The Vikings

you in anglo-saxon England in the region of Northumbria just off the coast there is an island that later generations would call the holy island it is the island of Lindisfarne Lindisfarne was the site where a monastery was erected and where the English Saint Cuthbert was later interred and the Lindisfarne monastery was really one of the great centers of learning in anglo-saxon England if not throughout the European world and that learning culminated in or around the Year 700 with the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels and this collection of the Gospels really is both symbolic for its artistic design for its great care and precision for creating art along with the text of Scripture but it's also the culmination of the learning of the anglo-saxon Christian world and the Lindisfarne Gospels have a number of features to them that are very interesting it's one of the best examples we have of what we call insular script or Hibernian script which for those who study ancient handwriting and manuscripts it's the unique style of handwriting to this region it's it's the style of writing and art we also see in the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels of course have all these intricate knot formations and these wonderful front pages to each of the Gospels that symbolise the author of each of the four Gospels the four evangelists in just a number of years after the completion of this manuscript tragedy hit the Lindisfarne monastery as the monks were at work in the scriptorium as they looked out over the sea suddenly they saw ships on the horizon and not being naturally scared of ships being quite accustomed to seeing trade ships and other things coming over the sea they were unprepared for what was about to happen when the ships landed it was a raiding party and not there on business or seeking anything from the monastery specifically these were Vikings they had come over from Scandinavia and they were there to raid and steal from the monastery all of its prized possessions several of the monks were killed and others were badly hurt or beaten or harassed and then they had to flee and this assault on the Linda's Ford monastery though there had been Viking raids before for historians marks the beginning of the expansion of the Vikings now the story of the Vikings is somewhat familiar to us at least in terms of the popular understanding of the Vikings many of us can conjure up the image of a certain barbaric warrior sometimes with horns on his head though that's a legend that unfortunately was not true of the Vikings themselves coming over on ships getting off and raiding various areas of Europe we also are probably familiar with the fact that the Vikings were the first to sail over to Iceland and then all the way over to Greenland and into the new world they were the first Westerners to make it that far but the story the Vikings is an important story for the development of the Christian world in the West in this lecture we're going to take a look at the Vikings who they were what was their context and what was its role in shaping both the European world as a whole and in shaping the church and we need to begin by just examining who the Scandinavian peoples were the Scandinavians of course were people that came from the three countries known as Denmark Norway and Sweden in that region of course is not exactly tropical it is a very cold climate in fact in the early Middle Ages Scandinavia was a bit of a bleak wilderness it was covered with vast forests in fact there was very little arable land throughout the Scandinavian regions and the Scandinavian people's in fact relied very very little on farming for their sustenance and for their diet often they took to the Seas they were fishermen or they engaged in animal husbandry which means that they raised livestock their diet consisted mostly of meat or milk or cheese or butter and fish as well thrown in and in many ways because of their diet they were seen historically and even down til today and in popular understandings of the Vikings as these kind of barrel-chested strong hulking characters who in many ways on a battlefield would dominate their other opponents that history goes all the way back to the Roman world when the Romans first encountered the Scandinavians they described them as this sort of reddish hair light eyed monstrous sort of imposing figure when they came across him and of course a lot of this for the Romans is snobbery they consider the Vikings as well as many of the Germanic peoples of the North to be barbarians but the Scandinavian world I want to say is not as remote and isolated and detached from Europe as we might be accustomed to assuming the Scandinavian world was different because of the harsh long winters and because of the ways in which their life just sort of evolved they were not a city folk they did not plant large cities that attracted more citizens to it etc in many cases the skin and even peoples were clannish people they often built great need halls usually spilt around the sacred tree or sacred oak and life would sort of be lived in small clans and those clans did not necessarily hold loyalties to the neighboring clan or to any sort of sense of national identity but for all of its uniqueness the Scandinavian world was not remote and isolated and all that different from its Celtic and its anglo-saxon neighbors of course in the English Isles at this time the rulers were the anglo-saxons in the Anglo Saxons of course have four kingdoms the kingdom of Northumbria of Murcia of Wessex and of Sussex over in the continent you have the Frankish empires who had come to