The Vikings and Their Place on the Orb of the World Where Men Dwell

If you look at a map of Scandinavia, you can see that you can divide all of Scandinavia up into two regions: an eastern and a western region that's surrounding the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.  

Let's start with the east region, and imagine that you're looking at the northern part of continental Europe where Denmark kind of pokes up like a hand.  Start at the eastern-most base part of Denmark, and head east.  You get some German coastline on the Baltic Sea, a long stretch of Polish coastline, and then you continue up through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.  And that gets you to the Gulf of Finland, which then  heads almost straight until you get to St. Petersburg in Russia.  And then you head around the other side of that Gulf, and hit Helsinki in Finland, and continue along the Finish coast heading North and west until you to the Gulf of Bothnia. And that runs pretty much straight north, and the rest of that is pretty much the entire coastline of Sweden.  Then there's a little tiny narrow gap between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, there's a couple of narrow passages.  At one of these is Copenhagen, and that's why it developed into such a prosperous city, because it's on trade route.  And on the Swedish side is Malmo, and then there's another passage further to the west.  And that's the east region, focused on Sweden, mostly, in terms of the Scandinavian part--the Viking part.

In the west region you have the North Sea.  And it's bounded on the South by a bit Belgium and the Netherlands and a bit of Germany, and it's bounded on the east by Denmark, poking up like that.  That's in the southeast , and Norway is in the north east.  And you've got England and Scotland over in the west.  And so, that's the North Sea.  Now, the north of the North Sea is basically open.  There's not a lot of land there, but it's filled with ice, and it's very cold, it's not navigable for months of the year.  So, if you head out of the North Sea going to the northwest--you have to be kind of carful when you go--but you will hit the Faro Islands (which turned into a Viking colony, and where they still speak a language that is pretty close to Old Norse), and then you will eventually hit Iceland.

That's the Viking world.  It started in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.  And then it expanded.  Now, how did those Vikings even get to Sweden, Norway and Denmark?  Well, there were Germanic tribes living in Scandinavia on the very edge of the Roman Empire.  There was some small trading that went back and forth between the Romans and these Iron Age tribes, and according to various Roman historians, there were tribes in Scandinavia that included the Heruli (?) who were then replaced by the Swedes, and the Danes who are supposedly an off-shoot of the Swedes.

That's what the Roman historians said, and the archaeological evidence is complex, it's probably not capable of giving us that kind of detail, but it's not entirely inconsistent with what the Romans said.  There's an era of Sweden called the "Vendel Age," which has burials with very very rich grave goods.  They buried a lot of stuff, a lot of gold and other materials with their dead, and a lot of that gold seems to have come from Rome.  When Rome fell at the end of the 4th century, or going into the 5th century, a lot of gold ended up in Scandinavia, and that suggests that maybe Rome didn't quite so much fall, as was pushed a little bit. 

And that "not entirely fell, but was pushed," is a theme that we're going to see in Viking history.  The Vikings--and their ancestors--were extremely good at sensing a power vacuum and exploiting it.  Now, how were they able to do that, in an era when communication was only as fast as the fastest ship or the fastest walk of a horse?  The answer is: trading, not raiding, at this stage.  Information travels along with trade.  And maybe because there was lots of trade, in a small way going on all around the edges of the empire, and more importantly, because the Scandinavians were willing and able to use that information.  They communicated with each other a lot, and therefore they had information about what was going on in Rome.  They sensed the power vacuum and were able to move in and exploit it.

Now one of the reasons they were able to do this, is they were able to understand each other.  Linguistically, there had once been unified speakers of an off-shoot of Germanic.  Now if you imagine a family tree of languages, okay, and one of these is the Indo-European root.  It goes back 50,000 years--we don't really know much about it, nothing was written down, nobody knew how to write--but it split into big branches.  Branches like Italic languages, which ended up with Latin and all the romance languages, or Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh, or Germanic languages.  And on that Germanic branch of the tree, there are three subdivisions: east, west and north.  The Germans didn't have a south branch.  They settled from the north, it seems, moving down and so the division is vertical rather than horizontal.  You get east, west and north.  

