Mops the Scandinavion World Viking

Mops The Scandinavion world ond Europe in the eorly Viking Age I Scandinavia in the Viking Age 63 The making of modern Europe was a slow and laborious business 2 Scandinavian settlement in Eneland 83 which the historian simplifies at peril. Modern conceptions of national growth and of national types are too easiiy applied to situations in the past where they are distorting, anachronistic and positively misleading. To be obsessed with the image of peaceful and peaceJoving Scandinavian farmers, taken from the history of Scandinavia over the last two centuries, can lead to falsification as great as that provoked by the nursery and early schoolboy image of ruthless Viking axemen, horn-helmeted and heathen, breakers of skulls and despoilers of churches. Reality was much more complex. Not all farmers love peace. A ravager in May can turn a skilful hand to corn-harvest in August. One of the main objects of this book is to point to the highly complex human situation of raid and settlement, of piracy and cultivation that we mask under the conveniently smooth description of the viking Age. This Viking Age with its rough chronological extent from 800 to I 100 had a tremendous effect on the making of modern Europe. The process of recovery from the economic dislocation and political disaster which attended the fall of the Roman Empire in the West was not far advanced when the fresh wave of barbarian invasion struck. The historian, and especially the social and economic historian with his knowledge of happenings still to come, can see that this recovery was more than recovery, that Europe was proliferating ln new growth, that the Carolingian world was different from and in many ways superior to the late Classical world it aped and thought to be reconstituting. But when Charles the Great was crowned emperor in the basilica of St Peter's at Rome by Pope Leo 2 The Vikings in Britain The Scandinavian world 3 III on Christmas Day, 800, to many contemporaries it must have period when roo easy to see the 400-800 as the time the German seemed a symbol of recovery, a sign that the barbarian was tamed, .,"oOles, including the Anglo-Saxons, were converted to a Roman- that Rome had survived and triumphed in the West at Rome as in iur.d .iuitired way of life with the Christian church, the heir of the East at Constantinople. Charles, king of the Franks and of the principal is next Rome, acting as the agent. Our Viking Age then the Lombards, greatest of the Germanic warchiefs, had re-established stase forward. By I I 00 the Christian religion was accepted in Green- the imperium christianurn of Constantine. The warriors of the iun-a, in Iceland, and throughout the Scandinavian world. Christian Christian king of the Franks, now hailed as emperor, protected dvnasties that looked to Rome were dominant among the Poles, the the Danube frontier. The Rhine was no longer a frontier. Frankish Czechs, and even the non-Slavonic Hungarians" The centralized and soldiers, Christian missionaries (especially Anglo-Saxons) papal and centralizing papacy of Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII 1073-85, emissaries brought faith and sometimes peace to the continenta_ influenced a wider territory than that embraced in the western part German lands as far as the Elbe and the Harz mountains in the of the territorial state of Rome. Who were these Northerners, the east, and to the borders of Denmark in the north. An amalgam of Scandinavians, so painfully brought into the orbit of Christendom? German and Roman had been triumphantly achieved in the name Whar standard of civilization had they reached at the time of the of Christ. North Africa, Egypt, greater and the part of Spain, and coronation of Charles the Great? Why were they about to constitute Jerusalem and Syria were, is it true, in Mohamnledan hands, but at that stage in European development a new and fearful threat to there werc signs that the centre power of in the Moslem world was the Western world? These are the questions which have provoked so moving east. was It from Baghdad and not from Damascus that much recent thought and writing on the Northern world. the caliph Haroun-al-Raschid conducted his correspondence and despatched his embassies to the Frankish charles. At constantinople, Irene, the empress of the second Rome, watched uneasily the Scandinavia towards the end of the progress of the Franks in the West. The Eastern Empire, as it now eighth century may be called, possessed political control of Asia Minor, and by constant labour retained its foothold in the south of ltaly, Sicily, We rely principally on archreological and linguistic evidence for and the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its strength, and our picture of Scandinavia in the pre-Viking period. The dominant increasingly its reason of being, lay in Constantinople, Miklegarth, elements in the population were Germanic, pagan and substantially the great city, as the Vikings were to come to term it, the