Vikings - did they actually exist?

the Vikings did they really exist I put it to you that the Vikings didn't exist and now I'm going to call fi this somewhat because I guess I have confused quite a few people but that's sort of the point of this video in that an awful lot of people are very confused about the term the Vikings so confused in fact that I'm coming around to the opinion that we should just stop using the term entirely because people don't understand what is meant and they end up drawing some bizarre conclusions because of the confusion some people are confused in that they think that all Vikings were warriors because they were a some sort of warrior race because they were Vikings right and a Viking is a Raider right and one of those guys who leapt off a long ship with with a big axe and so forth and so anyone who is a Viking must be a Raider and a warrior and this leads people to really amazingly stupid conclusions such as that reached by number of people recently there's bit of a hoo-ha R on the internet I don't if you saw it about a few graves that were found in England and some of them were Viking men and some of them were Viking women and some people went ah do you know what this means half of Viking warriors were in fact women just look at the archaeological evidence no half of Viking warriors were not women they were just the graves of some women buried alongside some men and yes you could say that these were Viking men in that they were sort of Nordic types with Nordic brooches and other grave Goods but if you've been buried in an orderly fashion in graves alongside each other in England then presumably what you are in fact Scandinavian settlers I mean if you were Raiders and you were unsuccessful you were killed in a raid and your fellows were beaten back do you think the locals would give you a nice burial with all your grave goods all in orderly fashion in any graveyard no that almost certainly didn't happen the fact that you're buried in a graveyard suggests that you are quite definitely living the settled life this is where you live and perhaps those women were in fact local women who had taken on Scandinavian customs and wearing the brooches and so forth but just as likely perhaps more likely is that they were women from Scandinavia could come over and their husbands who had settled in England which is really quite a straightforward thing to do if you find a load of people buried that doesn't mean that they're warriors just because they're Vikings but wait a minute they must be because Vikings are warriors right and this the problem is another word confusion in the in the other direction is that people think of the Vikings as all of the people living in in the Viking world that is Norway and Sweden and Denmark and perhaps Iceland well they're all sort of one people in that they all spoke a version of Norse quite a few different versions so a lot of them would have had quite a bit of trouble talking to each other but yes they were all sort of a people but there weren't all Vikings there weren't all Raiders the vast majority of them were farmers and traders and you know ordinary people doing ordinary stuff in fact even the people who went raiding could've gone raiding all that often I imagine that there's a 5% risk of getting killed on a raid well you wouldn't have to go on many raids with you before you're probably dead you couldn't make a life out of raiding um so a small number of these Scandinavians went on some raids and yet we now think of them as Vikings and we use this word Vikings to refer to this entire culture and people start saying oh well Viking women used to do X Y Zed but Viking women but what the heck is a Viking woman women didn't go on raids and and value even here Viking babies Viking babies were taught to do such a touchy by the age of the whatnot and we're fed on this is Viking there were no Viking babies okay there are no though one year olds with a shield and a helmet running around loop off wrong ships and attacking Lindisfarne no there were no Viking babies or Viking women or Viking old folk you know it's a bit like imagine today there are lot of people in this society that we live in who are accountants so is this accountancy culture if you're from that society you must be an accountant right and and if you get married to a woman then you desert there's a woman accountant and then you have a baby accountant then you don't we have live in accountancy Society similarly in in Sweden they didn't live in Viking society they just lived in that society which was full of you know normal people doing normal stuff almost all of the time so perhaps we should stop using the term Viking it's very confusing if you go to the your Vic Center as I did literally a few years ago they may have changed it slightly the your Vic Viking Center in York is a major tourist attraction and as you're outside queuing field and your tickets it says the Vikings they came they raided don't you ponder that you burned and it has pictures of guys with axes and leaping off long ships and burning long houses and so forth and then you get in through our Vikings that are brilliant and you pay your ticket and you go in and you see the Vikings they traded in amber they kept chickens they went to the lavatory they did all the normal stuff that normal people do so perhaps we should just stop calling these people Vikings because Vikings isn't really a term for a people bit like accountants isn't the term for the society we live in Vikings is not a word for the north's world perhaps we should just call them Norse or Nordic or Scandinavians of the late Dark Ages or something else but not by Grim's because it really is misleading Lindy man

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 356,440

Rating: 4.7930355 out of 5

Keywords: vikings, viking, medieval, history, people, middle ages, culture, scandinavia, norse, nordic, anglo-saxon, warrior, raider, longship, Jorvik, danes, normans, norsemen, swedes, norwegians, icelanders, icelandics, Warriors, axe

Id: RHHLFFy6CWs

Length: 6min 7sec (367 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2015