East Germanic is Gothic.  They're all gone.  They're all dead.  They were replaced by Huns and Magyars and others who came in.  All we have from Gothic are a couple of texts, and a lot of personal and place names.  Gothic is a really challenging language, but you can learn Gothic, because there just isn't that much of it.  You can almost memorize all the texts in Gothic, and then you can know Gothic.  It's very convenient; makes you look like you really understand this complex language.  That's east Germanic.  It goes extinct.

West Germanic is Germans and English.  You get a split within that: That's the high, which is the people living in the mountains, and the low, living in the plains.  And from the high you eventually get modern German coming through old high German.  It wasn't the prestige language until Martin Luther made it so by translating the Bible into it.  And in the low you get more splitting.  You get Frizzian, you get Dutch, you get Platzdeutch (?), and you get English.  So that's the east and the west, but north is what we're interested in.

North is the branch from which the Viking culture springs.  And by the time we get to the point where you can really differentiate anything else, you find that northern branch spitting east and west.  But at the beginning of the Viking age, it's sort of all one thing.  There were dialects, but people could understand each other, and we call that "Old Norse."  Old Norse then does split later on into the current system we have right now, which is east Norse and west Norse, and if you remember the geography we just talked about, with the eastern part, mainly the Baltic Sea, and the western part mainly the North Sea, they sort of map onto that, though not exactly.  So Swedish and Danish are east Norse, and Norwegian and Icelandic are west Norse, as is Faroese, which is still spoken in the Faro Islands and is the closest living language to Old Norse.  Apologies to the Icelanders, you guys have evolved a little bit more, but still awfully close.  And then, an extinct language called "Norn" which was spoken in the Orkney and the Shetland Islands. 

And Old Norse sounds pretty Germanic.  It sounds not so much like Swedish, but it sounds like this: (Go here to listen: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13250763/)  And translated that says: "It is said that the earth circle, which the human race inhabits, is torn across into many indentations so that great seas run into the land from the ocean.  Thus it is known that a great sea goes in at Narvasund (which is Gibraltar) all the way to the land of Jerusalem.  And from the same sea, along sea bite stretches toward the northeast, and is called the Black Sea.  And divides the three parts of the earth, of which the eastern part is called Asia, and the western part called by some, Europa, by some Anea.  Northward of the Black Sea lies Swithia the Great.  Also known as: The Cold."

So this is how the Scandinavians thought of their own world, and how they talked about it.  And thy were living in Scandinavia, speaking Old Norse in their various dialects for a couple hundred years after the fall of Rome.  They were traders and farmers.  They were traders particularly in materials that could only be gotten in the north: furs, ivory, feathers.  Materials from various animals, and sometimes, as we'll see in the story of Audun and the Ice Bear, the live animals themselves.  They wanted lightweight, very very valuable cargoes.  This is usually the first stage in trade.  Think about the trade in spices and silk, which was the first thing that comes from European trade from Asia, and only later gets to be big heavy things.  Lightweight valuable cargoes: furs and ivory.

And they then built large trading settlements at the natural bottleneck in shipping lanes or river mouths.  An example is Hedeby in southern Denmark, northern Germany area, which was a choke point for shipping and land trails, and where there was an enormous trading post in the Viking Age.

So that's what the Vikings were doing for a couple hundred years.  We don't really know why, but in 793, some Vikings had the brilliant idea to, "Hey, let's get in a boat, and sail across the North Sea, and sack the monastery and Lindisfarne in England."  Well, monasteries were [i]easy[/i] pickin's.  They had great locations near water, because they had become very rich, and that was the best land to be.  And so they could be part of trade, they could collect tolls and so forth.  But they weren't defended from the water side because no one was attacking them from the water side.  And in fact, the English didn't really think that monasteries needed to be defended because, who's gonna attack a monastery?  Heh, well, turns out a bunch of pagan Vikings are gonna attack a monastery.  

Now the Vikings were so fast, they did these smash and grab raids, that they couldn't be stopped.  By the time you got your army raised up, or got some navy vessels in or anything else they were [i]gone[/i], and they'd already took the stuff.  And so, what they did was to start getting rich by stealing stuff.  They went south in the very early part of the 9th century because Charlemagne was dead in France, and they sensed the power vacuum, they sensed the weakness in the sons and grandsons of Charlemagne and started raiding there, also.  

