10 Big Myths About the Vikings

hello everybody Welcome to history hit I'm James and last month I made a video titled the Vikings explained which does pretty much what it says in the title but since then I've been reading your comments intently and let's just say some are more constructive than others thanks to I am God 6464 for that one but reading through them all I I thought I'd make another video on some of the more pervasive Viking myths responding to comments as I go but also bringing in expert opinion from across the history hit podcast Network so here we go here are 10 big myths about the Vikings they wore horned helmets no no no no Sil EGS said this one was totally obvious but the cultural history behind it is less so as Canal coholic said so why is there such a strong association between Vikings and Horn helmets the whole thing was made up in German Opera in 1876 it stems from Richard Varner's dur ring neber lungan Opera cycle where the costume designer Carl Emil doler had the Viking rolls wear horned and winged helmets why Germanic cultures had worn horned helmets back in ancient times meanwhile the Germans a new nation in 1870 were rather intrigued by the Vikings the Opera was playing on growing nationalist sentiment of the time by blending Scandinavian and German history no doubt plenty of intellectual types watched this Opera and thus horned helmets began to weave their way into all sorts of cultural references late 19th century illustrations of Vikings almost always have them wearing horned or winged helmets it's nonsense there is no archaeological record of Vikings ever wearing horned helmets ornate horned helmets would be expensive to make and pretty impractical depictions of Vikings from the period show them like pretty much everyone else to be wearing simple iron or leather helmets like this one Ragnar LOF Brook was a real person someone with an impossible to pronounce name said they'd like to see a full video on Ragnar LOF Brook we'll see how this one does but in the meantime we've got a full podcast episode on God medeval you can listen to check out the link in the description that said the main character in the TV show Vikings probably wasn't a real person is that a controversial opinion not really you see superheroes crop up in many different historical cultures in Greece it's aysia amongst many others the Romans had anus B wolf for Anglo-Saxons and King Arthur was claimed by the Welsh and the English in the Middle Ages but these people aren't real their characters in literature and it's likely that Ragnar lothbrook is much the same Viking mythology expert Caroline larington went on the god medieval podcast for this what we do know is that the sons who were attributed to him were definitely real people and they're referred to across Chronicles and in sagas as well as the sons of Ragnar LOF bro so they're real all right but the problem with our actual Ragnar is that he turns up in a whole range of sources some of which are clearly fictional sources I think the ones where he kills a dragon we have to conclude that maybe that didn't really happen but he's also identifiable with a figure who was was a kind of sub King in Sweden and he turns up in some Swedish Traditions he's also a king of Denmark in Danish Traditions but more likely he's identified with a range of known Vikings called something like rigan Harris or Ragnar or Ragnar who operates in various locations so Ragnar may be based on a Chieftain who besieged Paris in 845 called regen Harris but little is known about this guy in reality the historical basis of Ragnar lothbrook is likely constructed from a variety of people through oral tradition and then embellished with some fantasy elements remember don't let the truth get in the way of a good story it All Began in 793 Viking Lord mentioned that the Viking age didn't really begin in 793 and they're right the years 793 to 1066 are how many historians defined the Viking era in England 793 is the year of the Viking attack on lindes Farm in the Kingdom of North Umbria but that actually wasn't the first Viking attack on Europe or even England the important bit is that the attack desecrated a major religious site which had some rather powerful links the cleric alun of York held from North Umbria and by 793 he was a teacher of the court of the Emperor Charlamagne who is the most powerful man in Europe when alun heard about the attack he was shocked that Pagan Invaders could turn up from nowhere enslave or kill peaceful monks and loot all the gold and silver they could find was not okay and he sent a series of letters and wrote a poem about it he also partially blamed the monks themselves for the way of wearing of the hair his final piece of advice for how to avoid future Viking attacks said consider carefully brothers and examine diligently lest per chance this unaccustomed and unheard of evil was merited by some unheard of evil practice consider the dress the way of wearing the hair the luxurious habits of the princes and people apparently they had it coming for them but really there had been earlier Viking attacks the first recorded Viking raid in England was in 789 in Portland Wessex where a royal Reeve or sheriff and his retinue were murdered there were probably earlier unrecorded raids in England too the Viking age if we can call it that at all was more a gradual process of Scandinavian migration and Expeditions rather than having a moment where things suddenly became more violent Viking Expeditions across the North Sea could have taken place at any time after 700 when Scandinavians began to incorporate sales into longship designs they may have headed to Europe on trading missions and then seen the opportunity to raid largely undefended Coastline settlements let's just tune into what Steven Ashby had to say about the 790s on the G medieval podcast so it looks like there's a extended period of Maritime connection and Travel and Transport and trade but then it spikes just when everything else spikes when we hear about the the raiding in the Ang Chronicle when we we start to see changes in the movement of silver around around the Viking age when we start to see references in the Frankish annals and when we start to see the movements