I'm not even trying to be fair, impartial, or unbiased. This is a rant about people whose ahistorical bullshit and blood and soil appropriation of ancient cultures they have no relation to beyond living in vaguely the same place to make themselves feel better about working in cubicals pisses me off.
This shit just pisses me off. I did Viking larping for years, studied some Archeology, read a lot of very boring site reports. These guys are a bunch of neo-pagans, emphasis on neo, making shit up to fit modern white-supremacist notions of a mythical golden age because Romans and Christians showed up and turned everyone in to [misogyny noises].
There's just so much that pisses me off. The droning, and throat singing, and all that shit? Has nothing to do with Europe at any period in the last 10,000 years. Thoraboos just grabbed it from other parts of the world because they think it's dark and scary or something. What we actually have attested of viking, ei early medieval Northern European, entertainment consisted of what were basically rap battles, with people getting up to show off by dissing each other using an elaborate poetic language of word games, metaphors, allusions, and references that was, by design, hard to follow; Being clever and inventive was part of the game.
They're dressed like shit - Apparently the antlers are based on some artifacts found at Starr Carr, England. The Starr Carr site in 9,000 years old. It has nothing, at all, what so ever, to do with vikings, germans, or any people or culture recognizably related to Europeans.
idk what's with the dull colors. Vikings were kind of famous for wearing brightly colored clothes in clashing colors.
And the obsessive focus about droning on and on about Odin this and Odin that. For one, the Odin cult is fairly recent. I think after like 500ad, at best guess, with Thor and Freyr probably pre-dating that. And who knows what was going on prior to that. The people living in Europe at the time were almost entirely illiterate. They didn't write things down so we don't know what their pictures depict or what any of it meant.
My point is, mostly - "Norse Neo-Paganism" was invented in the 90s in Europe, and in the 60s in the US. In the US it was dreamed up by a white Neo-Nazi who was bored in Prison. It's totally, utterly, utterly ahistorical. It's just a mish-mash of neo-ager shit from the 60s, random Victorian esoteric-ism, terrible pop-history, and German romantic nationalism. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, the entire point of Germanic romantic nationalism was to create a unifying national mythology to convince all the German speaking people that they were part of the nation ethnic nation, which was flagrantly ridiculous and completely ahistorical. And it formed most of the basis for Nazi nationalism.
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with history or archeology. It's all about building a mythical golden age that conforms to modern nationalist and racial mythology. Europeans alienated by modernity and unsatisfied by Christianity are appropriating the practices of Indigenous people in order to try to create an indigenousness for themselves. It's pure what no theory does to a motherfucker. They don't like modern society, so instead of doing something about it they form a reactionary nationalist, racialized, and mythic rejection of it. And they don't even go for the cool parts, like dressing really pretty and combing your hair and singing poetry, that are actually attested; They make up this stupid militaristic grunting and growling bullshit while mashing together cultures thousands of years distant, spread across huge areas, all trying to create on through-going nationalist myth. They congratulate themselves about owning the Romans in Teutonberg forest, ignoring that Arminius was a Roman Equestrian, a Citizen, and that pretty much everyone at the time thought Rome was awesome since that's where the wine, engineers, bathes, and all the other cool shit came from. This nationalist "Romans vs. Germans" shit would have been completely bizarre to people of the time who didn't consider Romans an ethnicist (which they were not) and didn't consider themselves "Germans".
And then they jump 800 years forward to claim they're all vikings, a completely different culture with a different religion, different language, different economy, different everything. And then, without missing a single fucking beat, they start drawing medieval Icelandic Christian magic signs from the 1600s on themselves while reciting Snorri's 13th century Icelandic Christian fan-fic, in which the Norse gods are actually survivors of the Trojan war.
It's so fucking frustrating. Just jumping back and forth in history, snatching things from disparate periods, languages, and cultures, mixing in absolutely nonsense new-ager mysticism, flat out making things up that sound cool, dressing the whole thing up with hyper-masculine toxic dudebro bullshit, and, AND, fucking things up for the rest of us because now if I wear a thor's hammer or something people think I'm either a racist or a choose your own adventure idiot or both. Like if I hear one more asshole going on about how cool and germanic it was that his ancestors blew scary lur horns at the Germans and that makes him proud as a viking and would I like to see his authentic slavic pagan tattoos I'm going to throw my shield at his head. Some dipshit was like "Oh yeah the we know about the Germans because ibn Fadlan blah blah blah" and it's like you absolute fucking shithead, ibn Fadlan was hanging out with Rus on the fucking Volga!
I legit had an argument with some jackasses who were "reclaiming" the black sun, the SS one, and I could not hammer throught their fucking heads that Himmler made the fucking thing up and there was nothing to reclaim.