A Viking named Ragnar, legend says it's "Ragnar Hairy-Pants" who we'll talk about later--and yes that's really his name, Ragnar Hairy-Pants--sacked Paris in 845.  And then after he sacked Paris, the king, Charles the Bald, paid him off to leave!  Saying, "Keep everything you sacked, and here's an additional 7,000 pounds of silver--just please don't come back and sack us again."  Well word got out, and Vikings started sacking everywhere.  They attacked Spain and Portugal, tough they were less successful there and actually lost a battle at Barcelona.  Some of them even went rampaging through the Mediterranean Sea, sailing all the way around Gibraltar, going in and they sacked a few cities in Italy.  Supposedly the thought they had sacked Rome.  (I don't think they really think they really thought they had sacked Rome.)  But they attack an Italian city on the Mediterranean, which is kind of a large feat.  

Of course at the same time they were sacking and pillaging the monasteries and the coastal lands all throughout England, going up into Ireland, going into Scotland.  And in the middle of the 9th century, they started staying.  So, you have to think that you're a Viking.  You say, "Hey, Sven, Ragnar, Gunnar. . .  We could get in our open boat, and sail back across the North sea, with a bunch of other smelly Vikings, or we could just stay here over winter and start pillaging again in the spring."  And so that's what they did.  And then they started sending home for their wives, their children, their domestic animals, and others, and they started colonizing.  Not just raiding.  They started colonizing England, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Faro Islands.  That's the westward expansion of the Vikings.

They also went east, and settled in the lands there.  The western Vikings were mostly Norwegians, and the eastern ones were mostly Swedish.  The Swedes actually called themselves the "Rus" and supposedly that's the source of the name "Russia."  Now, you can imagine that Slavic and Russian scholars dispute that.  "Oh, we are not named after a bunch of Swedish Vikings!"  But there's at least equivocal evidence that, yes, the name "Russia" means, "Eastern Swedes Who Have Taken Over."  They settled Novgorod, and then they moved on and they set up Kiev.  

The eastern Vikings were also known as the "Varangians," and that name comes from Greeks and the Slavs who named them that.  And they eventually ended up controlling all trade on the Volga River, which is a huge river and important trade route that links the Black Sea with the Caspian Sea.  They also took over the route of the Dnieper River, which links the Black Sea and Constantinople with interior Europe.  So they were, you know, right at the heart of where all the trade had to pass.  Again, they supposedly founded the city of Kiev in Russia, because they went east, and some of them went as far as Byzantium itself, and there they became the Varangian guard, the famous Varangian guard, the elite bodyguard of the emperor.

Now I'm sure that these Vikings, all the way down in Byzantium, were incredibly brave and useful to the emperor, but the biggest reason is that they were probably hired, was that they didn't have any loyalties within Byzantium.  There's  a reason we have that word "Byzantine" to indicate corruption.  There were all different kinds of factions playing off each other and struggling, and the Vikings showed up, and they were good fighters, and they didn't care, as long as you paid them they were loyal.  You didn't pay them, they weren't.  And the emperor figured out that he could pay them.  

The Varangian guard lasted for centuries, and there started to be fewer and fewer Kievian Vikings, ones from Russia,  and more and more Anglo-Saxons after the Norman conquest.  This emphasizes my point I made earlier, that the Norman conquest wasn't that the French took over England--I mean that's part of it, and people speaking French, but it was still a Viking thing.  And so lots of Vikings from Anglo-Saxon England, or from Norman England at this point, showed up in the Varangian guard, after the Norman conquest of Sicily in the 11th century.  

Now while all of this was going on, things were not sitting still in the Scandinavian homelands.  Everyone was getting rich, or people on the outside were getting rich, and the money was flowing in.  But in Scandinavia, there weren't unified kingdoms.  You could not realistically speak of Sweden or Norway or Denmark.  There were Swedes and Norwegians and Danes in the sense that they lived in those areas, but there were a lot of warring kingdoms with multiple kings all squabbling.  Towards the end of the 9th century, all of that changed.  

