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Findings show that the Vikings' self-image was influenced by Ancient Rome
- HeckFeck 4y agoHoly Roman Empire? Tryhards. Byzantium? Bunch of posers. The truth is this: Rome never ended, she just went North. It would explain the Norsemen and their keenness to reconquer Gaul and Britain.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThat's not even going into the Norman conquest of Italy.
- selimthegrim 4y agoSicilian Vespers didn’t work out so well for them.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- doikor 4y agoIt went even further north. Finland is the true successor state of the Holy Roman Empire https://i.imgur.com/tolQ9ih.png https://i.imgur.com/tolQ9ih.png (As this is the internet I have to mention that this is indeed a joke and not even a very good one)
- Oarch 4y agoWait, THIS is the Internet?!
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y agoThe image has a small mistake. The king of spain did not buy the title. Andreas gifted the title of sucessor to the Crown of Spain, after failing to sell it to anyone on Italy. Spain still owns the letter but has never officially claimed the title, so technically still in hands of the Crown of Spain and not the family that ended up dying. the current Borbon family still owns the title (technically, I guess). Though through weird buying shenanigans they do have the title of Kings of Jerusalem, they conquered Naples after they had bought the title to the last heir of the kingdom. Honestly kingdom titles being bought all over medieval europe is kinda hilarious. After centuries of bragging it was god given, you end up with a dude waving a paper saying you can be king by buying it off him. Like the original selling people a star that is now popular online, a proto nft having the receipt of a kingdom
- Loughla 4y agoI mean, if nothing else it makes me feel better that people aren't really getting better at scams, I'm just aware of them because I'm alive today instead of back then.
- jjk166 4y agoThe diagram says that the HRE became the German and Austrian empires, but really those were two external entities that gobbled up the remains after it fell; Napoleon conquered the HRE, and thus by right of conquest the title of Emperor would go to him. Further, by being proclaimed emperor by the people, being crowned emperor by the Pope, and being recognized as emperor by the emperor in Constantinople, he was the last person to satisfy every historical requirement of being the Western Roman Emperor.
- qwytw 4y agoAnother mistake: Charlemagne was technically a successor to Constantine VI who was the emperor of the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire. After Empress Irene (allegedly) murdered her son and ascended to the throne on her own right the pope in the west did no recognize her (also because she was a woman) and crowned Charlemagne instead. However unlike most other usurpers throughout Roman history he did not march to Constantinople to depose Irene and therefore both empires coexisted for the 700 years or so. HRE (it was just called the Roman Empire, the word holy was only added in the high middle ages) was not a successor to the Western Roman Empire. That wouldn't really make any sense, since the Roman had already reconquered Italy (and the lost most of it) after the Western Empire had fallen (Rome itself was still formally a part of the (eastern)Empire at the time of Charlemagne.
- throwaway6734 4y agoAt a minimum Irene has her son blinded to usurp his throne.
- RadixDLT 4y agothat explains why germany developed 1000 years after the fall of rome
- RadixDLT 4y agoaustrian empire only happened because they tried to stop the ottoman empire from expanding
- tsimionescu 4y agoI think Justinian was the last of the people who considered themselves emperors of a Roman empire to actually hold Rome (for a while), so the Byzantines should get at least some credit. And then, the second Emperor of Russia married a Byzantine princess, taking the title of Caesar (Tsar). Basically, every empire even close to Europe is Rome.
- rhodorhoades 4y agoYeah, but at that point they were a Greek speaking, Christian monarchy that had been actively hostile to western Rome for a century. When did Rome die? When the capital was moved from Rome.
- yareally 4y ago> "When did Rome die? When the capital was moved from Rome" Do you consider end of the Roman Empire to be 286CE? That's when the capital was moved from Rome to Mediolanum (Milan).
- frozencell 4y agoWasn’t Rome really influenced by the Gauls? Emperors purple toges are said to came from the Italian Gauls for example.
- ETH_start 4y agoThis appears to say they copied Roman-era Norse material culture, not that they copied the culture of Ancient Rome.
- simonh 4y agoRight, I read through the whole thing and the only reference to 'Roman' is to other Scandinavian burials in the 'Roman Era', absolutely nothing to support any claim of influence from 'Ancient Rome' itself.
- kzrdude 4y agoWhile ancient Rome almost surely influenced germanic and scandinavian culture. People from those areas served in the Roman military in some cases. In some cases they brought home money and culture after surviving such a life. Norse mythology and for example week day names show clear similarities with the ancient roman and greek corresponding concepts, which is not a coincidence, and so on.
