Northmen: The Viking Saga, 793–1241 by John Haywood
In Northmen thousands of questions are answered about this transitional period of the Viking era.
This stand alone group in Scandinavia before there were any defined borders were all considered Vikings and were under numerous tribal leaders that mostly went their separate ways.
John Hayward gives a great overview of the influence and impact that this all had.
Peaceful places have no history, and this place abounds in history.
Worthy of more than five stars.
EXCERPTS:
The Vikings were an unprecedented phenomenon in European history, not for any technological, military or cultural innovation that they contributed to–in most respects they were really rather backward and even their shipbuilding methods were conservative–but for the vast expanse of their horizons. No previous Europeans had ever seen so much of the world as the Vikings did. From their Scandinavian homelands, Vikings sailed east down the great rivers of Russia crossing the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea to reach Baghdad. In the west, Vikings even penetrated the Mediterranean to attack Italy and North Africa. Other Vikings crossed the Atlantic, leaving settlements along the way in the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, to become the first Europeans known to have set foot in North America. It is these far-flung connections, and the daring spirit that created them, that give the Vikings their enduring appeal.
Medieval writers used ‘Viking’ specifically to describe someone who went í víking (plundering), that is a pirate, and not necessarily a Scandinavian one at that. The word is thought originally to have meant ‘men of the bays’, perhaps because that is where pirates lurked hoping to ambush an unwary merchant ship. Under the influence of national romanticism, however, ‘Viking’ became a synonym for ‘early medieval Scandinavian’ and the usage has stuck. It was also during this era that Vikings were equipped with their romantically barbaric, but historically inaccurate, horned helmets (the error originated in the mis-identification by early Antiquarians of Bronze Age horned helmets as Viking helmets). The helmets too have stuck in the popular imagination.
Archaeology uncovered evidence of peaceful Viking enterprise in the fields of crafts, trade, exploration and settlement, leading to a more balanced view of their lives.
It became impossible for them to find wives, they would have begun to drift away too, perhaps signing on as crew on the few ships that still came to Greenland. Only those who felt too old to start a new life would have remained and, with the young people gone, the extinction of the colony was just a matter of time. The last outpost of the Viking world may simply have died of old age.
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