of beads changing all those things you know a lot about as well it's looking more and more like this is a kind of key moment after the attack on Linda far Viking raids on England did become more frequent but an attempted Viking Conquest didn't happen until 865 when the largely Danish great Heathen Army invaded in the Frankish kingdoms there was a viking attack in 799 but raids became more regular and organized during the 830s Vikings settled in both countries around the turn of the 10th Century as even kaisen 6838 said it didn't really end in 1066 either that's marked as the end of the Viking age in England because Harold hrada led the last serious Scandinavian Invasion that year but he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Stanford Bridge there were Viking attempts and raids on England after this point but after the Norman Conquest which happened only a few weeks after Stanford Bridge the threat gradually faded away it took place in the Dark Ages how do you annoy a medievalists you talk about the Dark Ages that's not even a joke historians don't like this phrase it was coined by the Italian Renaissance scholar petrarch in the 14th century and referred to the lack of source material in literature since the fall of the Roman Empire in the fth century it's fair to say there's not not a huge amount of contemporary written sources about the Viking age or indeed the Early Middle Ages compared to other periods much of what historians can gather about the Vikings comes from the later medieval sagas which were largely written centuries after the Viking age to add to their potential unreliability they were also written in Iceland which is some distance away from Mainland Scandinavia the term Dark Ages had a bit of a Revival in the enlightenment era and the label was stuck to the Early Middle Ages which includes the Viking age meanwhile the term also took on a new meaning referring to economic and scientific regression and an age of Lawless violence the age of Barbarian Invasion as the Roman Empire fell would not have been ideal Europe was not always peaceful during Roman times often because of Civil War but after Rome collapsed in the fth century there was a period of chaos between fractured Barbarian kingdoms the lack of Roman lore and Authority led to to economic backwardness let's remember that Rome ruled most of Europe for half a millennium and the development of Roman government went back another 500 years at least this was not a good period in history but one period we could attribute to being of Dark Age is the mid 6th Century a century after Rome's collapse that's because it was quite literally darker this was due to a series of volcanic eruptions that caused the average temperature in Europe to Fall by 2.5 degrees C that's halfway down to the last ice age and consequently not much would have been harvested leading to famine worse still southern Europe was ravaged by the plague of Justinian in 541 which killed millions of people I'm going to say that the mid 6th century was one of the worst times in history to be alive but the Viking age began at the end of the 8th Century this was more than 350 50 years after Rome's collapse and at least another 200 away from the truly dark period in Europe the 8th century is also seen by some historians as a bridging Century between late Antiquity and the medieval period there was an economic boom during the 8th century and the emperor Charlamagne had United much of Western Europe reclaiming himself Emperor the Franks in the tradition of the Romans 300 years before him that this boom had occurred and that Scandinavian people hadn't had a share of the wealth generated is a possible cause of their raids and Expeditions by the 11th century much of Europe was being ruled under stronger unified monarchies and even the Scandinavian kingdoms were converting to Christianity while there were significant Viking invasions in the 11th century particularly in England these were more Wars of Conquest than the raiding that markk the 8th and 9th century berser workers took magic mushrooms bizarre I'm no expert on psychedelic drugs but I'm pretty sure people who take them are more likely to hug you than kill you psychedelics can adjust the user's sense of time and space and can make their environment appear hilarious so essentially the exact opposite of what you need to go berserk and then actually be able to fight you'd be lucky to even pick up an axe without questioning the universe never mind actually hit someone with it it would be an insanely bad idea to take hallucinogenic drugs before hand-to-hand combat meanwhile rodick Dale had this to say there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the use of magic mushrooms of any description in Scandinavia in the Viking age to make people go berserk in battle there we go this myth seems to have been developed in fairly recent recent times it's actually it's the Swedish Theologian Samuel Erman in 1784 suggested based on his knowledge of Siberian Shamanism that they used ammonite muscaria the flyer gar mushroom which is that famous red and white topped one that everybody has seen and everybody knows to actually go bad and then it was further popularized in 1956 when Howard fabin performed experiment on prisoners in Ohio State Penitentiary extracting what he thought was the active uh ingredient buer tenin uh and feeding it to these prisoners and monitoring what actually happened and he concluded that it matched the symptoms that he understood from old nor literature meanwhile the whole concept of Berserkers is deeply mysterious that Vikings went berserk to the English meaning in battle is a modern misconception Berserker means bare skin in Old Norse and could relate to some Warriors wearing Bekins or it could relate to the North European bear cult accounts of these Warriors are found in the Viking sagas and perhaps our best idea is that they were Champions so Berserkers didn't actually go berserk and they certainly didn't take magic mushrooms to do so there was one Viking empire I remember in Civilization 3 you could play as the Vikings a militaristic civilization with a Berserker as a special land unit meanwhile you can also play as the Vikings on Age of Empires