This ahistorical made up bullshit drives me absolutely fucking bonkers. Modern people trying to project their modern noias and alienation back on to ancient cultures we barely know anything about and coming up with weird fashy nationalist shit. Just absolutely infuriating at every level. And god forbid you tell any of these dipshits that there's lots of evidence that the adoption of Christianity across Europe was gradual and voluntary. Many of them are very strongly latched on to having a colonialism narrative of their very own so they can cry about the big mean christians who destroyed their manly natural magical authentic pan-european pagan golden age! Never mind that pretty much all of their fucking written sources ARE CHRISTIANS. Their whole conception of these cultures is mostly uncritically based on Christian fiction written for entertainment! Often hundreds of years after any of the cultural or religious practices described would have actually occured, if they were real at all!
Also apparently there are no drums to be found in "viking age" sites in Scandanavia?!?!?!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Its because white people like the idea of the whole 'rape and pillage might make right manly white man' Viking myth invented by white supremacists
I mean that one was invented by the English, which I suppose makes it invented by white supremacists. But only indirectly .
Isn't that basically how the Vikings operated though (except, of course, they wouldn't think of themselves as white)?
The thing sort of is that Vikings werent "a people" but specific people doing specific actions for profit, its like how you can engage in piracy and be a pirate because of that, but pirates are not "a people".
"Vik" is generally held to mean small fjords that pirates would launch out of using fast rowed ships to over-take heavier, less maneuverable merchant vessels. Vikings, according to this thought, were people who attackes from viks, and yeah, they were pirates.
The vast, vast majority of them were farmers, fishermen, crafts people, or slaves to the above three. Going viking was something a small portion of the population did, usually to raise seed money for a farm, fishing vessel, or their own viking expeditions. Vikings engaged in as much trade as pillaging but since every written account we have is from Christians who were absolutely fucking terrified of them (baring some corner cases like ibn Fadlan), they were mostly written about as horror movie monsters. They were famous travelers and traders - There's Muslim coins in Scandanvian medieval sites, for instance. Half the reason they were turning up in Inland France is that they had better ships than almost anyone in Europe, far more sea-worthy, faster, and often capable of navigating fairly shallow rivers. So they could go pretty much anywhere they wanted, and did, and a lot of them were pirates and pirates are exciting and scary so people wrote about the pirates and not the guys who showed up with five tons of salt herring, cat fur, and seal skins to trade for whatever the fuck French people had to trade for. Probably mud and heresy.
Re: Thinking of themselves as white; Beowolf is a spear-Geat or something. there were about eighteen flavors of Geats at the time and they all hated each other when they weren't fucking. He wasn't Swedish because the idea of Sweden didn't exist yet, because Nation-States were invented in the 17th and 18th centuries by assholes. Hrothgar wasn't Danish, he was a Scylding.
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I would also like to hear more expert opinions on this, but I think it's always safe to keep in mind how the powerful of their times influenced the perception of the Vikings. Most of what we know outside of artifacts was written about by romans who has incentives to lie significantly about as much as possible. I follow a similar line for Romans to how I deal with Nazi propaganda: assume everything is a lie until corroborating evidence arises from sympathetic or more neutral sources. I guess we also have some evidence of later Vikings from the Norman invasions, but I'm still just unconvinced they were unique in terribleness or might-makes-right acts.
????? A good chunk is from the sagas, another good chunk is from Arab writers, and then you've got a lot from the English. While there were roman wirters who wrote about the vikings, that's only in the context of Varangians interacting with the Roman empire.
I guess I meant from before the sagas, because most people are referring to before the times when Vikings were highly influenced by other Europeans when they talk about the ruthlessness of Vikings. Maybe I'm the one wrong here though. Arab writers is totally new to me though, but that also sounds like it would be from much more recent times that the ahistoric fans are referring to
But do the sagas seem to paint a picture of a particularly dangerous/ruthless society? I was always kind of under the impression that they were fairly normal relative to pretty much every other culture's early stories
The "Viking age" is typically measured from the raid on lindisfarne in 793 AD to 1066 when the Normans conquer England. While "Going viking" was a phenomenon before this and also later, this also roughly fits with the most active period of Viking activity and so it useful.
The "saga age" was roughly from 800 to 1100 and overlaps therefore quite nicely with the "Viking age". While quite a few sagas were written later, and some aspects of their culture were only written about later, the most active period of writing was contemporary with the "Viking age". And typically done by people who were writing about events that happened quite close to their own life.
The Arab writers were very contemporary too. They wrote about their interactions with the vikings, and typically in their capacity as envoys or diplomats.
Ibrahim ibn Yaqub wrote about vikings in the context of trade with the Danes in Schleswig, Abu al-Khattab was writing about diplomatic contact between Viking kings and the Cordoban court while serving in the court.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan was writing about his own travels with vikings, and his views and prejudices are the origin of a lot of our stereotypes of vikings. The idea of vikings as uncouth and unwashed brutes is from him. Because he was writing from the perspective of a highborn envoy interacting with merchant traders who did not have a religious demand to wash thrice a day.
