19 May /16

Viking

Viking – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Viking – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Historical accounts tend to view their excursions as raiding parties by uncivilised, bloodthirsty savages, but the pop cultural understanding of them often involves images of blonde Norse giants donning horned helmets and sporting beards and braided hair. So it seems as if our understanding of what Vikings really were is as confused as the aftermath of a settlement they have just raided.

Though the truth is somewhere in between, a recent surge of interest in vikings, thanks, in part, to a resurgence in pop cultural interest as well as the discovery of an additional archaeological site in Newfoundland, Canada, may help us get closer to understanding what they were actually like.

Unfortunately, the confusion surrounding the Vikings even extends to the word itself. Though the Viking Age occurred from the late 700s until the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the actual word viking was first used in George Chalmers’ work, Caledonia, in only 1807.

Interestingly, the word is a 19th century creation using the Old Norse word vik and the -ing suffix to mean ‘one who comes from inlets on the sea (fjords).’

For those who were “vikings” during the Viking Age, the Old Norse term víkingr simply implied participating a long-distance sea voyage utilising rowers, whereas their victims (notably the Anglo-Saxons) referred to their either based on their location or origin- þa Deniscan (the Danes)- or based on the large, temporary camp they would construct while conducting a raid- wicing, from the root wic, meaning ‘village or camp.’

For the longest time many have thought of Vikings as the barbarians who, as E. A. Freeman referred to them in The History of the Norman Conquest (1868), “harried far and wide,” though modern archaeology is reconstructing a society that was far from savage.

In addition to having a rather complex social stratification, the Vikings were also extensive travellers and traders. Having contacts from modern-day Eastern Canada to Russia to Arabia and further East, the Vikings traded goods as varied as spices, silk, amber, and slaves in a trading network that was as expansive as any of the great civilisations, yet without the use of coinage and with a non-standard alphabet based on sounds called the runor.

As for their travels, sites such as L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada as well as the newly discovered site that is currently the buzz of the archaeological community demonstrate that, nearly 500 years before Columbus and the “Age of Exploration,” the “heathen” Vikings had crossed the Atlantic, though the word to describe them, entered the English vocabulary in only the 19th century.