Everything You Wanted To Know About The Vikings | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Were there many major differences between the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish Vikings? So, asking to apply sort of modern ethnographic labels I suppose to them but um, but, they did apply to some extent?’
‘Not so much modern ethnographic labels as as modern nations and borders. The nations of Norway, Sweden and Denmark actually came into being during the Viking Age and the idea of a single monarchy ruling over a single nation evolved in that period. The thing that's important to remember is the simple vastness of Scandinavia... the distance from the northern tip of Norway to the southern tip of Norway is the same as the distance from the southern tip of Norway to Rome. It's absolutely kind of massive. And the landscape varies enormously. Denmark is just, you know, the highest point in Denmark 187 metres high. Norway is mountains and fjords. Sweden has its forests and lakes.
So it's extremely varied. So is there anything that unites these people? And I would say what unites them is partly a common language, which they called the Danish tongue strangely enough. And to a large extent, a common culture as well. As it's held together by language. So there's both variety and diversity. In terms of the Viking expansion, almost every book you read about the Vikings will have a little map showing arrows coming out of these three countries, you know with the Swedes going east and the Danes coming West and the Norwegians heading off to Iceland and Greenland. It's a bit more complicated than that because I think there was a lot of mobility within Scandinavia and you could find Swedes in Iceland and Norwegians in the East just as much...
[On getting along with the locals] So if we look at England, I think that once the question specifically once they decided to settle. So we'll leave out the the kind of raiding and the killing bit. And maybe the second phase if you like when people then obviously they settled down. They very soon I think probably married local people and formed families with them. One of the most important ways local people would influence the incoming Scandinavians was in religion because in England, England was a Christian country, the incoming Scandinavians were not Christian, and Christians, you know, it's the commandment: thou shalt have no god but me. Christians are generally at that time very keen to convert other people to Christianity. So one of the things that happened is very soon I think they adopted Christianity, although it's quite interesting in some parts of England, you can see a very Scandinavian form of Christianity evolving as, as the Vikings joined in. They obviously traded with the locals.
What we don't know too much about is the exact mixture of population. I mean, did the Vikings live in their own villages and interact with the next village where the English might have been living? Or did they live cheek by jowl in the same village? Or did they just have a Viking overlord on a large estate where most of the people living on the estate or in the village might not have been Scandinavian? I think their influence on the English language suggests that there was a lot of interaction on a personal level. And also, but that also comes inevitably with immigrants after the first generation or two. Then people start speaking the local language. That's, you can see that with any immigrant group in history, the language doesn't really last more than a few generations...
I personally think that many aspects of what we think of as the Viking Age continued, they crossed over the divide brought about by the coming of Christianity, and it's really only with the Protestant Reformation that life changed quite drastically in many Viking parts of the world."
