Vikings = "illiterate pagans"?

Remember always that history is written by the victors. Traditional (Christian and Roman) stories portray vikings as a bloodthirsty and evil bunch, but the archaeological record doesn't suggest that they were any moreso than any other ethnic group at the time, particularly when compared to the "poor little innocent Christians" (who were at that time engaged in one of the most brutal and bloody sets of religious wars the world had ever seen, i.e. the Crusades).

Re: writing, I believe the oldest known Germanic inscription (in this case, Anglo-Saxon) is dated to somewhere between 450 and 480 AD. By comparison to the Greeks and the Romans, the Germanic peoples were not of a particularly academic or scientific bent, certainly, and many of the Germanic individuals that a given person would meet would probably have been illiterate (as would the vast majority of people of *any* ethnic group at that time), but the allegation that as a culture they lacked a written language is false.

Note that the Viking Age is ca. 800-1100. The First Crusade was preached in 1095. The Crusades don't take place at the same time as the Vikings.

Also, the oldest runic inscription is not Anglo-Saxon. The runes were probably developed ca. 250-100 BC. The first surviving artifact with runes on it, the Meldorf Brooch, was made in Denmark ca. 50 AD. The Younger Futhark, teh runic alphabet the Vikings used, was developed ca. 700-800 AD.

Nice. :) What I posted above was partially from memory and partially from a cursory 'net search for the history of the English language (i.e. the earliest recorded anglo-saxon inscription).

Thank you, also!

Post 1 of 2

Writing as a technology of pen on paper was not known in Scandinavia until the introduction of Christianity. Runic writing appears to have been an incised kind of writing, on stone or wood, or even apparently on birch bark.

It is not known how widespread the ability to read and write runes actually was. We have a couple of sites (for instance, the medieval harbor at Bergen, Norway) where there are many wooden shipping tags and "memos" consisting of a stick or slat with runes cut in. These suggest a fairly widespread knowledge of runic writing at least in the early medieval period after the end of the Viking Age.

The Norse sagas and mythology were not recorded before the 13th to 14th centuries, a couple of hundred years after the end of the Viking Age or more. It is believed that before that time that the tales and poems of the Vikings were circulated orally. The poetry in particular seems to be internally coded in such a way that the correct original structure would be transmitted: because of the use of alliteration and syllabic counts per line, a misremembered part of a poem would stand out.

That being said, we still don't know how much of the society participated as rememberers/speakers of this oral literature. By the end of the Viking Age, we have the skalds, highly skilled poets, often in the employ of kings. Earl Rognvaldr kali of Orkney (d. 1158, just after the end of the Viking Age) wrote:

I can play at tafl,
Nine skills I know,
Rarely forget I the runes,
I know of books and smithing,
I know how to slide on skis,
Shoot and row, well enough;
Each of two arts I know,
Harp-playing and speaking poetry.

This suggsts that well-born men at least were expected to be literate in runes and able to "speak poetry", which may either be composing it or reciting it. But it doesn't say how common this skill was among the general population, or whether a small class of trained skalds travelled about reciting the sagas and mythological poetry.

Some useful articles:

Liestøl, Aslak. "The Literate Vikings". Proceedings of the Sixth Viking Congress. Uppsala 3-10 August. Bonäs, Dalarna 10-12 August 1969. Eds. P. Foote & D. Strömbäck. Uppsala 1971, pp. 69-78.

Knirk, James E. "Learning to write with runes in medieval Norway". Medeltida skrift- och språkkultur. Nio föreläsningar från ett symposium i Stockholm våren 1992 med en inledning av Barbro Söderberg. Ed. Inger Lindell. Stockholm: Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, Stockholms universitet. Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, Opuscula 2. 1994. pp. 169-212.
[Shows how medieval runes were taught and learned. Focusses on remnants of practice pieces, specifically examples of the futhark written in order as a practice tool.]

Re: Post 1 of 2

First of all, THANK YOU so much for your very detailed and useful answers!

Second, you're the Real Viking Answer Lady!!! I admire your website so much. Didn't know you were on LJ. I hope you don't mind that I've friended you.

Re the blood eagle, even in the very English-centric book I'm reviewing, the author admitted that the blood eagle was probably Christian hyberbole.

Your comments and the sources you've directed me to (as well as your website) will no doubt allow me to assess this book better. It's the first time I've reviewed a history book--although it's more popular history than academic. Being a nonhistorian, I want to make sure I have all the facts before I write the review.