dominate large amounts of terrain in the European world but that Frankish Empire sat on top of a pre-existing Celtic or gothic way of life and the Celtic world at this time is goal that is modern-day France certain parts of Germany and the Netherlands in all three of these regions Scandinavia anglo-saxon England and large amounts of the Celtic world during the Roman period all share a common Germanic background there is lots of trade between these cultures there is not overt hostility that goes back centuries to some grievance in history's past and so when we get to the Viking Age of expansion and raids and warfare in many ways it sort of comes out of the blue when the Scandinavians come a Viking as we say they don't come to sort of settle old debts rather what happens is almost collectively they just embarked on an expansionist ik policy that will take them all around the known world but again to stress this the backstory of Scandinavians and anglo-saxons and the Celtic or gothic world was quite intermeshed and what happens though is with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century you have a marginalization or regionalization effect that occurs throughout much of Europe we've already looked at the reigns of Charlemagne and the rise of the Carolingian Empire and how it attempted to sort of snatch up many of these regions on the continent but there was a wider concern that occurs with the fall of Rome and that is that in many ways there is no Imperial Army to keep certain cultures and certain people's at bay if they decide to use their military advantage or their strength to attack some others and lastly what happens is as you have anglo-saxons begin to convert to Christianity and as you have the Frankish empires at least formally adopting Christianity what you see happening in those two regions is you see complex mixture of the old pagan ways of life and the new Christian ways that they are trying to sanctify culture we might say the greatest example of this is the epic Beowulf and the epic Beowulf of course our knowledge of it has been expanded by the excavation of Sutton Hoo than if you have seen any of the modern publications of Beowulf there's probably one of two images on it it's either Beowulf sword or it's the Sutton Hoo helmet that both come from the time of the writing of Beowulf and of course the story of Beowulf is relatively familiar to people it's the story of the hero Beowulf who goes to the Kingdom of Denmark to help the King bear defeat this monster that is terrorizing his clan that is sneaking into the mead hall at night and stealing people away to eat them and the monster of course is Grendel but what's often forgotten about Beowulf is that it's actually not written by a pagan Beowulf was written around the same time of 700 AD it sort of compiled really and Beowulf was written and finished about 700 AD about the same time as the Lindisfarne but beileve is written by a Christian in anglo-saxon Christian who who has essentially two tones of voice when he's telling the story on the one hand he's somewhat ashamed of the paganism but then on the other hand he has this sense of cultural identity to the stories of great heroes from his tradition it would be a bit I suppose like the way in which many Americans look at some of the founding fathers who were not Christians people like Benjamin Franklin a deist and these kinds of things where you can sort of be very proud of the national heritage of some of these great leaders even if you personally have issue with the way in which they characterized or express their non-christian beliefs in certain things and so the Celtic and the anglo-saxon world is going through a significant amount of change as it becomes Christianized what's important for the story the Vikings though is the Scandinavians themselves were not part of that Christianisation yet in fact the Vikings were still committed to the Old Norse gods of paganism and so it's worth just a brief description of what the Norse gods were and what the Viking religion was when you look at the Norse gods in the Viking worship and sacrifices to their gods what you see is parallels with the way the Romans engage with their deities now of course there are stories of Romans who zealously believed in their faith but there are also stories of pagans who sort of went through the rituals just for the sake of continuing the rituals or just to simply keep their powder dry to make sure that the gods weren't angry just in case they were actually paying attention and with the Vikings you get much of that as well there is nothing in the Viking religion that actually should even make us call it a religion there are no priests in the Norse mythology there is no caste system of those who are designed to sort of Stoke up the religious faith amongst the Scandinavian peoples in fact the worship in the sacrifice to these gods was really more a responsibility of all of the scattered even peoples individually particularly when you match up the Norse gods with the military ethos now what we know of the Viking or the Norse gods comes down to us from two main texts the are a number of others but the two main texts that are still read today and study today are the poetic Edda written in the 800 to 900 compiled really in the eight hundreds or 900 and the prose ADA which was compiled in the 13th century in these stories what we find is a bit of a different mythology amongst the Norse or the northern Scandinavian gods than you find in other parts of the pagan world there are two factors of Norse religion that you don't really see in much of Roman or Greek paganism or in other parts of