In the Footsteps of the Vikings
History and Travel Portal

1. Setting the scene

In the Nordic countries something starts happening around the 9th century that people even far away will soon experience. The Vikings enter the scene. Who are they? What are they seeking? What are their achievements?

The Vikings were skilful shipbuilders and navigators. Thanks to these skills the Vikings came to make themselves known over large areas of the ‘then known world’, in places such as Novgorod and Kiev in the east, Malta in the south and also America in the west, a part of the world that was not yet ‘discovered’ as we use to say in our euro-centric way.

It is from old books found in Iceland that we learn that the Vikings went to America. We are told that a Viking ship was driven during a storm to a strange coast, which is thought to have been what is now known as Labrador. When the captain of the ship returned home he told what he had seen. His story made a young Viking prince, called Leif the Lucky so excited that he decided to sail to the newly discovered coast. There he found wild grapes in such plenty that he called it Vinland, or the land of Vines. This might be part of what is now the Rhode Island.

Much of what the Vikings did can be seen as a forgotten or even an unknown history, as we will find out when we follow in their footsteps. Take their landing in America. When the Vikings came there they did not know that they had come to a continent that others in Europe did not know about. And elsewhere in Europe no-one knew that the Vikings had sailed to America. That is why we say that it was Columbus who discovered America, although he went there nearly 500 years later. (Famous Men of the Middle Ages, by John Henry Haaren, [1904], at sacred-texts.com ROLLO THE VIKING DIED 931 A.D.

In addition toi Sagas we know about about the Vikings from other sources such as chronicles written by monks. The learned argue about the historical accuracy of these sources. We need not bother about this. We will mainly learn what they told in their time. The sagas were written down some 200 years after the events they describe. Until then the stories were told and thereby transmitted as an oral tradition from one generation to another. In the time of the Vikings there were not many people who knew to read and write. This is one explanation why there are not many hard facts to go by, describing their lives and deeds. Through legal documents we do, though, get some hard facts.

We must also be aware that literature is flavoured by the one who is telling the story. Whose point of view is he or she presenting? To give you an idea of different ways of looking at the Vikings, here is first a description of the Germanic peoples given by an Arabic geographer from the times of the Vikings: "they have large bodies, gross natures, harsh manners, and dull intellects...those who live farthest north are particularly stupid, gross and brutish". (cited in Western Civilisations, p 276)

In the Nordic sagas, again, the Vikings are pictured as strong and brave. Wisdom was held in high regard, and being a good poet was a skill that a king cherished most in the men he surrounded himself with. “Of all his guard the king most prized his skalds; they occupied the second high seat.” (Egil’s saga, p. 6)

And here an example of how we today look at the Vikings / Normans. "From (their) Scandinavian inheritance the Normans derived their sea-faring, much of their trade and commercial prosperity which they shared with the Nordic world, their love of adventure, their wanderlust which led to the great period of Norman emigration in the eleventh century, their dynamic energy, and above all perhaps, their powers of assimilation, of adoption and [strategic] adaptation ... " [Tnn 23]” (Rollo the Walker and Relatives)

CONTINUES... (to the beginning)