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The Vikings Were More Complicated Than You Might Think
- sandworm101 6y agoIn some ways more, but in other ways they were less complicated than most think. I'm reminded of an interview with one of the historians attached to the Vikings TV series: "...but historically they would all have been blonde, ALL of them, and that would look strange on TV today."
- watwut 6y agoIt is funny, because just last week there was an article about them not all being blonde. Popular sentiment on HN was "that is strawman actually no one says they were all blonde and it would be dumb to expect them all to be blonde". The argument was that given all the rape and slavery they engaged in, some gene mixing is to be expected.
- ng12 6y agoIt depends when in the historical record you look. The Vikings didn't just raid, they settled. Dublin, York, and Kyiv were all Viking cities. Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde, as their influence grew so did their genetic pool.
- wahern 6y agoNot all Scandinavian populations had blonde hair. I know a blonde person of unmistakable Scandinavian extraction who, it turns out, possesses a Y chromosome haplogroup from Northern China, presumably inherited via the Sami or a similar herding society that moved across Siberia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_people AFAIU, because of how the inheritance traits for hair and eye color work, a population could have a relatively persistent fraction of people exhibiting non-typical phenotypes for some time even with a temporary infusion of alleles, not to mention regular contact. In general, people got around more than one might think. The Inuit reached Greenland shortly after the Vikings from the opposite direction; both ended up displacing the existing inhabitants. The Age of the Vikings is pretty much modern times in terms of speed of migration and population mixing; not much different from today as compared to when many stereotypical phenotypes originally arose.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde, as their influence grew so did their genetic pool. By the early Scandinavian Viking era, Germanic-speaking peoples had been carrying out raids to the east and southeast for centuries, and bringing back slaves. Even the earliest Vikings were not as “pure” a population as you imagine.
- goto11 6y ago> Early Scandinavian Vikings were almost assuredly blonde No. Recent DNA analysis on Viking-age burials (as alluded to in the article) has laid this myth to rest.
- staticautomatic 6y agoThey certainly did return home with slaves, who they were entitled to rape. But on average, the vast majority of Viking rape would have occurred during raids (mostly in continental Europe and the British Isles). The Norse villages would have remained quite genetically insular.
- goto11 6y agoThis is disproven by the study in question. Scandinavia had significant infux of genes during the Viking age, influx corresponding to the areas where Vikings raided/traded/settled.
- sandworm101 6y agoThe early viking who raised were from home populations. The ones that settled afar (normandy etc) were different. The ones raiding scotland from the east, the ones on the show, were blonde.
- goto11 6y agoYou guys are obsesses about the vikings being blonde, but there is just no evidence for it. DNA evidence shows there were plenty of dark hair among viking age Scandinavians back from the iron age.
- rbecker 6y agoFunny what gets categorized as strange. On the Witcher show, medieval villages as diverse as San Francisco were portrayed as the norm: https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-zen_doc/1587012/pub_5e2830783639e600b7f854e1_5e283402e6e8ef00ad1a6d8a/scale_1200 https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-zen_doc/1587012/pub_5e283...
- lordleft 6y agoI still find it an arch historical irony that the descendants of Vikings have built some of the most robust welfare states in the West.
- staticautomatic 6y agoMost Norse in the 8th to 12th centuries were not Vikings. The word Viking comes from the word “wicing”, meaning “pirate”. It was obviously not an entire civilization of pirates.
- forinti 6y agoFunny you should say that, because some Vikings became Normans and occupied England which later became the British Empire.
- staticautomatic 6y agoSure. It's true that some Vikings settled, including in Normandy (in exchange for guarding the Seine against other Vikings, just like in the TV show). And yeah, they also settled pretty large swaths of England, beginning with York, and founded Dublin, among other cities. The whole of England very nearly became run by the Norse but for a single battle at the end of a very long war of attrition. The TV show was actually extremely historically accurate in terms of specific events (like jumping out of the coffin and murdering the priest). It was just also extremely inaccurate in terms of the characters, time periods, and geographic locations in which those events occurred.
- adolph 6y agoEven the term "Viking" seems shrouded by time and their cultural influence today seems outsized to their relatively short <300 year period of influence. The etymology of "viking" is uncertain. In the Middle Ages it came to mean Scandinavian pirate or raider, while other names such as "heathens", "Danes" or "Northmen" were also used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings#Etymology
- staticautomatic 6y agoThe etymology isn't mysterious. The primary sources clearly indicate that the first appearance was the Anglo-Saxon word "wicing", meaning "pirate." The Wikipedia references to the other names are from the Middle Ages, a time period that almost entirely post-dated the Viking era. It is unsurprising that the word Viking should originate from Anglo-Saxon, since the Anglo-Saxons are the source of the vast majority of written records about the vikings. The Norse did not keep written records of themselves unless you count runes, which wouldn't have contained such a word. Indeed, the earliest written records of the Viking "skalds" (poems), in the Codex Regius, were written some time in the 1200's. The Vikings really do deserve their "out sized" influence, though. They were an incredible lot, ranging geographically further than any human civilization until the Portuguese discovered Australia. They could be found at various times in present day Canada, Turkey, Russia, and parts of Africa.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> The etymology isn't mysterious. The primary sources clearly indicate that the first appearance was the Anglo-Saxon word "wicing", meaning "pirate." Sure, if you believe that the act of writing something down in one place retroactively causes it not to have happened in another place, this is an argument that makes sense. Though even then, you haven't actually made a case that the etymology isn't mysterious. Where did the Anglo-Saxons get their word from?