Now I'm gonna start off with the legend because, like so many things about the Vikings, it's really charming and romantic, but it's also possibly not true.  But we'll start with the legend and then get to the reality.  The legend is this: Harald the son of Haftan the Black, and he has some small, rather pathetic kingdom in Norway, but he's the kind of it.  And he supposedly sees this beautiful woman named Gutha, the daughter of King Irek of Hordaland, and he asks her--and I'm not making this part up, either--"Would you like to become my concubine?"  Not wife, by the way.  When you read this in the text books and it says, "marriage proposal" you know someone has sanitized it.  He did not ask to marry her, he asked if she wanted to be his concubine, at least that's what the [i]story[/i] actually says.  Whether it really happened or not is another story.  Well, she turned him down.  She said that she was not giving her maiden head to some loser with only a pathetic little kingdom, and I may be paraphrasing a bit there, but that's the general gist.  

Now you'd expect Harald to get really mad, but instead he took it as motivation, and then and there he swore (and why he picked this particular thing, I don't know) that he would neither cut nor comb his hair until he was the ruler of all Norway.  And so, he goes out and over a period of twelve years, he conquers all of Norway.  And he unifies it under his rule.  That part's historically true.  The haircut, I don't know.  At that point, when he has unified Norway, he finally gets his hair cut and combed.  Now, this is what I love--his previous nickname during that twelve years had been "Harald Lufa" and if you think of loofa the sponge that you wash yourself with, well, it's not exactly the same, but it meant, "Harald the Mop" or "Harald Mop-Head."  But, once they combed out his hair, and trimmed it, it turned out that he had a [i]beauuutiful[/i] head of hair, and I'll say that the Vikings were very sensitive to that.  Many times the sagas mentioned about how  good someone's hair was; the Vikings cared about good hair.  And when they combed out all his hair it was beautiful, so he got the nickname of "Harald Harfeyre" or "Harald Fine-Hair" or "Fair-Hair."  And neither of those quite works, as we think of fair hair as being blond hair, and that's not what they mean there (though he very well may have had blond hair) and fine hair we think of really thin.  So it would be like, "Harald Awesome-Hair" or something like that. 

 So he had all this beautiful hair, he has now successfully taken over all of Norway, and he goes back to Gutha and she's like, "Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, look at your hair."  She doesn't exactly say that in the legend, but you can extrapolate and fill in the details.  So, princess Gutha goes and joins--and there's no better word for it--his harem in Norway.  

So, here's why Harald is important, wither or not the hair story is really true--though everyone does call him "Harald Fair-Hair."  Supposedly the reason that Iceland was conquered, and the reason that there's all this Viking activity going on everywhere is because Harald had deprived many powerful people of their positions.  Not just the kings that he killed, but the second and third tier nobility, Harald's like, "Well, you'll swear loyalty to me."  And some of them didn't want to, so he wanted to replace them with people of his own choosing.  So the mythology is that this is what caused the colonization of Iceland, and all these other colonizations.  Harald Fair-Hair is oppressing everyone in Norway, and we are just too awesome and too tough and strong to knuckle under to him, but he's too powerful for us to fight him, so we're gonna get in our ships and go to Iceland.  And again you can see how this is mythology, because can you imagine meeting someone in Iceland who's like, you know farming goats and he's like, "You know, I was a chieftain before Harald came along."  And that's a story but there's also some truth in because a wave of colonization does start at exactly this time.

And it's not just Iceland.  It's England, Scotland, Ireland--this is when the Vikings found Dublin--Normandy, and then the Faros, Greenland, and even getting as far as North America.  Now, probably the most important of these colonizations for illustrating what went on is the colonization of Iceland.  Mostly because we have the best record for that one.  Obviously the other colonizations were really important, but most of the time we don't have things written down and we do in Iceland.  