the world first and foremost in the Scandinavian mythology they have a relatively clear creation myth they have a story of how things came about they also have a more coherent cosmology than you really get in greco-roman mythology now of course the Romans and the Greeks particularly the Romans all do talk about the location of the gods they talk about Mount Olympus they talk about the ways in which the gods ruled over certain aspects of nature but that's not really a cosmology that's more of a sense in which the gods are lords over things that the Romans are concerned about like harvest or marriage or fertility in these kinds of things in the Norse mythology you have a relatively coherent cosmology in the sense that they actually have locations for just about every being or entity that they come in contact with the other piece of the Norse mythology that is unique is they have an eschatology the Norse have a concept of how the world will come to an end so first and foremost the creation story the story goes amongst the Scandinavians that in a time long past there was one giant god named Amir Amir lives in a deep ice cave seemingly locked up in this cave you might say they don't explain how he gets there or how the beings arose in the first place but it begins with Amir living in this ice cave and he is sustained by some sort of primordial cow who feeds him milk of course this is the scandinavian world when it was cold you stayed inside and your animals fed you and the cow over time begins to lick the ice I assume for the sake of water and as the cow licks the ice he uncovers the God burry and burry is therefore released from his p'tee within the ice and burry becomes the father of Odin and Odin's two brothers and Odin and his brothers slay the God a mirror and they use his body to create the world in the world is actually quite interesting from a least a literary standpoint the world is conceived of as a giant tree igloo sill and ignatow sill is the sort of skeletal structure that holds the worlds together and in the Scandinavian cosmology there are nine worlds nine unique worlds that are all attached to this sacred tree and placed around this tree and beneath it on various levels or all of the places where gods and man and other beings dwell the first that you come to when you move beneath the tree sort of at the root level is you come to asgard asgard of course is the place of Odin and his clan of Thor of SIF and of all of the gods that are the primary gods for the Scandinavian peoples now there was a place called vanaheim which is where the old giant gods dwelt but that is not discussed as much as guard as the central hub for divine activity at this same level there is Alf Heim which is the region where the light elves live that is to say the good elves or you're a fan of Tolkien this is going to start sounding very very familiar of course Tolkien was an expert in all of this mythology and in Beowulf in particular so the fact that there are some parallels between this and Lord of the Rings is going to come to no surprise but Alf I'm is where the light elves live and around this as well is the area of Valhalla and Valhalla is something like heaven only it is not a heaven for everyone Valhalla is Odin's realm where those who participate in glorious battle and die on the battlefield half of them get to go to Valhalla in half are taken by Odin's wife Freya to her realm if you go to Valhalla of course things are good for you if I often describe Valhalla as sort of the ultimate guys night out but is essentially a giant mead hall where the spirits of these Warriors go to live and while there they are fed by a magical Pig who every night feeds them from itself and there's a also a magical goat who feeds them with the most delicious meat they've ever had it's sort of a you know heavenly barbecue I suppose so half go to Valhalla where they are to await the final battle Ragnarok which we'll talk about miss the second the other half are chosen by Freya to go and dwell in her realm and the beings that are responsible for going over the battle field and for snatching up Freya's chosen half to go to her realm or the Valkyries those of you who are fans of opera course are aware of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle trilogy and of course the famous piece of music that many of us know even if we don't know about opera is the ride of the Valkyries you well the ride of the valkyries in vogner's play is just this sort of thing it's after a great battle and the Valkyries are coming to the battlefield and hence the music of their ride as they come to select up which Warriors get to go be with Freya so this first realm Asgard alpha M Valhalla and others is really sort of the the highest order of the nine worlds one level down though from Asgard in Valhalla you have the realm of humans you have is the area known as Midgard or middle-earth and Midgard is separated by some mountains from the Jotunheim which of the enemies whom Odin is always coming in to sort of keep it bay and this region has others as well it has spa altheim which is where the Dark Elves live which the Scandinavians believe the Dark Elves were the ones responsible for bad dreams that they would come and sit on your chest at night and whisper evil thoughts as you slept and near Midgard or middle-earth is also where the dwarves lived one level down from that of course and you have the region of hell and yes hell is the etymological origin of the the word we describe when we talk about eternal damnation from the Bible we talk about people going to hell only in the Scandinavian religion hell for them is eternal ice