- staticautomatic 6y agoThey weren't writing it down "retroactively" but contemporaneously. The first priests on the British isles who escaped being slaughtered in their monasteries by Vikings straight away wrote down that the perpetrators were "pirates" and promptly sent notice out to the rest of what was then England. We aren't talking about where the Anglo-Saxon word for "pirate" came from. We're talking about where the word "Viking" came from. It clearly came from the Anglo-Saxon word, "Wicing."
- antipaul 6y agoIf only we wouldn’t forget to afford the same nuance to each other in the present...
- jkingsbery 6y agoThe more I read about the Middle Ages now that I'm an adult, the more I learn that the whole time period from 500-1500 is more complicated than I was taught in school. It makes sense that the Vikings would be more complicated too.
- Florin_Andrei 6y agoIsn't it less documented than the following time, and therefore containing more surprises as we keep literally digging into the past?
- jkingsbery 6y agoSo, for example: what I learned in school is "the time between 500-1500 (roughly) did not have a lot of written records" and that was the end of story. Since reading on my own, I've found: * Really, the time where there weren't any written records were mostly concentrated to 500-750 or so. Even though I had learned about Charlegmagne in school, I hadn't really learned much about all he did to encourage reading and writing (obviously, to the extent that it was possible given the cost of vellum at the time). The amount of written records were also not uniform geographically. As the original article says, Scandinavians wrote less than people in souther Europe. * There actually are decent-for-pre-modern records of England from the time around the Vikings. The story in school was mostly "Things were great under the Roman empire, then things fell off a cliff and stayed that way for 1000 years." In reality though, there are the Domesday Book or the writings of Venerable Bede (just to mention two examples) that record events of the time. Of course, there wasn't the printing press so it is technically true that things were less documented, I think this is just less so than commonly believed.
- jcranmer 6y agoThere are some factors to call out here: The first is that most historians are not dispassionate observers concerned with recording literal truths; they are concerned with narratives containing moral truths. And, especially historically, lying about the facts to arrive at the moral truths was not beneath them. The history of Sparta is a classic example: our Greek sources here all talk up how wonderful Sparta is with its notions of equality and avoidance of luxury, and contain postscripts saying "but of course, this is the Sparta of yesteryear and not the Sparta of today, which is exactly the kind of wastrel that I'm condemning." I do want to be clear that this kind of moralism-over-literal-truth does happen all the time today, and it's definitely visibly strong in the textbook version of history taught today. Consider how US history courses at the grade school level tend to present the US as a moralizing force of liberty and democracy and manage to completely omit traumatic events such as King Philip's War, the deadliest war ever fought on (then-future) US soil, perhaps partly because it is rather inconvenient for the narrative of pious Pilgrims peacefully coexisting with Native Americans. Specific to the Middle Ages, though, the humanism and Enlightenment movement that happens after that time did try quite hard to discredit any idea of progress in that time period and draw push their modernism as a rebirth of the glory of Rome, Greece, and the Classical Age. Like most historians, they had a particular narrative of the Middle Ages that mattered more than the truth, and they pushed it hard. And subsequent historians repeat that narrative verbatim without considering if perhaps their sources might not be telling the truth. Some of our notions about how the Middle Ages works actually applies much better to the Early Modern period instead--for example, it was during the Early Modern that bathing was restricted because "modern science" (the miasma theory of disease) knows that bathing is how you get sick. A final point is that there is a particular axe to grind with the question of religion. Many Protestants sought to deny anything that the Catholic pope did. The Middle Ages, being an era where the Catholic Church and the pope had far greater political power than he holds today, then becomes a prime target of criticism. Indeed, this criticism did reach the point that the Christianization of the Roman Empire was blamed for its fall (cf. Edward Gibbon). I often comment that to learn history, you should first forget everything you learned in school about it. It feels to me that it's more often wrong than right.
- stakkur 6y ago'The Vikings' weren't a people; it's a term. The people who went a-viking were from several countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Frisia, some others), and were (of course) somewhat varied in their genetic makeup. And, they often took wives from other lands, and had children with them. It's a familiar story throughout history--peoples intermingling, defying easy modern classification. The stereotype of 'blonde Vikings with horned helmets' wasn't perpetuated by historians or scientists, it was perpetuated largely by 19th century artists and others. Yet pop media seems to write false antagonisms like this: "They also found considerable genetic variety in the ancient remains, indicating migration of Southern Europeans, before the Viking Age, to the area of Denmark, which undermines any idea of a single Nordic genetic identity."
- rbecker 6y agoOf course. If even a single foreigner mixes with a population, that populations genetic, ethnic identity becomes entirely invalid, and using it as something to unite around becomes illegitimate. After all, if a thing has fuzzy edges, that's the same as the thing not existing at all. Fortunately every other ethnicity will be equally rigorous on what they use as a basis for common identity, so there's no risk this approach leaves you atomized against a unified competitor.