europe. Taking Europe by storm, the Vikings (whose origins I will further discuss next week) made a massive impact, both negative and positive. 

The Viking Age is no simple matter. It was a period of complicated interactions and new relations. Throughout the period, Christianity seeped its way into Scandinavia by means of native royal powers. Raids on monasteries define the traits of these people, yet there is far more to their story than this. They were mercenaries, merchants, innovators, and settlers. Their age altered the foundations of many nations as well as shook those of others. It is a very broad period of history and often requires a lot of background in various other European people to understand the events of this age.

Our Sources

There is little available from the ‘Vikings’ themselves for this period, at least when it comes to written word. Runic inscriptions make up a large source of this material, but they are not histories. They typically honored the fallen and out of the 6000 inscriptions known, only half are from this period. 

Another major source of information comes from the sagas. Written in Iceland after the Viking Age and conversion to Christianity, these a literary works that provide a complicated pool of resources. These are also not histories, but stories deeply colored in memory. Still, they provide an incredible amount of information, more so for the period of Iceland directly after the Viking Age, if used with care and caution.

History in the Viking Age was told by Skalds (poets). Our sources of their poetry, Skaldic verse, provide possible insights into events and people. They were the keepers of history, lore, and genealogies. They granted honor to kings and brought them down all the same. Many of their verses find their ways into later saga tradition. It is thanks to the strict meter of this poetry that they can be a bit more reliable.

However, besides sources from the Scandinavians themselves, there exists a large (mostly negative) pool of information regarding the Vikings from abroad. Shifting through their biases and complications, knowledge regarding events can be found in these, or at least be supported by them. One such source is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (England). There were also geographies and explorations done. Some notable figures that provide information about the medieval Scandinavians are Adam of Bremen, Ibn Fadlan, and Saxo Grammaticus. I will touch on many of these sources in later lessons.

Besides written sources, there is always the abstract sources of archaeology and place names (linguistics). These are very helpful when in coordination with other sources and can help tell the story of a place with much more depth.

In the next lesson I will discuss the people who inhabited medieval Scandinavia and the Age of Migrations that preceded the Viking Age.

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Sources

Dukes-Knight, Jennifer. ‘Viking History: Timeline and Sources.’ University of South Florida, 2015.