Monday 6 September 2004

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Civilization 3 Conquests, where they are correctly identified as Scandinavians.

Viking civilization?

Unlike most Norwegians, I agree that there never was a Viking civilization. Contrary to popular belief hereabouts, Viking was not an ethnicity, but a job description. And a rather unsavory job too: In today's society they would fall somewhere in between biker gangs and terrorists.

There was at the time, for lack of a better description, a Scandinavian civilization. It encompassed Norway, Sweden and Denmark and areas that were colonized from there. During the centuries around the fall of the West Roman Empire, Germanic tribes moved around quite a bit and gained new knowledge. When the Nordic peoples learned to make their own iron, agriculture improved. At the same time the climate got warmer, or perhaps I should say milder. The population expanded rapidly.

At this time, the Scandinavian peoples had not yet coalesced into nations as we know them today. They were organized as "peoples", smaller than nations but larger than village tribes. (For those of you familiar with the Bible, you can compare them to the 12 tribes of Israel, although they probably did not feel quite that related.) When the growing population finally exceeded the capacity of the land to feed them, and there still was no strong central authority, groups of armed men started to raid other settlements. This could be other Scandinavian villages or towns, but the improved shipbuilding of the period also made it possible to travel further afield. Here they found great riches, poorly defended. And so began the Viking age.

The Vikings were all-out barbarians, or at least that was their typical mode of operation. At the same time there were Scandinavian traders traveling to the same areas, probably a rather confusing experience for the neighboring peoples who could not know for sure when the longships arrived whether they came to trade or plunder. It is quite possible that some of the expeditions did both of the above; the historians do not seem to agree completely on this. But it is definitely a fact that after a while expeditions of plunder were followed by expeditions of conquest and eventually settlements. At this time power in Scandinavia was gradually centralized to fewer regions, which eventually developed into the nations we know today (although their borders were to change repeatedly for many more centuries).

In short, there never was a Viking civilization. But the Vikings were a byproduct of the growing Scandinavian civilization. This Scandinavian civilization, as a whole, did not considered the Vikings heroes. After a strong government was established, the Vikings were exterminated. And good riddance.

Due to national romantic poetry and general ignorance, many Scandinavians (probably most of them) have these things confused, and think Vikings were cool. Then again, there are evidently people today who think biker gangs and terrorists are cool, too. May they all meet the same fate as the Vikings did.