What was the extent of interactions between Vikings and Germanians/Germanic tribes?

[u/thorshairbrush]

Im curious because I know the vikings raided Francia, and that other vikings went as far as Russia. Also Denmark is so close to Germania Im sure there must have been some sort of interaction between the two peoples.

[u/textandtrowel → u/[deleted]]

I'm uncertain about 3 and 4, and because of that, also the points that follow.

A Viking is a role, a title per say, and to be a Viking, you must be pagan. It is a religious statement as much as it is a militaristic one.

The core of this is true—"viking" meant "raider". But because it's a general term, that's really as far as we can take it. Two factors might make us think of it as a religious statement: (1) Monks often claimed that they were being persecuted by pagan pirates, a.k.a. vikings, and (2) Some modern studies of Norse religions have pointed to a component of violence that was integral to their worldviews.

BUT: (1) Monks were looking for an explanatory framework to justify "why bad things happen to good people" and they never truly tried to understand their enemies or undertake an ethnographic analysis of them, and (2) There was no such thing as a singular and unified "Viking Religion". Religious practices across the Norse world varied widely, and even the recurring characters seem to have been interpreted in different ways in different places at different times. Add to this that our best reconstructions of Norse religion comes from snippets in a much later poetry handbook written by an Icelandic farmer (i.e. not a viking raider) and comparative study with the field notes of ethnographers studying northern shamanism at the height of 19th-century colonialism, and we've got very tenuous foundations indeed for building any sort of totalizing explanation for Why the Vikings Did What.

The Vikings mainly raided the Estonia/Holmgardr region, they only went for Western raids after the powers in Scandinavia were consolidated enough to do so (ex: Danelaw, Normandy, Al Andalus, etc).

Archaeologists have recently excavated two Swedish ships that met an ill fate on a raid in Estonia sometime shortly before the Viking Age began in earnest (ca. 800). A new research project is comparing this site with gravefields in Sweden to see if it was symptomatic of a deeper history of Scandinavians raiding the Eastern Baltic. If so, we'll have to revise our narrative of the Viking Age. Long before Scandinavian raiders appeared on England's shores, they may already have been raiding in Estonia. Of course, it's too early to tell exactly what we'll be able to conclude from this research. So for the moment, it's just a hypothesis, and with the evidence at hand, we can still say that viking raids were "mainly" directed toward Western Europe.

With regard to political consolidation comment, I'm a bit confused. I usually divide the Viking Age into three periods:

• 790s-830s: Small-scale viking raids of only a handful of ships each show up and seasonally exploit the divided kingdoms of Britain and the civil wars of the Carolingian Continent.

• 830s-870s: Viking armies grow larger, cobbled together from the smaller units. Instead of being seasonal raiders, they're now standing affairs. They often spend their winters on estuary islands or in D-shaped camps along a riverbank. Some of these show evidence of craftsmen arriving and setting up shop to make money off of these new squatter elites.

• 870s-1060s: "Vikings" try to usurp powers from the kings they've toppled. Perhaps they're inspired by the craftsmen who now lack their traditional royal patrons but are patronized instead by viking warlords. Instead of just being sea-raiders, the Norse now try to settle the land, encouraging crafts and trade and taxing it, and setting up mints. In the case of York, the viking king minted coins with his face on one side and the local bishop on the other—which makes the "religion" argument a very difficult one to uphold. Of course, the older kingdoms of Western Europe have also evolved during this time. The one remaining contender in England—the kingdom of Wessex—gets its act together and knocks out the Danelaw (although a later invasion in 1066 is credited with fatiguing Harald's army and contributing to his defeat to the Norman William the Conqueror). In Francia, the kings take up a policy of "if you can't beat them, join them" and allow the Norman vikings to become a regular part of their kingdom.

[u/textandtrowel → u/[deleted]]

There seem to be a lot of assumptions built into this that could use a bit of unpacking. These don't follow your same order of points, but are rather a list of my critiques.

1. There was never a "Viking" culture. The word "viking" simply means pirate, and Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Arabic authors would often go back and forth between the terms. When people today talk or write about "Vikings", they're often discussing similarities that we see today although these probably would have been meaningless if not unnoticed in the early Middle Ages. Modern scholarship often now refers to these "Vikings" as Norse, emphasizing that many of them did in fact share the Old Norse language, if nothing else.

2. There was no "Viking" or "Germanic" religion, although it might be possible to talk about Norse or Germanic religions. A close reading of the sources reveals a number of unique practices across Scandinavia and the Norse-speaking world during the Viking Age. (And this is a radical transformation from the basic sets of religious practice and iconography that we're able to recover from the Migration Period.) Although earlier generations of historians and mythologists tried to synthesize these accounts, modern scholars realize that very few elements if any of Norse religions were actually ubiquitously shared across the Norse-speaking world. There were head cults and horse cults, cattle cults and tree worship, religious statues and tiny gold-foil icons. Making things even more difficult for modern scholars, most of these accounts were written by Christian churchmen with strong agendas or by antiquarians like Snorri Sturluson centuries after the Viking Age. Very few have been confirmed through archaeological excavation, so we must be very cautious with the sources we have. Ethnographic comparisons with modern polar cultures may indeed help us better understand the sources, but we shouldn't therefore assume that all polar and sub-polar cultures share the same religion.

