Who Were the Vikings? Raiders, Traders and Settlers From the North

A vikingr in Old Norse was someone who went on a raiding voyage, and to go i viking was to go raiding; it was an occupation, usually seasonal, not a nationality. The people themselves were Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, farmers and fishermen for the most part, speaking dialects of one language, worshipping Odin, Thor and Freyr, and living in chiefdoms that only became kingdoms during the period. What set them apart was the ship. The clinker-built longship, with overlapping planks on a keel, a single square sail and oars, was shallow enough to run up a beach or a river and seaworthy enough to cross the Atlantic, and no one else in Europe had anything like it.

The raids began at the end of the eighth century, and historians have proposed a cluster of causes rather than one: a growing population on thin Scandinavian farmland; the concentration of wealth in undefended monasteries; the collapse of Charlemagne's empire into quarrelling successors after 814; the demand of chieftains for silver and reputation with which to hold followers; the trade in slaves, which Vikings ran from Ireland to the Islamic world; and simply the ships, which made the coast of every rich kingdom a day's sail from a fjord. Christian writers, who wrote nearly all the sources, saw the raids as God's punishment, and their accounts of pagan savagery, though not invented, were written by the victims.

Three peoples went in three directions:

• •Danes went west and south: to England, where they conquered the north and east in the 860s, were held off by Alfred of Wessex, ruled the Danelaw and eventually, under Cnut in 1016, the whole country; and to France, where in 911 a chief named Rollo was given Normandy to stop him attacking Paris
• •Norwegians went west across the ocean: to Scotland, Ireland, where they founded Dublin, Cork and Waterford; to the Faroes and Iceland, settled from 870; to Greenland under Erik the Red in 985; and to Newfoundland, where his son Leif landed around 1000, five centuries before Columbus
• •Swedes went east up the rivers of Russia: as traders and mercenaries called Rus, who founded Novgorod and Kiev, gave Russia its name, served the Byzantine emperor as his Varangian Guard, and reached Baghdad by way of the Volga

The helmets had no horns; that image comes from a costume designer for Wagner's operas in 1876. The real Vikings were vain about their appearance, combing their hair, bleaching it, bathing weekly, which an English chronicler complained gave them an unfair advantage with English women. They had a legal system with assemblies, the things, at which free men settled disputes and made law, and the Icelandic Althing of 930 is the oldest parliament in the world. Their women could own property, divorce and run farms, and were buried with the keys of the household. They were also slavers, whose economy ran partly on captives, and their raids were as brutal as the monks said. The poetry, sagas and myths that survive were written down in Iceland two centuries later by Christians, and they are the reason the Norse gods are better known than those of any other pre-Christian European people.

The Viking age is conventionally closed in 1066, when Harald Hardrada of Norway, the last great Viking king, was killed invading England at Stamford Bridge, three weeks before the Normans, descendants of Rollo's Vikings, conquered it at Hastings. The deeper ending was conversion. Scandinavian kings adopted Christianity between about 960 and 1030, partly from conviction and partly because it brought them the administrative and diplomatic tools of the kingdoms to the south, and a Christian king could not easily raid a Christian abbey. The settlers abroad were absorbed: the Danes of England became English, the Normans became French and then conquered England as such, and the Rus became Russians. Greenland's colony died out in the fifteenth century as the climate cooled, and Newfoundland was forgotten until the foundations of the Norse houses at L'Anse aux Meadows were dug up in 1960.

The written sources for the Vikings were mostly produced by their victims or by Icelanders centuries later, so historians lean heavily on other evidence. Runestones, carved mostly in the tenth and eleventh centuries, record the Scandinavians in their own words, often commemorating relatives who died abroad in England or in the east. Archaeology supplies ships, graves, houses and hoards of silver, including Arabic coins that trace the eastern trade routes. At L'Anse aux Meadows, tree rings in cut wood recorded a burst of radiation from a solar storm in the year 993, which allowed researchers to count forward and show that the timber was cut in 1021.

Chemistry and genetics have added more. The isotopes in tooth enamel record the geology of the place where a person grew up, so a skeleton buried in England can be shown to have spent its childhood in Scandinavia. Large studies of ancient DNA have found that people buried as Vikings were genetically mixed, with some having little or no Scandinavian ancestry, which supports the idea that Viking was a way of life that others could join. The same methods showed that one famous warrior grave at Birka in Sweden held a woman, a finding whose interpretation is still debated.

Much of the Viking world ran on silver measured by weight rather than counted as coins. Arabic dirhams, English pennies, arm rings and ingots were all treated as raw metal, and when a smaller sum was needed a piece was simply chopped off, which is why archaeologists call it hacksilver. Traders carried small folding balance scales and sets of standard weights, many found in graves and at trading sites, and they tested the quality of the metal by cutting small nicks into it to check that it was silver all the way through. These test marks survive on thousands of coins.

The largest hoard of this kind found in western Europe was dug up beside the River Ribble at Cuerdale in Lancashire in 1840: more than 8,000 objects, around 40 kilograms of coins, ingots and cut fragments, buried in a lead-lined chest in the early tenth century. Its coins came from Viking-ruled York, from Anglo-Saxon and Frankish mints and from the Islamic world, a cross-section of a trading network in a single box. A bullion economy suited people who dealt in many currencies under no single state's guarantee, and Scandinavian kings only began minting coins of their own in large numbers towards the end of the Viking age.

The best known image of a Viking, a warrior with a horned helmet, is almost certainly wrong. Only one reasonably complete helmet from the Viking Age has been found, at Gjermundbu in Norway, and it is a rounded iron cap with a guard around the eyes and no horns. Horns would have been impractical in battle, easy for an opponent to grab or strike.

The horns largely come from the nineteenth century. Romantic artists liked them as a symbol of northern wildness, and the costume designer Carl Emil Doepler gave horned helmets to characters in the first full production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle in 1876. The look caught on and spread through illustrations, films and sports mascots, so that a nineteenth-century stage costume now defines a people of the ninth century.

The Vikings were Danes, Norwegians and Swedes who, between about 790 and 1066, used their unmatched ships to raid, trade and settle across Europe: Danes conquering much of England and founding Normandy, Norwegians settling Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and briefly North America, and Swedes founding the Russian state and reaching Baghdad. Driven by land hunger, silver, slaves and reputation, they were farmers and traders as well as raiders, and their age ended as their kings converted and their settlers were absorbed.