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The article is drenched in ideology. It's explicit: > The final development, the ‘ethnicisation’ of the word that allows the use of terms such as ‘Viking farms
by Mizza 4y ago
The article is drenched in ideology. It's explicit:
> The final development, the ‘ethnicisation’ of the word that allows the use of terms such as ‘Viking farms’, ‘Viking towns’ and ‘Viking women and children’, is much more recent and has gradually crept up since the Second World War. This is insidious; by linking military prowess and savagery to an entire ethnic group, it encourages its appropriation by racial supremacists.
The author is attempting to use linguistic pedantry to delegitimize an ethnicity he doesn't like for contemporary ideological reasons.
- em-bee 4y agolinking military prowess and savagery to an entire ethnic group aren't we doing the same to every warfaring group? goths, gauls, romans, mongols... is there any warfaring group that didn't have families and and even at least animal farming?
- jcranmer 4y ago> is there any warfaring group that didn't have families and and even at least animal farming? Some of the Plains Indians gave up sedentary agriculture after the introduction of the horse, and became fully nomadic. I don't believe they even kept herds of domesticated animals, so the "at least animal farming" part would fail. There are some uncontacted tribes on the Andaman Islands which are remarkably hostile to outsiders that are believed to be hunter-gatherers. Would that count for you?
- pyrale 4y agoWell, the romans were probably one of the most militarily successful societies over a long period, but when talking about them, we still remember that warfare was only a small aspect of their society and not their way of life. You'll find plenty of books that focus exclusively on their politics, art, civil engineering, etc.
- em-bee 4y agowell yes, exactly. and yet here someone is complaining that we are trying to do the same for the vikings, when we really should look at those aspects everywhere.
- henrikschroder 4y agoRight, and there's the added bonus of the author not being Scandinavian himself. History classes in schools in every country probably follow the same general pattern, and if you live in a western country I would expect everyone starts with the ancients, Egypt, Greece, Rome... But if you grew up in Scandinavia, after the fall of Rome you would generally jump straight into the Viking age, because it's at this point that history stops being about them, the others, and starts being about us. The Viking age is when we became a people, it's when our history starts, it's the moment when we burst onto the world stage and got noticed by others. It's at this point in time that we ceased being generic north-Germanic settlers and became our own culture. This watershed moment legitimises our modern nation states, because this is when it all began. "Maybe you shouldn't romanticise this time period as much as you do!" ᚠᚢᚲᚲ ᛟᚠᚠ, ᛞᛁᛈᛊᚺᛁᛏ.
- vintermann 4y agoIt is you who are drenched in ideology. This author is trying to keep history focused on history rather than patriotic myth-building.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pyrale 4y ago> The author is attempting to use linguistic pedantry to delegitimize an ethnicity he doesn't like for contemporary ideological reasons. The point of the author is that casting all norsemen as vikings is factually wrong, and that further wrong is done by the use of this historic falsehood as a basis for political movements. At the same point in time, a large part of Europe was under the control of the frankish empire. Despite that, we don't describe people from this area as bloodthirsty warriors out for tributes and land conquest. We are able to realize that only a small part of the feudal society took part in these raids, and we have lots of historic material on other aspects of this society. This is what is missing in the history we tell of the nordic society.