too two classic historical games right there these examples suggested that there was one United Viking empire that lorded over the rest of Europe from the north but there wasn't Denmark had established its monarchy in the 8th Century but it took Norway another 100 years years to unify and Sweden didn't become one Kingdom until the 11th century most of this period was marked by weak government and fractures tribes here's Caroline lington again maybe in a kind of symbolic way the emerging it would be hard to say it's the Viking empire because nobody I think would really admit the claim that there was a Viking empire but the least Viking sphere of influence starting in Scandinavian then radiating outwards to the very north of SC Avia then out to Normandy across to Ireland and taking the British is as well Norway Denmark and England were unified under the North Sea Empire of canuk the great in the mid 11th century but this didn't last particularly long and it didn't include Swedish territory the Norwegian Harold hrada later tried to revive this by invading Denmark but while he claimed the throne he never achieved it he also tried and failed to win the English throne in 1066 the three Scandinavian kingdoms did eventually unify under one Monarch with the later calar Union but this occurred in 1397 and was dissolved by 1523 this was well after the Viking era they called themselves Vikings let's just start with a very definition of Vikings two northmen are in a me Hall they talk about that one time one of them went Viking but they don't call each other Vikings they might say one of them is a vikinger let's break this down the origins of these words are all a bit obscure in Old Norse a vikinga refers to someone who went on Expeditions and usually abroad the word Viking refers to an activity related to Expeditions but it's not a verb a few comments also made the point that the word Vic means Cove in Old Norse and Bay in Norwegian so the word Viking could come from that in English this means you can't Viking in in the same way you can cook which is a verb someone can go Viking just as they can play football so Viking was originally a noun vikinger is a person which is also a noun it's only in the later medieval sagas that the word Viking became related to the darker aspects of expeditions such as raiding and piracy all this atmology relating to a tricky period in recorded history is hard to get right some Scandinavians during the vi in age would have used these words but they wouldn't have commonly defined themselves as that like many historical labels the word Viking made a distinct comeback in English during the 19th century and has basically stuck to Define Scandinavian people from roughly the year 750 to 1100 there were some references to Vikings and contemporary sources but Christians often refer to Scandinavian Invaders as heathens or pagans but also as Norse so speakers of the Old Norse language there wasn't much sense of national identity in the early medieval period a nationality was primarily a language and as I said earlier the kingdoms of Norway and Sweden only developed in the late 9th century Scandinavian people would have probably referred to their family name or local area they would not have called themselves Vikings very often if at all they were all Raiders raiding pillaging bloodthirsty horned helmet wearing Vikings I've already debunked one of these but it's hard for Vikings to shake their violent reputation that's because they were violent jumping off longboats to enslave people and steal loots was a preferred tactic to begin with by the mid 9th century Scandinavian War bands were overwintering in England and laying Siege to French cities Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Kings often paid them off with silver but to say Vikings were all Raiders rather misses their wider impact first of all due to a major Maritime Innovation long ships they were able to sail west across the Atlantic and colonize Iceland Greenland and they reached North America how they got so far before the invention of early modern navigation instruments or even Maps is something of a mystery the early medieval Scandinavians were extraordinary explorers taking their longship South they also set up trading colonies in Spain Sicily and North Africa which doesn't sound much like the behavior of Raiders from the north the trading networks established helped rejuvenate the European economy to the west of Scandinavia there were a lot of violent raids and England was conquered by the Danes in the 11th century in the East there was certainly violence too and a lot of human trafficking but the trade networks from Sweden ran down into the Abid caliphate Viking could take their boats down the huge River of Eastern Europe and reach Constantinople these trade networks were Illustrated through Islamic coins being found in England while Viking grave Goods suggest there was a market for exotic ornaments a couple Generations ago people were genuinely doubting that Scandinavians were particularly interested in Commerce and trade and that was fair enough with the data sets at the time but now with the excavation of sites like a cang or a beera Sweden or ahead of you've finally got evidence for very long-term sophisticated planned sites that look like they're essentially designed to get all the best trade items of the region are coming down these trade routes there have been more Viking archaeological discoveries to the east of Scandinavia than in the west the zimmo pointed out that there was plenty of violence in the East due to the amount of slave training and slaves would have been captured via violent raids that's right but I would say Viking activity in the East was more about trade than it was about Warfare women warriors were commonplace women fighting alongside men makes for an interesting romantic and modern plotline given this has been most unusual for the vast majority of recorded history it seems rather odd that this would happen in a period with few written sources women Warriors in the Viking age have some basis in myth for instance the Valkyries were a mysterious group of female Spirits choosing who died and where they go in the afterlife but they were not