There was a period of time that's called the "Landnam,"  and that's not "land naming."  Ive seen that, not in a real scholarly book, but in one book and in a lot of places on the internet.  "Landnam" = "land naming."  Wrong.  "Nam" is from the verb "niman" which is to take, so "the land taking" or the settlement.  And what happens is that people hear that Iceland is a pretty good place.  It's got timber, it's got fish, it's got good pasture.  One of the things that's going on is that this is during the Medieval warming period, so Iceland's a little warmer, but also Iceland is right in the middle of the Gulf Stream.  Now, the Gulf Stream is not exactly Florida temperature up there, but it keeps Iceland warmer.  So even though Iceland is significantly further north, it ends up having sort of the climate of New England.  Though the middle of the island is all glaciers, the edges are not that freezing cold, though really dark in the winter.  

The first settler in Iceland was a man named "Ingulfur Arnarson," and he built a farm at Reykjavik.   SO if you think about that Reykjavik is the capitol of Iceland, and it was the first place settled.  By the way, the name "Reykjavik" means "Bay or inlet of reekingness."  It means "steam bay" because of the hot springs and so forth, so that's where he set up.  And supposedly the way he set this up, is he had the door pillars of his old house back in Norway on his boat.  When he got within sight of the Iceland coast, he threw them overboard, and he sails back to the coast, and he walks around until he finds where they've washed up.  And that tells you where the gods want you to build.  This is a motif that show ups in the sagas.  I'm not sure how true this is, I mean can you imagine if they washed up in a swamp: "Oh, well we've gotta build the house in the swamp."  But this is the idea that the gods tell you where to build by where your door pillars wash up.  

Now the things is, though the Norwegians were coming back to Norway and saying, "Hey, there's this uninhabited, unsettled area with good land that we can go to," there had actually been people living in Iceland.  They were Irish.  And we did know that they were Irish monks who went to Iceland, because it's closer to Ireland than other places, stayed there in the summer to fast and purify their souls and stay away from other people, and then came back in the winter.  That was stories that was written down.  

More recent analysis, archaeology, study of place-names and study of genetics suggest that there were a fair number of Irish living in Iceland and that maybe the Norwegians who showed up killed them, or at least killed all the men.  You don't want to say this, by the way--well you probably could nowadays to a bunch of Icelandic scholars, but even twenty years ago it was extremely controversial.  Or as someone told me that Icelanders say, "I am the descendant of Norwegian chieftains."  Not Irish slaves upon whom we committed genocide.  So, um, those are the kid of stories that stress people out when you talk about their country's founding.  It's a very romantic founding, as we know the name of guy who first got to Iceland, but there had been Irish people there before hand.  The place names in particular, especially in the west and the south are more evidence of that, even though the stories in the [i]Landnamabok[/i], which is this book about the land taking, say that, "Oh we named that because there was an Irish slave who died there," or,  "There was another Irish slave died here."  It's more likely that the Irish people who were living there told the Icelanders the place names.  The same thing happened in America with the many Native American place names.  Even after they were chased away or killed, the place names stayed.  Place names are extremely conservative, and they stick around for a long time.

So, families go to Iceland, they stake out claims, they build farms.  They bring sheep.  There is lots of fishing, there is lots of timber.  Iceland hadn't been harvested and because of the climate, there is actually timber to cut.  Trees are actually rare now and very valuable.  Iceland climate is not as terrible, and there is a lot of good trading to go on.  Furs, whale, walrus ivory, gir falcons from the artic, all these things that you can trade and lots and lots of fishing.  So what you get in Iceland then is this colonization movement, though to be fair, the book that tells all about it, [i]Landnamabok[/i] is as much about the family and political relationships 200 years later, as it is about the settlement period.  In other words, the book is sort of justifying the way things are by sometimes making things up, sometimes using the truth.  There is a mix.  

The other thing about Iceland, and what makes tiny little Iceland--well, I say "tiny" but Iceland is actually the same size as Ireland.  We think of it as really really small, with a very low population--and certainly compared to Ireland it is--but physically it's the same or just about the same surface areas as Ireland.  The difference is, as I said, the whole middle of the island is covered in glaciers, so people have to spread out around the edges.  

But, Iceland is so important because the customs survive, and the records survive.  That doesn't mean that these same things were going on back in Norway, it just that we don't have a lot of data about them.  So, when I talk about Iceland, you should know that it's its own unique situation, but it representing things about Viking culture in the Viking homelands.  Now what was different about Iceland is that they had no king, and they were very very proud of that--and they were never going to have a king.  We came there to get [i]away[/i] from King Harald.  

