Mawer - The Vikings

The term Viking is derived from the Old Norse vk, a bay, and means one who haunts a bay, creek or fjord. In the 9th and 10th centuries it came to be used more especially of those warriors who left their homes in Scandinavia and made raids on the chief European countries. This is the narrow, and technically the only correct use of the term Viking, but in such expressions as Viking civilisation, the Viking age, the Viking movement, Viking influence, the word has come to have a wider significance and is used as a concise and convenient term for describing the whole of the civilisation, activity and influence of the Scandinavian peoples, at a particular period in their history, and to apply the term Viking in its narrower sense to these movements would be as misleading as to write an account of the age of Elizabeth and label it The Buccaneers.

It is in the broader sense, that the term is employed in the present manual. Plundering and harrying form but one aspect of Viking activity and it is mainly a matter of accident that this aspect is the one that looms largest in our minds. Our knowledge of the Viking movement was, until the last half-century, drawn almost entirely from the works of medieval Latin chroniclers, writing in monasteries and other kindred schools of learning which had only too often felt the devastating hand of Viking raiders. They naturally regarded them as little better than pirates and they never tired of expatiating upon their cruelty and their violence. It is only during the last fifty years or so that we have been able to revise our ideas of Viking civilisation and to form a juster conception of the part which it played in the history of Europe.

The change has come about chiefly in two ways. In the first place the literature of Scandinavia is no longer a sealed book to us. For our period there are three chief groups of native authorities: (1) the prose sagas and the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, (2) the eddaic poems, (3) the skaldic poems. The prose sagas and Saxo belong to a date considerably later than the Viking age, but they include much valuable material referring to that period. The chief poems of the older Edda date from the Viking period itself and are invaluable for the information they give us as to the religion and mythology of the Scandinavian peoples at this time, the heroic stories current amongst them, and their general outlook on life. The skaldic poems are however in some ways the most valuable historical authority for the period. The skalds or court-poets were attached to the courts of kings and jarls, shared their adventures, praised their victories, and made songs of lament on their death, and their work is largely contemporary with the events they describe.

Secondly, and yet more important in its results perhaps, archaeological science has, within the last half-century, made rapid advance, and the work of archaeologists on the rich finds brought to light during the last hundred years has given us a vast body of concrete fact, with the aid of which we have been able to reconstruct the material civilisation of the Viking period far more satisfactorily than we could from the scattered and fragmentary notices found in the sagas and elsewhere. The resultant picture calls for description later, but it is well to remember from the outset that it is a very different one from that commonly associated with the term Viking.

With this word of explanation and note of warning we may proceed to our main subject.