The Vikings

One of my hobbies is history, and I am just finishing a new book about the Vikings. It irritates me that, despite all the new knowledge that has been discovered about Viking history, many historians are still mystified about the cause of the Viking period.

Most traditional historians see overpopulation as the main reason for the Viking Age, but that is blatantly absurd. The first Viking raids bear no resemblance to the great movements of the earlier migration period. Scandinavia was not over populated at 800 A.D. It is estimated the population of Scandinavia at the start of the Viking Age was 800,000 people, which was well within the population Scandinavia could support under the favorable climate in the north at that time. Denmark’s climate was similar to that of present day France. Besides, the Vikings raided, but didn’t settle for the first 70 years of the Viking Age.

Other historians believe that Scandinavians were too fragmented to have acted in unison, to begin the Viking Age. It is true that Scandinavia was an ever-changing tapestry of small, feuding kingdoms, but that is only part of the story. In many decisive respects the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians were closely bound together. They shared the same language, religion, law, social organization, art, and culture, and they shared the same legendary and historical past. The contacts and common interests of individuals endlessly reinforced these similarities. Most important in this context, the religion of Scandinavia was a powerful unifying force for two reasons: it was their only religion, and before the Viking Age it was theirs alone. That was enough to unify the Scandinavians in action when Charlemagne’s Christianity reached the Eider after his campaign against the Saxons in 772-85.

I learned my Danish history from Saxo Grammaticus, who wrote a history of Denmark about 1200 A.D., so I knew exactly why the Scandinavian’s began the Viking Age. Saxo described Charlemagne’s campaign against the Saxons as genocidal evangelism. The campaign started with the cutting down of the Saxon's most sacred tree, their version of the World Tree or Yggdrasil. Then, in 772, at Quierzy, he issued a proclamation that he would kill every Saxon who refused to accept Jesus Christ, and from that time on he kept a special detachment of Christian priests who doubled as executioners, and in every Saxon village in which they stopped, these priests would execute anybody who refused to be baptized. Thousands of innocent men and woman were killed and horrible atrocities were committed. Babies were burned alive, young woman were raped and torched in the name of Christ. Then in 782, at Verden, Charlemagne rounded up 4,500 Saxons who had returned to the pagan religion they had been forced to give up upon pain of death, and had them all beheaded. Scandinavian’s watched the cruelties inflicted upon their pagan brethren, the Saxons, at the hands of Charlemagne, and watched his armies approaching their southern border. Their hatred of the church, the cross, and against monks and nuns was extreme, and they retaliated. The first recorded Viking attack was a well-planned attack directed against the wealthy monastic settlement of Lindisfarne in 793. For the next 250 years the Vikings delighted in the burning of monasteries and killing the inhabitants by the most gruesome means possible.

Eventually the Scandinavian Pagans lost to Christianity. Viking Paganism was thousands of years old, and in no way inferior to Christianity, but the Christian Church was better organized than the Pagans, and Scandinavian kings saw Christianity as a means of consolidating their power. The kings converted, but for the most part left the people alone to practice the “Old Customs” in private. Some of those old customs are still being practiced, such as the tradition of the straw goat at Christmas, and indeed Christmas itself.

Happy Solstice!

Gråulf.