So it's, in many ways, the first democracy in Europe.  Now I say "democracy," but obviously women didn't participate, slaves didn't participate, people who were not powerful landholders didn't participate, but nevertheless, it's way more democratic than anywhere else in Europe at that time--and for many years.  You had chieftains who were powerful people in different districts, but you also had collective action through a meeting called "the Thing."  I love that "thing" just means "meeting" in Old Norse.  And that's the parliament.  And it met at a place called "[i]Thingvelier[/i]" which means "the assembly plains" or "the Thing plains."  And there is a big rock there, it's actually an escarpment, a kind of wall of rock, called the "law rock," and you go can go there today, and you can stand in the spot where all the law speakers stood.  In fact when you're standing there--here's a little geological trivia--you're standing exactly in the middle between the tectonic plates that make up the north Atlantic.  That "law rock" is actually exactly the spot where the two plates are pulling away from each other, so that's kind of cool also that that's the focus of their law.  

Every year all the important men in Iceland, and many others, would gather at the assembly plains, at [i]Thingvelier[/i] and they would build booths.  These booths were basically built of turf and rocks on the sides, and then they had canvas awnings on the top as a roof.  And the sides are still there--you leave your booth sides up all the time, and you just bring your canvas roof each year.  And the biggest thing that the Thing was for, was for settling lawsuits.  Icelanders were very big on the law.  They had a complicated law code, which they had memorized.  And they had a person called the "law speaker" who was the most trusted memorizer of the law.  This was a big prestigious position, but you had to be able to memorize the entire law.  

So, this sets up an interesting dynamic in Iceland and showed different places in the rest of Scandinavia, though not as much because they had kings, of this balance between "might and right" or the rule of law and the rule of men.  Iceland was negotiating that.  There were powerful chieftains who were sometimes hard to control, as we'll see in some of the later lectures, and there was this devotion to the idea of the law.  And that sets up a little bit of the culture of the Viking age.  Power is a little bit flatter, it's not as pyramidal.  The king has power, but he also has to answer to his powerful nobles, and they have to answer to their constituents, and it's not, when you think of medieval culture, it's not the highly stratified systems with the king all powerful at the top, but rather, a limited power king--or in Iceland, no king at all.  But there's this continual tension.  Now, what you then see coming out of that is the idea that even great and powerful men could get in trouble with the law.  But, they had a choice.  They could be outlawed, or exiled for a certain period of time, rather than physically punished or killed if they stayed in Iceland. 

 And so you get this literary pattern, a great man gets in trouble, sails away, and goes Viking.  He goes and becomes a  Viking, and conquers England, takes things in England, or goes exploring and this is how the Vikings ended up as far from Iceland, and as far from Scandinavia and Sweden as Greenland and New Foundland.  Eric the Red is exploring, he sees Greenland, he's been outlawed, so he brings people, and they go and settle in Greenland.  Leif Ericsson, his son, goes even further, and sees what he calls, "Vinland" or "vine land," which for a while was thought to be Nova Scotia, for a while it was thought to be Massachusetts, because he sees grapes, and he apparently brings back grapes, and grapes don't grow that far north in Canada.  Where Vinland was. . .  huge mystery still.  Nobody really knows.  

And for a long time it was thought that all this talk about getting to North America was just fluff, but then it was discovered that the Vikings really did make it as far as New Foundland.  So the Greenland colony was there from 986 to 1400.  The colony in New Foundland isn't really a colony; it's an overwintering spot, but they do get there.  They get around the sort of curve in the top of New Foundland, and they end up in a place called L'Anse aux Medeau, which sounds like "meadows" but really comes from the French word for "jellyfish;" The Cove of the Jellyfish.  And there's a temporary settlement there.  In L'Anse aux Meadeau we found turf houses, we found evidence of trade going even further south into New Foundland, maybe into Labrador or down the coast further, and we found a primitive iron forge, forging bog iron making rivets for the boats, so we know the Vikings were there.  It wasn't discovered until the 1960s and excavated, and it is exactly where the sagas, the Greenland Sagas--if you read them carefully--it's exactly where it should be.  So, that suggest that there's a lot of historical truth in there.  