And what is true is that the various sources give us different views of the vikings. Vikings being written about by the victims of their raids (Discounting Andalusian but not other Iberian sources) describe them as almost demonic, because they see people popping out of the dark to raid, steal, pillage, abduct and burn.
Writers who live in Viking conquered lands typically write about them as a ruling elite (Here it is interesting to note English writers writing about how vikings were all obsessed with grooming, and as seducers of all the womenfolk, in marked contrast to the Arab perspective)
Writers with neutral or trade relations write about them as seafarers and travellers from far off lands.
And the Romans in Miklagaard write about them as a combination warrior caste, immigrants and barbarian threat.
It is hardly realistic to assume they were evil in any spectacular sense if we look at the full picture. But a Viking raider (A partly tautological term) was a slave trading murdering robber on a boat. Its just that this fact gets acknowledged in a way we don't typically acknowledge the contemporary European knight as the same on horseback.
Very interesting, thanks a ton! I am still under the impression that those who make ahistorical claims are referring to some earlier periods, or at least that's how I'm usually interpreting it because of comments about the lack of influence of "eastern cultures" or about some fictional isolation. But I was totally unaware about those Arab connections, that's pretty fucking cool.
Last paragraph is exactly what I was hoping was true, because it's kind of my begingpoont for such discussions. Viking were murdering slavers in a time and material context where that was unfortunately normal, and we're not uniquely savage or particularly powerful outside of good raising boats
They're usually just mashing together whatever they think is cool and germanic and [misogyny noses] without any real understanding of history or culture or anything. It's very incoherent.
And yeah, Muslims and Scandanavians both went all over the place and interacted on the edges of their spheres of influence. You find medieval Muslim stuff, mostly coins, in Medieval Scandanavian sites and they were definitely trading for exotic luxury goods, including I am 100% sure but don't have a citation silk from China.
Yeah the incoherence is exactly what I mean; classic fascists shit
o7
There is some silk found from the era in Scandinavia, but most people assume it's from Central Asia or Roman (Byzantine), because at that time the Romans had a steady domestic silk production. I think the most "Exotic" stuff we know of in that sense is the presence of Indian goods in Scandinavia. There's a rather famous statue of Buddha known as the Helgö-Buddha which was found in alongside Coptic, Roman and Irish luxury items on the small Swedish island of Helgö in a dig dated to the Viking age.
Thank you. I need to do more readon.
It is much more common in "ahistorical" narratives surrounding vikings to project later innovations back unto the vikings rather than projecting previous era forwards unto the vikings. Because in a sense Scandinavian history starts here. Not in the sense that there weren't people here, or that they didn't interact meaningfully with history (The great migration, the Cimbri, the Geats and the goths [Bearing in mind here that the Goths had wandered out of Scandinavia centuries before they became what we now know them as] are all proof that his is obviously not the case), but in the sense that much of what went on prior is to this day a big ol' question mark.
It is much more likely for someone to project the idea of a "Sweden" back on to a person living in the area in 900 CE than for someone to project Cimbrian culture unto a guy living in Jutland in 900 AD because what the fuck is Cimbrian culture? What does that entail? Are those guys even Germanic they could be fucking Cimmerian or Celtic for all anyone knows.
And while again I don't want to project unique evil unto the vikings, it is worth bearing in mind that the vikings were the center of the European slave trade at the time. The demand for European slaves in the Middle East/North Africa/Iberia was largely satisfied by varangians and vikings either semi directly through the rus or indirectly through venice/italy and Constantinople. The Muslims who went to Norse lands did so to negotiate either reprieves from raids or the price of slaves. Abd al-Rahman III, the guy who employed Abu al-Khattab, purchased about 10000 slavic slaves from Venetian traders, and those guys would have ultimately been captured by varangians/vikings.
Holy shit I had no idea it was happening at that scale. Something new to look in to.
Some of the larger slave trade hubs would have castration houses to supply the eunuchs. The whole thing is fucking wild, and the medieval slave trade just sort of gets written out of history.
Damn. I clearly have a lot more reading to do.
And note; ibn Fadlan's encounter with the Rus on the Volga was like no shit THREE THOUSAND MILES from London, so who knows if they even had the same practices.
They were always highly influenced by other Europeans. No one was ever really isolated. There was always trade and travel and people showing up in weird places. Viking ships could do like 100 miles a day or something absurd like that under good conditions. they were trading with people in Spain.
Probably should've made clearer that I intended to say "before intermingling resulted in significant cultural assimilation with other, more well known, Europeans like those in Rome, Spain, Russia, or turkey. These fascistic ahistorical people in referring to imagine such a time when the influence was so low that the "wimpy European culture" hadn't "fucked up the Aryan viking culture." I also realize that isolation was rarely ever a reality (though the coins thing from your other comment is also news to me, cool shit)