Warriors and they weren't specifically involved in fighting let's also remember that they were mythical Shield maidens appear in the Viking sagas but Scandinavian sagas referring to brunhilda or hervor two of the most famous warrior women were written almost a thousand years after they were set and they were dramatic superhero characters with a historical reality remaining obscure back to reality Viking women would have accompanied men on Long ships for long Expeditions for the lindes fan raid in 793 probably not but for the overwintering great Heathen Army in 865 this is more likely this is because women of the time would have kept the Warriors company but also provided important logistical support like making food and clothing a woman's role in Viking Society was focused on the farm and clothing the family would have taken an immense amount of time here's Johanna Katrine Frick doer on the gone medieval podcast about that well we think that it was mainly women who did the textile work although obviously you can't say it was extremely strictly gender split but the grave Goods women tend to be buried with textile equipment and not a lot of male skeletons have been found with textile equipment so we're fairly certain that it was mainly a women's preoccupation just the job of keeping yourself and your family clothed that was just an endless job I think because making you know a shirt or a garment took weeks from the beginning so you've got a sheep or you've got a field of flax and you have to get the wool off the sheep or the fibers out of the flax and then there's just this extremely labor intensive process spinning everything and cleaning it and so on and preparing the loom and very very skilled work and then you set about weaving and eventually after many many weeks of weaving you have enough fabric for a garment that you then cut and sew and so imagine a household of 10 people this is just endless endless work and then in the Viking age you suddenly get all this expansion and many many more ships being built and going out and so you need Sals for the ships because they're not going to go very far without Sals someone has to do these tasks and in medieval societies across Europe similar things happened men were predominantly peasant laborers or Warriors or both while women would normally pick up the tasks at home this myth has been particularly engrossed by the Vikings series where ragna's wife legara is a warrior and leads companies of women into battle it's not impossible to think this could have happened occasionally but it being common place is extremely unlikely because it doesn't match the gender norms and traditions of the Medieval Era making clothes for the family is clearly valuable but it's not a power play and it doesn't make for great Viking TV archaeologists have found some Viking women buried next to weapons but this could be for all sorts of reasons being buried with weapons does not make you a Warrior without further Evidence leaf Ericson landed in America there's a national day for leaf Ericson observed each year on the 9th of October in the USA and parts of Canada this marks the landing of Ericson in New Finland so he is considered the first European to set foot in America but there's a problem Ericson was a character in the sagas it's written in The Saga of Eric the Red that Erikson was blown off course when trying to reach Greenland and reached Vinland which is now New Finland this happened in the Autumn of somewhere near the year 1000 so it's unlikely to be exactly October the 9th we're not even sure what year it was a viking site was found in the 1960s by two Norwegian explorers the inats at Lono Meadows they semi- excavated three L houses and three storage Huts then came the idea that this was where Ericson landed maybe but unlikely there probably were other trading posts on the Eastern Seaboard as well we just haven't found them yet but then Ericson might not have existed at all despite there being several statues to this hero there's no real evidence beyond the family history of the sagas to really explain where he went or what he did goldon Campbell went on Dan Snow's history hit and said this so mean how did they get there the archaeology throws up all kinds of anomalies the difficulty is that the s aren't history books they're literature they're read as log books by The literalists Who say if you go for so many hours directly to the West you will encounter so and so and then they confirm what they're seeing with a detail in the SAS I don't believe any of it I think the SAS are family history essentially they're designed to glorify certain people with Tales of their ancestors in the case of the sagas we have characters like Eric the Red Leif his his son we know as Leaf the lucky did they exist well I suppose there could have been a Chieftain called Eric he might have had a son called Leif but I very much doubt it in other words you have a series of tales that reflect real discoveries because the nor did go to Greenland they lived there for almost 500 years and various FS that you've visited are named after the founding settlers that are named in The Saga here's an illustration of Leif Landing in America that even if he did exist he did not wear either a horned or winged helmet thanks for watching this video I'd really like to recommend Cat jarman's book RiverKings for a new interpretation of the Viking age through Cutting Edge archaeology and it was an important source for writing this script I also listened to a lot of Viking podcast from across the history hit network from our shows God medieval and Dan Snow's history hit I've linked all the episodes in the description so you can find out more about the Vikings also don't forget to ask us any question you want about the Vikings and we might well make another video like this video And subscribe to our YouTube channel you can also watch more Viking documentaries get all of our podcasts ad free and more by subscribing to our app head to history hit.com SLS subscribe or look us up on the App Store

Channel: History Hit

Views: 58,553

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, vikings, viking age

Id: el_o1hTAWFA

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024