- ETH_start 4y ago>>Norse mythology and for example week day names show clear similarities with the ancient roman and greek corresponding concepts That's more likely due to the two cultures having a common Indo-European origin, from whence they inherited their language and mythology from, as opposed to cultural diffusion during the Roman era, I think.
- edgyquant 4y agoSurely not considering how intertwined German peoples were with Rome
- Tor3 4y agoThe seven day week and the connection to planets came from Babylon or Egypt, way back. And then via the Greek and so on. The Romans weren't actually the quickest to adopt it, they had an 8-day week (possibly from the Etruscans), which had to fight with the (also known) 7-day week. It's unclear when the 8-days week completely fell out of favour, but the 7-day week didn't become official until AD 321 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-day_week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-day_week) In any case, the 7-day week spread, and much farther than just to the north of Europe. China apparently imported the Hellenistic system as far back as the 4th century (wikipedia), and Japan got it four centuries later (but wasn't made official until 1876. The week day names matches the Latin ones, with Monday as "moon day" and so on).
- hillsboroughman 4y agoIf Vikings imitated/emulated the Romans in their funerary practices, arguably they did the same in their living practices too. If that's the case, why are the Vikings persistently dissed, at least in popular culture, as uncouth, violent, hard drinking, fornicating barbarians? As a resident of New Jersey, I feel for the Vikings.
- pluc 4y agobecause history is written by the victors
- Hikikomori 4y agoOr the surviving victims of viking raids that wrote down what happened, probably a bit biased and without any real knowledge of viking society.
- krapp 4y agoBecause they weren't Christians.
- vintermann 4y agoIt's not dissing. The people who portray them as such like them as such, thinking it's badass. The past is a foreign country, as they say. It may be oddly familiar in some ways, it may even feel better in a few ways, but most of all it's strange. Alien, even, when we're talking as long as go as the Norse Vikings lived. It can never be a home. It's safe to say that those Norse people who built the faux Roman, faux ancient grave 1000 years ago, were as naive about this as Viking idolizers are today.
- idlehand 4y agoRome was a warrior culture too, especially in the beginning. Even their sports were bloody and gruesome, with people being maimed and dying for the enjoyment of the population.
- bergenty 4y agoAll those qualities are things to be proud of in my book. Those are desirable and masculine.
- schnitzelstoat 4y agoIn the Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson describes the Vikings as being descended from Trojans. Much like Virgil claimed the Romans descend from Aeneas (a Trojan prince) in the Aeneid. So Roman (and Greek) influence wouldn't surprise me.
- Tor3 4y agoCan't remember any such thing. Do you have a citation?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FranzFerdiNaN 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Edda#Prologue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Edda#Prologue > The Prologue is the first section of four books of the Prose Edda, consisting of a euhemerized Christian account of the origins of Norse mythology: the Nordic gods are described as human Trojan warriors who left Troy after the fall of that city (an origin similar to the one chosen by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century to account for the ancestry of the British nation, and which parallels Virgil's Aeneid).
- neaden 4y agoThe introduction of the Prose Edda is really wild. Snorri basically tries to synthesize his understanding of history, the Eddas, and the Bible to explain how many of these are the same people or describing the same events.
- cobbzilla 4y agoSome context -- Snorri has 500 years of dark-ages obscuring whatever he wants to say [1]. I am utterly unconvinced that what Snorri writes is what the original Vikings believed. [1] The Prose Edda was written in the early 13th century; the earliest recorded Viking raids on Britain are late 8th century; original Viking culture/beliefs must be even older.
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- helsinkiandrew 4y ago> On this site researchers have found detailed similarities between two graves that were built hundreds of years apart Vikings may have been influenced by the Romans, but burials have followed remarkably similar patterns for thousands of years all over the world with no influence from outside: The dead are often buried with items to help them in an afterlife - food, money or something to trade to help the journey. With items that were significant to them or their role in their life - jewellery, weapons, tools. And are often laid out straight in 'best' clothes, relatives hold vigil over the body until burial/cremation etc. We also base burials on the burials we've seen - so is it strange that they build tombstones like the old (Roman) one? In the same way that Egyptian rulers wanted a pyramid like their predecessor?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notart666 4y agoIt's a tradition that was carried over from the vegetarian guard often recruited from the nords due to reaching their population limit early, they would often journey south to work in Roman controlled regions though it's different in how it was adapted just like how most groups take in traditions and beliefs from things they've seen elsewhere. It's not really indicative of anything really.
- dboreham 4y agoAlthough a vegetarian guard sounds intriguing (but not as cool as a Vegan Guard), probably this was the Varangian Guard.
- Eumenes 4y agoVery interesting connection between Rome and Vikings - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard