History Summarized: Vikings

there is one more pogrom don't understand anybody aha God what are you doing here uh hey you caught me getting hyped for my video on the Vikings so that's just you and I pretend this didn't happen okay cool Thanks so um yeah Vikings hey history time let's go before we get into any actual details of any sort we should all be on the same page about what exactly a Viking is and that seems like it should be obvious but there's actually a lot of confusion about this Vikings in the strictest sense were people of Scandinavian background between the 8th and 11th centuries who made a habit of sailing out to various places around England the North Atlantic and northern Europe and raiding them the word Viking itself pretty much just means Reiter but let's not confuse the point here most Scandinavians probably were in Vikings because it is difficult for a whole society to make an entire lifestyle out of just reading that's straight-up unsustainable most people were probably farmers or craft people or traders or all sorts of other important jobs that people around that time would have had Scandinavia and the Vikings is like Europe and night there were plenty of nights in Europe but to say that a majority of the population regularly engaged in nightly shenanigans would be absurd but in our common culture Viking has become a blanket term to describe medieval Scandinavia in a way that implies all the wrong assumption if I described something as Viking civilization you would be inclined to think that every weekend the entire population of medieval Sweden dropped what they were doing and hopped onto a ship to go wreak some tiny English town but that's just not true Vikings were always a subset of the broader Scandinavian people and their culture so how then might this misconception have come about why have we been conditioned to believe that all of Scandinavia made a habit of pillaging and booze urging partly it's because of our sources we have decent archaeological records which is good but almost all of our written sources came a few centuries after the Vikings died down so that's already a red flag beyond that those records were written by people who had an to grind with the Vikings ie the English and Northern European Christians who would have been on the receiving end of a hefty handful of rape if someone showed up unannounced yoinked everything you owned and killed a non-negligible amount of people along the way you would be very justified in writing a one-star review of your guests we have an especially brutal picture of the Vikings because our sources were first and foremost really angry at them and a lot of the records we have they play up the most brutal aspects of the vitamin Scandinavian culture because if you're a Christian who's complaining about pagans saying they killed my townspeople stole our holy relics and went back to their lands to worship demons and sacrifice babies sounds a lot worse than yeah I mean they're mostly peaceful farmers over there but occasionally a few of them get in the boat and come take our stuff for the Christians who wrote about the Vikings all they ever saw was the explicit Viking part not the more common Scandinavia part so it makes sense for multiple reasons that our sources betray them as especially brutal but if that's all we consider we'll have a very one-sided picture it's the same reason that Norse mythology seems especially brutal our main records of it come from Christians too and if you're contrasting pagan heresy with the benevolent awesomeness that is Jesus you're going to want to make the pagan stuff seem as absolutely mental and ridiculous as possible similarly all of the stories of a famous Vikings like Eric the red or leif ericson or whoever else are all probably a little dubious because those sagas were also mostly written down centuries after the fact so I think a good analogy is to treat those legends like we treat the Iliad were they based in fact yeah probably should we treat them as accurate historical sources no while the Viking Age fizzles out in the later 11th century doesn't have an exact end date the general consensus is that the era kicked off with the rate of the Christian Monastery of Saint Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne off the coast of England in 793 and this pretty much set the tone for the next three centuries of Vikings doing Viking things while Scandinavians did Scandinavian things though this is an example of pagans raiding Christians religion had almost nothing to do with it the much more relevant factor at play here with the abundance of valuable holy relics and stuff just lying around relatively defenseless for the Vikings this was great and it's no surprise that some of them thought wow okay that was both really easy and incredibly lucrative let's find many more places like that and all the other Vikings not on their heads and said yeah yep yep if Lent so they spent the next couple centuries doing a whole lot more of exactly that but Lindisfarne is in England and the Vikings came from Scandinavia and to get from one to the other you need ships now let me tell you just how awesome viking ships were in a time when the rest of the world wasn't putting much effort into shipbuilding at all partially on account to the mediterranean being cut in half by the muslim conquests and no one really having much motivation to sail anywhere the vikings were going all out on shift design their ships were lovingly crafted and brilliantly designed the general shape was long and narrow which allowed them to handle the open sea and they were equipped with a mediterranean-style square sail and rose honestly to my eyes it's basically a diet trireme one especially interesting innovation to the whole was the so called clinker built where the planks were slightly overlapped instead of being flush which added to the ship's strength even still they were also super maneuverable on account of their narrow build and ability to easily roll backwards the combination of oars and a sail meant that they were amazingly versatile but perhaps the biggest advantage was the ship's very shallow draft about 1 metre deep that allowed it to Beach anywhere and sail down pretty much any River it came across it was because of the shallow design of the longboat that the Vikings were able to sail right up the center in 8:45 and 886 and just show up in the middle of Paris for some good old-fashioned rating can you seriously imagine that an entire army of people appearing in the middle of your city without any warning that is terrifying no thank you but sailing along boats or whatever other kind of like you ship wasn't just a weekend gig it took serious coordination and teamwork the Vikings get a lot of credit for being brutal and effective for the reasons I discussed earlier but they don't get anywhere near enough credit for being smart the Scandinavians realized after a while that raids were less effective in the long term than trade so as the centuries went on they shifted more and more towards building trade networks in creating constant streams of Revenue instead of ganking some monastery once and calling it a day these trade networks stretched all across Northern Europe into the Mediterranean and even into the Middle East and then even after setting up those trade routes the Scandinavians put a