pivot of illiterate, though the continuous and sustained use of runes indicates world trade between west and east. Now in the face of the two world moves in the direction of literacy and therefore of a more settled blocks that had emerged from the ruins of Rome, Byzantium and order. Folk movements in the fifth century, including a substantial the Moslem Empire, the West also had precariously achieved its emigration of Angles west into Frisia and England, had resulted in unity' a new unity it might be said, with a literal reorientation. The a degree of underpopulation. Yet the sixth and seventh centuries continental Germans, Saxons, Thuringians, Bavarians, Suabians. represent a quiet period politically with some evidence of prosperity. and Franconians had been brought within the pale of Romanic, Rich grave finds from the Vendel period in Sweden suggest trading christian civilization. A third world force had been created. contacts with the Frankish and Mediterranean world, and proof Frankish counts and Christian bishops, comites episcopique, were of wealth among the ruling princes. Danish archaeologists are brought to the fringe of territories inhabited by LostiG Sravs and also uncovering evidence that southern Scandinavia was enjoying powerful Northerners. Byzantium would penetrate culturally much relative prosperity in the immediate pre-Viking Age. A climatic though not all of the Slav territory. Western concerns now lay amelioration appears to have helped the Scandinavians to achieve increasingly poles, with the West Slavs, Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, stability and so to establish a powerful base in men and materials and the central point - in our story - with the Scandinavians. for their enterprises. Religiously there appears to have been a Such broad and sweeping generalizations have their moments of basic uniformity of belief. The Scandinavians followed common truth and also their dangers. From the ethnic point ofview it is onry Germanic custom in burial ceremonies and fertility rites. Their gods 4 The Vikings in Britqin The Scandinsvian world 5 were the familiar Germanic gods, Tiw, Odin (Woden), Thor and wayfarer, the one-eyed to be encountered at cross-roads, the wily Frey (Freyja). A special twist, however, was given both to belief .,rot..tor. Frey was the fertility god, hermaphroditic in most elabo- and to ceremonies because of the harsh economic and climatic con- iate form. protector of crops, of sex and the harvest. There is some ditions was more of much of the North. The hard necessity of reliance on self evidence that his cult fully developed in Sweden than any and companions in the bitter struggle against the climate and natural of the other Scandinavian communities. conditions led to a curious attitude of equality towards the gods. Other gods and supernatural beings also abounded and are among The Scandinavian did not creep to the altar. The gods themselves the best known figures of Scandinavian thought to the modern were subject to testing and open to rejection if a stronger deity than world. Balder, the beautiful and Loki, the evil genius of the gods, they appeared. There are accounts of formal sacrificial ceremonies. are known as well as, if not better than, the figures of Greek Ship-burial (the ultimate product of northern thought concerning mtthology. But they in final form are the product of the high ritual) represented one of the most elaborate methods known to imagination of a sophisticated literary civilization of the twelfth mankind for the disposal of the body of the dead. Everyday routine and thirteenth centuries. They represent the triumph of antiquarian and seasonal change were accompanied by religious ceremonial. reconstruction. As such, our Tales from Asgarth tell us much of the Each head of household possessed sacrificial rights, ancl the kings, fine achievements of Icelandic civilization; they only reflect dimly, when they appeared, enjoyed a sacral quality. A specialist priest_ and sometimes distort grossly, the gods of the Viking Age. hood did not develop. There is little trace of a class of men set apart The same must be said of the fundamental tenets of belief of from other men by their professional career of worship of the gods. the Scandinavian. In finished literary form, as seen through the In the hard world of the North, such a luxury could not be afforded: writings of Snorri Sturluson, the Scandinavians had a most elabo- men were needed at battle, plough, and bed. rate mlthology. Man's struggle in this world was an incident, an The Scandinavians were polytheistic. A multiplicity of gods episode, on his way to the next. Essentially it was a testing-time. governed the cycle of the years. Some strong elements of nature If the test were successfully taken, the warrior would, after death worship persisted and were further to persist until and beyond the in battle, weapon in hand, enter Valhalla where a place would be end of heathendom.

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