Vikings were global cultural influencers, not just warriors

Vikings have a mythic place in our culture. We think of swashbucklers roaming the seas for treasure, violent vagabonds who never settled. Anders Winroth, a Yale University history professor, studies the Vikings, their poetry, sagas and way of life. He argues they are different than we perceive. He spoke to me from Stockholm — where he is summering — about his book, The Age of the Vikings. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Jennifer: We are fascinated with the Vikings even though we think of them as marauders with no conscience. Why do we keep reading about them, making films and TV shows about them? We like pirates, too, so I guess we find this kind of adventure, bloody or not, compelling.

Anders: You have part of the answer when you said it is like pirates. Vikings raided places all around Europe, and they did make it to North America. It is easier to have a personal relationship with Vikings than it is to other groups.

Jennifer: You noted that the composer Richard Wagner borrowed from Viking myth to create his Ring Cycle. When I was reading your section on Viking rings, I thought of J.R.R. Tolkien, who studied Nordic mythology in school.

Anders: Tolkien was a scholar of Old English and Old Norse literature. He must have read much of it in the original because he borrows a lot of things from the northern sources, such as the Edda, the main source of ancient Scandinavian mythology and poetry. There is a long list of names of dwarves from the Edda which come up in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. There has been a lot of fascination in the Vikings over the past 200 years, including Tolkien and Wagner and Game of Thrones.

Jennifer: Let’s talk about the boat graves — stones marked out on the earth in the shape of a ship, where bodies were buried. I assume it is linked to the importance of Vikings’ vessels. Why did they stop using this kind of grave marker? Was it just because Christianity had arrived?

Anders: Christianity led to a lot of new funerary customs but, of course, how you bury people is a fashion that changes all the time. It is not a simple story of Christianity coming and then boat graves disappear. We don’t know why they disappeared. It was the kind of burial that some people used, but it was never allencompassing. There was probably some connection between one’s status and having stone boat grave. It is not unusual to associate ships with dying. In Greek or Roman mythology, you needed to get over the River Styx to get to the underworld. You had to pay the ferry man or you became a ghost on the wrong side of the river.

Jennifer: The Vikings were far more creative than we are led to think. They wove tapestries, created rune stones, wrote sagas and poetry, sculpted and farmed.

Anders: One of the things I was trying to do in this book is to make the Vikings less sensational. We think of them as people who raided and killed and fought, but they also, like every other group of people, created literature and music, even though we don’t know much about it. From European sources, we know how they attacked and killed and plundered, but if you want to know who the Vikings were, we need to get sources from their side. You have to read their rune stones and poetry, which tell us how they lived.

Jennifer: Although Scandinavia and the Norse are thought of as predecessors to those living in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, it is the Icelandic who have the easiest time reading Viking runes.

Anders: It is hard for a modern English speaker to read Old English. It is even difficult to read Middle English — Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example. Language in Sweden, Denmark and Norway developed faster than Iceland, and so if we want to read Old Norse, we have to study it. The language spoken in Iceland today is not dissimilar to the language spoken in the Viking age, so they have a much easier time reading medieval sources.

Jennifer: The Vikings have left a subtle imprint on English-speaking cultures.

Anders: It is surprising how many words in English were borrowed from the Vikings, especially when they settled in northeastern England. Words like wonderful, rotten, in-law, outlaw, wrong, thrifty, window, fellow, eggs and steak. But because of their vast travels, they had an impact on places as far as the Caspian Sea.

My wife is from Iceland, and that is where most of the original manuscripts of the sagas and most of the poetry are located. Iceland is isolated. The North Atlantic is a dangerous ocean, so it was difficult to settle in Iceland. There were periods in Icelandic history where there was very little contact with Scandinavia.

There were a lot of Vikings in Ireland. Dublin, for instance, is a Viking name and Vikings settled in that area on the Liffey River, laying out streets. “Ransack” is a Norse word. The same word exists in Middle Irish as rannsaka (to search a house).

Icelanders don’t have last names, a legacy of the Vikings. My wife’s second name is Fridriksdottir, Frederick’s daughter.

One of the things I was trying to do in this book was to help people understand the Vikings in their time. The history of Scandinavia is violent, but so is the history of Europe. We think of the Vikings as violent, but that is a myth. In the context of the society they lived in, there was nothing remarkable about Viking violence.

They were much less violent than Charlemagne, who was the ruler of what is today’s France and Germany. He was a king and had the resources of his kingdom and was much more ruthless than the Vikings, who were more like freebooters.

The Vikings have left traces all over Europe and Central Asia but they existed such a long time ago that their culture is sometimes hard to see; it is entangled with the culture of the peoples in the areas the Vikings visited. There is a need for us to see the Norsemen in their historical context, not just as warriors but as cultural influencers.