lot of effort into settling cities and running government famously building up Dublin from nothing into a prosperous self-sustaining city so these guys were no slouches when it came to diplomacy sure some of it might have been with the understanding of trade with us or will raid you but it's better than nothing right so while the Vikings did do a lot of Viking sea in the Naviance society as a whole was expanding through lucrative trade and successful colonization though in addition to all of this perhaps their most famous seafaring accomplishment was sticking it to Columbus by sailing to America a full five hundred years before that Italian schmuck came around and while I'm talking about people big air quotes discovering America I'm just going to go ahead and clear some stuff up in Columbus time and before no one thought the world was flat people who gave it more than 20 seconds of thought knew that the world was round since ancient Greek times the issue for Columbus was that most calculations for the size of the globe placed it at impossibly large making a direct trip across the ocean most likely to end in death but even still distance itself wasn't a problem we have evidence of all sorts of ancient people sailing ridiculous distances the trip was really dangerous because he wasn't sailing near any coastlines for most of history people have sailed by more or less hugging a coast as they went always making sure to keep land in relativized sites so they wouldn't get lost at sea sailing across the Atlantic meant sailing across completely open ocean which invited all sorts of opportunities for dying either getting lost sailing in circles running out of supplies or suffering from sickness with no land in sight or just butting up against a casual Kraken all options so Columbus passed the challenge went to America committed all sorts of genocide yada yada whatever back to the Vikings the Vikings actually had it fairly easy because they had a convenient network of islands that they could easily hop between on their way to America the Vikings would start in Scandinavia hop over to the Shetland Islands and onto the Faroe Isles then make the jump to Iceland then to Greenland and then to America in fairly short order and we already know that the Scandinavians settled Iceland in Greenland so America was a stone's throw away now unlike Columbus who sell just under 7,000 kilometers with no shoreline in sight the longest stretch the Viking sailors would have to go without seeing the shore was just over 100 kilometers and if we account for sea mirages and semi-regular volcanic eruptions it's entirely possible that the Vikings have their destination in sight throughout the entire journey which makes it so easy kind of feels like cheating so I guess credit to Columbus for making the journey but credit to the Vikings for doing the trial version five hundred years earlier what that tangent about America the way let's get back to France where 25 years after the second rate of Paris the French King said alright screw it have Normandy and proceeded to give the Normandy and here's where it's important to remember the distinction we made between Vikings and Scandinavians it was because of the Viking raids that the Scandinavians got Normandy but the Normans were not Vikings because the Normans didn't trade like the Vikings did well the Normans did do was convert to Christianity and start speaking French and then in 1066 they decisively won the battle hastings which resulted in the norman conquest of England and a slew of resulting political reforms that paved the way for the next millennium of English history nice then in the middle late 12th century the Normans conquered southern Italy and Sicily and the resulting kingdom of Sicily lasted for over 700 years double nice also I forgot to mention earlier because I was probably too busy gushing about long boats but back in 880 to the og Scandinavians no Normans yet set up a colony thing in this place over here and pelted the Kiev and ruse triple nice though there's all this dope niceness going on between the colonizing the exploring the trading the farming in the course the rating all good things must come to an end readings slowed down drastically in the 11th and early 12th centuries as Christianity spread across Scandinavia also once easy pickings for raids became increasingly fortified in standing armies became more and more common the drive to go out and raid wasn't as strong as it used to be according to some people the last nail in the coffin was the Battle of Stamford Bridge a failed Viking attempt in 1066 to conquer England that date might sound familiar because the Norman Conquest happened just three weeks after that so is the Battle of Stamford Bridge the last has solved the Viking Age or does the fact that the Normans were mostly Scandinavian mean that the glory of the Old Norse lives on I honestly can't say what does in doesn't count Scandinavian influence most definitely lived on in centuries after between the Normans being Normans in the various Scandinavian kingdoms doing usual Kingdom stuff but as far as Vikings being Vikings goes safe to say that the line to get into Valhalla was a little sparse I do have to say it's interesting how the Viking Age was suitably bookended by Christianity it opened on a whole lot of monasteries getting raided and it ended with Scandinavia becoming Christian I swear between the Romans and the Vikings Christianity is really good at having the last laugh you've got to give that to them some people say if you can't beat them join them but Christianity took a different approach if you can't beat them just make them you finally I'll admit that I really didn't talk that much about Viking arms and armor and all that and by much I mean at all I'll say that there are some pretty interesting points of comparison between Viking weapons and Roman weapons but you'll want to hear that from someone who actually knows what they're talking about for all of that Viking goodness as well as some really awesome videos about medieval swords armor weapons castles and way way way more I highly encourage you to check out a channel called shadow versity because that guy shad is the master of all things medieval I've been binging his videos for days now and if you're a fan of what we do on this channel I highly suspect you'll like what he does too especially if you like history for me as a history enthusiast I really respect the way he treats his sources and how he argues his points and as a guy who thinks that swords are just plain awesome it's really really cool and it's a giant nerd out for me every time I watch one of his videos I honestly cannot say enough good things about this channel so please give him a look links in the description check it out have fun now if you will excuse me I have a dragon to fight

Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions

Views: 507,000

Rating: 4.9504952 out of 5

Keywords: William Shakespeare (Author), Shakespeare Summarized, Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Legends, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, Vikings, Scandinavia, Lindisfarne, Normans, Hastings, Norman Conquest, Kievan Rus, Columbus, History, Norse, Shadiversity, Longboat, America, Viking, Christianity

Id: jjCcSQV1Epc

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2017