We still don't know where Vinland is, where the grapes are, because grapes just don't grow in New Foundland.  Lots of crazy Viking speculation occurs.  Someone made a fake runestone and put it in Oklahoma, people said, "Oh, the Vikings got to Oklahoma;" there is the thought that they got as far as Minneapolis because they could go up the St. Lawrence River and through the Great Lakes, and so forth, but that turned out to be false, also. We still have the Minnesota Vikings as the name of the football team, though that says much for the ethnicity of the people who lived in Minnesota.  And you have sort of "Viking mania" again, and every once in a while something weird happens.  Some Native Americans in Maine had a coin that had to have come from the Vikings, but whether that was traded multiple times from New Foundland or whether thy got to Maine or down even further, we just don't know.  

But by the end of the 11th century the Vikings had reached from as far as at least New Foundland--if not the rest of North America, or the North American east coast--all the way to the Baltic Sea, Russia, northern France, Greenland, all the island of the north Atlantic, and with the Norman conquest of England, taking over England as well.

That's the extent of the "Viking Empire."  There's never one single empire.  And in fact if we go to the Norman conquest, some Vikings from Norway had invaded England first before William the Conqueror, but were defeated at the battle of Stanford Bridge.  William the Conqueror, the Normans, they won, so it's just one group of Vikings or another.  However, even though you can see this as the high point of the Viking hegemony in Europe, there was a major change that was happening, and it started to happen around the year 1000, and that was the Christianization of the Vikings.  St. Olaf in Norway, Christianized that country at the point of his sword, and Iceland converted to Christianity in the year 1000.  

The story of the conversion is possibly a good illustration for this.  A missionary named Thangbrand comes to Iceland, and he wants to convert it to Christianity.  There's the model of St. Olaf back in Norway.  St. Olaf had wanted Iceland to be Christianized supposedly, but they wouldn't do it.  Thangbrand shows up and he wants to Christianize.  And he gets challenged by a bunch of pagans.  Now, you sort of know how this story is supposed to go, right?  The missionary gets challenged, and he says, "Well do whatever you want, but God will protect me."  Um, the Scandinavian Christians weren't quite that way.  Thangbrand says, "Well, if you think Thor is better than Jesus, let's fight!"  And Thangbrand fights people, but he keeps only a crucifix as his shield, rather than a real shield.  But it's great to read these stories of, "And then Thangbrand showed up and was challenged by Gothi, or some other person, and they attacked him, and Thangbrand chopped off his arm and he bled to death."  And moving along, Thangbrand fought some other people and someone said, "Well Thor could destroy you, and Thangbrand said, 'If God wanted Thor to be dust, he would be dust right away,' and then he chopped his leg off, and that person died."  So, Thangbrand is a. . . kind of what you would expect of a Viking missionary, not the tender as a lamb self-sacrificing missionary, rather a very active one.  

And at the year 1000 the Icelanders all convert, though the story that you read in the All Saga is kind of a trick.  They get the Law Speaker and the Law Speaker is supposed to judge whether we should be Christian or pagan, and he says, "We should all be only one thing, and I'm gonna pick Christianity."  And all the pagans were like, "Woah!  How did that happen?"  But in fact Iceland does convert to Christianity in the year 1000, and that sort of changes everything.  Not specifically Iceland converting, but all the Vikings converting, because the culture then becomes much more tightly tied in to continental Latin culture through the Roman Catholic Church; tied in to a long tradition of Christian thought that grows out the classical world, especially out of the Roman world.  And so culture and politics changes.  By the time we get to 1200 we're getting ready for the Crusades and for other Christian-Latin things, and the Viking age, as a distinct culture, has ended.

So we had, trading, raiding, the greatest explorers before the 15th century, democracy, kings, pillaging, destruction, and the expansion of a culture all across Europe and beyond.  The Norsemen radically reshaped Europe and they were the dominant cultural force between the fall of Rome and the Crusades.  Those are the people that we are talking about when we are talking about the Vikings

In our next lecture we're going to look into their religion and their mythology.  What did they believe for those 500 years or so, before they converted to Christianity at the point of Olaf's or Thangbrand's sword?