and torment by being frozen for the rest of eternity in the one last piece is there is a gigantic dragon or serpent sometimes called a snake but in Scandinavian literature often a serpent is more referring to a dragon or to a worm as they were called but there was this dragon or this serpent or snake that it encompasses the world it's it's it's an enormous size and in fact Thor at one point defeats this dragon it sinks to the bottom of the sea and it will come back though at the end of time to seek revenge during the great eschatological end of Ragnarok now on that point of Ragnarok in Asgard you have essentially a monarchy of the gods you have Odin who is ruling Asgard as the father of many of the gods he is often depicted as being flocked by Ravens Odin is a wanderer he is the pursuer of knowledge at all times in fact he's often depicted with just one eye because he has offered the opportunity to drink from the well of the sacred tree of Yggdrasil he willingly gives up one of his eyes in order to drink from this well to obtain certain insight of knowledge and Odin is the giver of knowledge to humanity most often displayed by the fact that he gives humanity runes and runes in Scandinavian culture or sort of magical alphabets that you would write on your swords or on stones out in the field that would imbue either your sword or other things with magical properties and of course Odin had a number of children his heir was Thor protector of mankind of course Thor and Scandinavian literature is not a spoiled brat with long flowing blonde hair and sexy abs Thor is more like Fred Flintstone I always say he's large he's barrel chested he drinks it up he lives it up he's a bit of the alpha male for the Scandinavians Thor of course is the god of thunder of lightning storms the both of which are very important if you spend a lot of time out at sea and it is believed that Thor's hammer Mull near is one of his primary weapons in the Scandinavian world often people would wear Thor's hammer as a pendant around their neck and there were all kinds of other gods as well there's if there's Balder one of Odin's son who's married to Nana which is of course interview who grew up calling your grandmother Nana that's where it comes from Nana is the the God of all things motherly now all of this cosmology and all of this mythology about the gods all comes down to an eschatology and in many cases for the Vikings the religious energy of their faith was driven by the fact that they were promised to participate in Ragnarok if they battled valiantly on the battlefield as Vikings again those who go to Freya's realm and those who go to Valhalla are almost always believed to be warriors you don't just go to Valhalla or the phrase realm forever rather you go there to await Ragnarok this is considered to be the ultimate thrill to take ported Ragnarok now what is Ragnarok essentially Ragnarok translated means something like the twilight of the Gods or even the death of the gods the the end of the gods and not a few commentators have pointed out the unique ways in which the Vikings believe their gods could die that they believe that even though they worshipped them as pillars of strength and as deities that could shaped their lives here on this earth in this life they nevertheless believed that at the end of time many of the gods that they worshipped would be overthrown by evil forces but that in the end even with the death of a few of their gods the end result would be something of harmony and the story of Ragnarok is complex there are different perspectives on this even amongst the Vikings but the simplest story that is told is that Loki the brother of Thor and the one of the sons of Odin though of course there's some dispute as to whether or not he is adopted or if he is actually one of olden sons but still Loki is the tempter God he is the trickster he often finds ways to pervert the good aims of Odin and Thor and others and in the end Loki turns on Asgard and unleashes Ragnarok first event that is said to occur before Ragnarok begins is the death of Balder the son of Odin and the brother of Thor and with the death of Balder Ragnarok is officially underway and a lot of events occur we can go into old great detail but it is not necessary here just a few highlights Odin gets into a battle with some of his mortal enemies a great dragon that Thor has defeated that used to encompass the world but has now sunk to the bottom of the sea is now returned and he spews poison all over the battlefield and he and Thor locked in battle and the snake does manage to kill and defeat Thor but not before Thor has wounded the dragon enough that he too dies and in the end many of the gods of Asgard are slain the few gods who survived the battle end up going on to make another paradise for themselves and one of the great places that they build is another Mead hole and that meet hole goes by the name of Gimli again another connection to Lord of the Rings emily is the place where the gods who survive go to live and in the end Ragnarok is not only the destruction of the gods it is also the destruction of the world but the world returns as the story tells at the end after Ragnarok there are two who returned a man and a woman and the couple who emerge from the sea have the responsibility to repopulate the earth and to begin things all over again and this has led to some confusion or to some debate amongst even scholars and there wasn't necessarily a clear answer in Viking mythology the question is is whether or not this represents some sort of cycle of time as if Ragnarok occurs again and again the human race is reborn and the question