Re: Post 1 of 2

What is your opinion on the the Vikings as "...shrewd military tacticians..." I know that they exploited speed -- their quick ships. I am not familiar with a lot of instances where a large Viking army fought another. As I recall, Stamford bridge and Hastings did not hinge on brilliant tactics. However, I really don't know the history.

Re: Post 1 of 2

I can't really answer for the overall tactics of army vs. army, but there were huge wars all the time once centralized kings came into the picture. Denmark really had some fighting, for instance. If you want a good snapshot, I recommend the following inexpensive paperback:

Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1968. To order from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019285139X/thevikinganswerl

The tactic that seems to have worked extremely well for the Vikings was to sail in and land anywhere they pleased in a shallow draught ship, hit hard and get out fast. Before local forces could respond, they'd be gone.

But Viking armies in England cut huge swathes through everywhere, and they were big standing armies with winter camps. This was the pattern in Ireland also, and it ended with a Viking kingdom centered on Dublin.

I'd say the tactics had to be "shrewd" or else they wouldn't have worked so well, in so many places.

To date, no one has written a good book on Viking military matters. A hack named Paddy Griffith did a book called The Viking Art of War but it was very poorly researched and in places so wrong that it's ludicrous. I keep hoping that an actual Viking scholar with an understanding of how to write about military tactics will analyze teh Viking's capabilities better.

One book that does look some at tactics and organization of warbands is:

Evans, Stephen S. Lords of Battle: Image and Reality of the Comitatus in Dark-Age Britain. Woodbridge: Boydell. 1997. To order from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0851156622/thevikinganswerl

Post 2 of 2

As for savagery, for comparison, the Vikings attacked the Irish 26 times in the first 25 years after their first appearance in Ireland, but the same Irish Annals that record this fact also mention attacks of Irishmen against Irish communities occurring 87 times within the same period (Else Roesdahl, The Vikings. New York: Allen Lane/Penguin. 1987. p. 223).

Remember also that until the last 30-50 years, pretty much all English-language scholarship about the Vikings was British-centric and viewed the Vikings from the viewpoint inculated by British medieval accounts of Viking atrocities.

A great example of how biased this British-centric view can be is the supposed rite of the "blood eagle", in which the victim's ribs were broken open and the lungs pulled out of the chest. The "blood eagle" turns out to be a little bit of bad press wished upon the Vikings by Christian chroniclers.

The origin of this torture is supposedly the account of the death of King Aella at York in 867 at the hands of the sons of Ragnar Loðbrokkr, said to be in revenge for the death of their father. The original Old Norse account uses the word "blóðörn" or "blood-eagle" in a bit of skaldic poetry, where it occurs as a kenning or metaphor for Ragnar being dead and left as the food of the eagles and ravens, a corpse upon the battlefield.

From this beginning hyperbole and misinterpretation ran amock. Soon you get medieval acocunts alleging that the "blood-eagle" was *the* Norse vengeance prescribed for the killer of one's father (though none of the many preserved codices of Viking Age law says anything like this); that the torture involved the ribs and lungs; or carving out the intestines, or cuttinga design into the skin and salting the wounds; etc. ad (literal) nauseam.

Some literature on this topic:

Einarsson, Bjarni. "De Normannorum atrocitate, or on the Execution of Royalty by the Aquiline Method," Saga-Book 22:1 (1986): 79-82.

Frank, Roberta. "Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-Eagle," English Historical Review 99 (1984): 332-343.

Frank, Roberta. "The Blood-Eagle Again," Saga-Book 22:5 (1988): 287-289.

Einarsson, Bjarni and Frank, Roberta. "The Blood-Eagle Once More: Two Notes," Saga-Book 23:1 (1990): 80-83.

Halsall, Guy. "Playing by Whose Rules? A Further Look at Viking Atrocity in the Ninth Century," Medieval History 2:2 (1992): 2-12.

Literancy & Runes

For the most part it is generally agreed that the majority of the Viking were illitierate, but the Halsinge Runes indicate a possibility of a runic shorthand, making it more like that the runes were used more commonoly that previously thought. Also note that the increased frequency of the radth rett runnor in Uppland during the Viking Age also implies a greater level of litereacy.

These indications are by no means saysing that their was a high literacy rate, but that it was not as unheard of many people would have you believe.

In addition to the other books recomended I would suggest JONAS (Journal Of Nordic Archealogical Science) or shooting a e-mail to Prof. R.I. Page of Corpus Christi University in Cambridge.

If you really want to get into the Runes and Rune Stones, I suggest the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University. The papers by Laila Ahfeldt are seriosuly eye-opening.