I'll confess that when I first read of the History Channel's series, The Vikings, I fully intended to never watch it. But, I happened to catch an episode and parts of two others. It's interesting and somewhat captivating I'll admit, but history it isn't. That's too bad, as the Vikings as a group (and they aren't a group, actually) are interesting, and they should be given a serious treatment, particularly by the History Channel.
Part of the problem I have with the show, I'll note right off the top, is that it fits into Hollywood's recent trend to treat all Christian cultures as hypocritical, and pagan cultures as benighted. Well, baloney. The Viking age coincided with an age in the British Isles that was deeply Christian, and by that I mean deeply Catholic. One recent British historian has stated that Medieval England was defined by this, and it was. Having been Christianized early in the Anglo Saxon period, the English became very devout, to be followed by the Irish and the Scots. The Welsh already were.
But this was a muscular Christianity, not one maintained by wimpy overweight men, as the show seems to want to suggest. Christian clerics of this period didn't shy much from marching right into pagan cultures and giving them the what for. When you look at saints associated with the British Isles, or with Scandinavia, of this period, they're a pretty hearty and hail bunch. St. Augustine headed into the Saxon lands knowing little about them other than that they were ruled by Saxon pagans. He actually scared those Saxons somewhat, so much so that an early encounter with a Saxon king was arranged to occur on an island, as the king was so afraid that something both supernatural and bad would happen to him, and he didn't want that to occur in town. St. Patrick, coming decades later, returned to a land where he'd been a slave and started the process of converting it. He was so tough that he didn't mind walking into druid strongholds and telling them to shape up.
This extends to the early Christians in Scandinavian lands, I'll note. Irish Christian slaves in Iceland refused to abandon their faith, and when Iceland experienced a severe earthquake late in this period, they pretty much told the Norsemen that they were getting exactly what they deserved. Iceland converted by vote of the Althing, its parliament, when the deciding vote was cast by a Norse pagan priest of some sort. He voted to for the entire island to convert. Not exactly the portrayal you'll see on television of either Christians (Christian missionaries had landed) or of the Norse.
Additionally, the show has apparently maintained, at some point, that the Scandinavians were ignorant of their being a European world beyond their shores, and that the Europeans were likewise ignorant of them. No, they weren't.
Europe might be thought of today as being bigger than it is now, which is to say that it was more difficult to travel around in, but it wasn't big. It's definitely the case that European cultures were aware of their near, and even far, neighbors.
Taking the Anglo Saxons as an example, it should be remembered that they were fairly recent immigrants, in terms of the human time line, to the British Isles themselves, having shown up as invaders and raiders in the 5th Century. If that sounds a lot like the Vikings, that's because the Saxons, whom seem to have been named after the sword they carried, the "Sax", were not much different at that time. The Saxons were certainly aware of their near neighbors. So were the Angles, an allied invading group who seem to have lived along the coast of far northern Germany (or what is now Germany) and therefore actually bordered Scandinavian lands. The Jutes, who apparently came from Jutland, lived in an area that jutted out to sea before they moved over, and likewise they would have been pretty familiar with other coastal people.
Indeed, the great early Anglo Saxon work of literature, Beowulf, is full of references to Scandinavians and the title character seems to be one, living in an area of what we'd regard as southern Sweden. The entire epic Saxon poem has nothing to do with the Saxons at all, but is all about Scandinavians, like the Geats and the Danes.
And the Vikings really got around, which is something that's worth remembering. They raided far into Russia, giving that country its name, as the Scandinavian tribe that did that, and eventually settled there, was the Rus. They'd ultimately raid as far south as what is now the coast of North Africa, pretty amazing really. And they hired out as mercenaries as far away as the Byzantine Empire.
That all took time to be sure, and the launching of their raiding did come as a rude to surprise to Europeans. That sudden spike in violence, which was to last for a very long time, seems to have been due to an improvement in climate conditions giving rise to the Medieval Climatic Optimum. When that occurred, farming conditions improved, followed by an increase in the population all over Europe, but which ironically meant that Scandinavians, who were still living on marginal land, had to look overseas to make a go of it. Some made a go of it by raiding, the verb for which in Old Norse was "viking". Most looked also towards emigrating, which ultimately took them to England and Ireland, where they moved wholesale communities once they realized that they could, to Iceland once they found it, to Greenland, again once they found it, and to the coast of France, which they scared the French into giving them.
They're an interesting group indeed, the last of the Europeans to live in that fashion, although certainly not the first, and coming in an age in which the Church had scribes who were literate so that the events could be recorded, but also coming at an age in which, by and large, the groups they attacked were stronger than they were, and survived the events to tell the tale.
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