is is or the gods themselves reborn or do they return in some way and there really is no answer but needless to say at the end of time humanity is in many ways left to its own devices as the gods are defeated at the end humanity is reborn some have seen this as the emergence of humanity out from underneath the gods that the gods expelled their final energies to defend the human race and to put an end to the evil forces and that the rebirth of humanity itself and now flourish without the forces of tyranny and of nature and these kinds of things always an intervening and stopping them from their destiny in whatever the case what at whether it's a cyclical view of time or whether it's some sort of emergence from out from underneath the tyranny of the gods or some other answer that we don't know the end result is that Ragnarok is the thing that fires the imagination of the Vikings when they go on their campaigns when they go on their raids they are not simply going out to gain loot to gain material comfort of course these are the things that they're doing but they are always inspired and they're always sacrificing themselves to the idea that what they need to do is to position themselves either to go to the of Freya after dying in battle or to go to Valhalla to await the final battle of Ragnarok and so the Vikings are not simply material comfort seekers they're not simply going out for themselves there is this religious pagan ethos that drives them to want to die in battle or to participate in glorious battle so that they might be found worthy of Valhalla or phrase court and for that reason what they end up becoming is of serious marshal force a serious skirmishing group that has religious fervour within them that drives them to go further and farther than any have gone before a lot of the reason why they are successful is because of the advent of their own technology and shipbuilding over the centuries they had developed a number of shipbuilding practices that lent a lot of advantage to their side whenever they went skirmishing throughout Europe they had low draft boats that could hold many people it could be road by oars they developed keels sails were eventually put to great use to sail further and farther than they'd ever had before and the result is is that the Vikings inspired by this ideal of Ragnarok but go a Viking could go a raiding all throughout Europe and all if even all the way down into Russia and they eventually make their way all the way down to Constantinople of course they make their way all the way over to the new world they are able to do this because of the of their advances in shipbuilding on a famous case on Easter Sunday the Vikings made their way all the way into Europe and they sailed up the river all the way into Paris and they conquered Paris on Easter Sunday in other cases along the coastline they would skirmish they would raid a village they would raid a city they would take what they needed and then they would leave just as quickly as they could long before reinforcements had a chance to arrive and so the end result is that the Viking raids in the Viking expansion created this consternation throughout the leadership of Europe that had to deal with the threat of constant Viking raids one of the things that Charlemagne and his successors had always attempted to do is just like the Romans they wanted to unite Europe under one banner and under one authority however with the rating of the Vikings and with their expansion they had to own up to the fact that they had no standing army they had no natural resources that would allow them to keep an army as Rome had on the perimeters to beat back the barbarian tribes and so as a result early medieval kings and authorities had to figure out ways to inspire those in regions that were affected by Viking raids to defend themselves and the main idea that comes up is the idea of appointing vassals of dispersing the authority of the Empire and of Kings all throughout one's territories by appointing vassals who would have allegiance back to the main king but who would be tasked with defending a region and in return for defending that region would be granted lands and serfs and all kinds of benefits of being a defender of the kingdom as a whole in this model of course is what we know today as feudalism but futile ISM was in large part a response to the Vikings or to the the inability of the main central government to maintain its own Authority and its own borders around its wider vast territories and feudalism will have a remarkable impact on Europe it will change the culture of society it will change the way people interact with one another it will both inspire things like chivalry and knights and lesser Nobles to see themselves as both defenders of the authority of their Lords but at times as rivals to the authority of their Lords and potential usurpers it will also unfortunately take the Roman slave system and it will crystallize it as the model of serfdom that serfs or tied to the land that they are unable to travel that they are essentially slaves by a different name and so the Vikings exasperated the reality that there needed to be a new governing system and that system inevitably shaped Europe

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 274,436

Rating: 4.8382664 out of 5

Keywords: Vikings, Church History, Feudalism, Thor, Norse Mythology (Literary School Or Movement), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, Middle Ages (Event), Seminary (Literature Subject), Theology (Field Of Study), Christianity (Religion)

Id: 5aGZRZgsq_4

Length: 31min 21sec (1881 seconds)

Published: Sun May 25 2014