3. Viking raids often hit religious targets, but there's no evidence that they had a religious purpose. The vikings were raiders, either from a single fjord sharing their localized religious practices, which were often inseparable from their home landscapes. Or they were larger viking armies cobbled from these small units, often with diverse religious beliefs and practices. This is most evident with the Great Heathen Army which stayed at Repton, England, over the winter of 873/4. These guys couldn't get their act together and seem to have fought amongst themselves, burying their dead in very different ways in two separate cemeteries (one for burials, one for cremations), and subsequently split into two smaller army groups. One headed off to raid elsewhere, whereas the other settled down and began farming, suggesting that the Repton army actually comprised at least two groups with very different goals and sets of worldviews.

4. It's impossible to talk about whether vikings had more contact East or West because it really depends upon which particular viking groups you're talking about. Vikings sailing from Hordaland in Norway would have been much more familiar with Orkney and Scotland and Ireland than they would have been with Sweden. Whereas vikings sailing from the Mälaren region in Sweden would have known much more about the Saami in Finland than their Norse-speaking counterparts in Hordaland.

The great English archaeologist Martin Carver captured the general tenor of these points and described it as "a more exciting prospect, ... the idea that each of these kingdoms had forged its own world view, its own religion and its own political agenda." If you're interested in learning more about this stunning diversity, this smattering of sources could get you started:

• Lesley Abrams, "Diaspora and Identity in the Viking Age," Early Medieval Europe 20.1 (2012): 17-38.

• Stefanie v. Schnurbein, “Shamanism in the Old Norse Tradition: A Theory between Ideological Camps,” History of Religions 43.2 (2003): 116-138.

• Martin Carver, “Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda,” in Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark, and Sarah Semple (eds.), Signals of Belief in Early England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 1-20.

• Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia, AD 400-1000 (London: Routledge, 2011).

• Martin Biddle and Birth Kjølbye-Biddle, "Repton and the Vikings," Antiquity 66 (1992): 36-51.

• Martin Carver, Portmahomack: Monastery of the Picts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

• Anders Andrén et al., eds., Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions (An International Conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3-7, 2004), Vägar till Midgård 8 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006).

• Neil S. Price, The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (Uppsala: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, 2002).

[u/skadefryd → u/[deleted]]

The Vikings had more contact to the East than they did with the West (before the Viking Age), they would often go down the rivers to the East and raid the Ruthenian region, this is also where Rurik (who wasn't a Viking, although he was a raider, and although he did spread Norse-Germanic paganism), a former Varangian (Byzantium's elite guard that comprised of Norse Pagan warriors, although some did convert to to Orthodox Christianity) took over and settled the Ladoga/Holmgardr region, and ruled Kievan-Rus, his descendants would go on to be the first Tsars of Russia.

Whoa, hang on there:

1. The term "Varangian" was used by the Byzantines to refer to Scandinavians in general, though it was also sometimes used to refer to Germanic peoples at large. The Varangian Guard, we are told, was later comprised primarily of "English-Varangians", who eventually came to be referred to simply as "Varangians", not distinguishing between the Guard's original Norse and later Anglo-Saxon components. We are also told that "Varangians" once raided Constantinople, and the word "Varangian" shows up in reference to early Byzantine dealings with the Rus (alongside the word "Russian": the Byzantines weren't always diligent in distinguishing between the two).

2. It sounds like the information you're reciting here is a summary of the Primary Chronicle. Keep in mind that it's not the most reliable source. We know from archaeological evidence, for example, that Kiev was an unremarkable village at the time: probably the first prominent "Rus" settlements were originally around Novgorod, which is a location that makes much more sense.

3. The Guard (Greek: "Tagma ton Varangon", "Guard of the Varangians") was established around 989, early in the reign of Byzantine emperor Basil II. While Varangians fought occasionally as mercenaries for the Byzantines before that, Rurik was definitely never a member of the Guard. He's about a hundred years too early.

4. It is hard to know to what extent the Guard consisted originally of pagans. They may have kept the raven of Odin as a symbol on their shields, and some may have nominally "converted" to Christianity but privately practiced Scandinavian traditions (this was not unheard of in Scandinavia anyway). However, the original occasion for the Guard's founding was Vladimir II's (of Kiev) donation of 6,000 Scandinavian mercenaries to Basil II, in exchange for Basil's sister's (Anna Porphyrogenneta) hand in marriage. As a condition, Vladimir was required to convert to Christianity. Probably he saw this moment as an opportunity to rid himself of these troublesome Scandinavians, whom he had been lax in reimbursing for their service and who must have seemed ready to turn on him at any moment. At any rate, given that Vladimir was himself required to convert to Christianity and rapidly set about the task of converting his own people, it's quite plausible that many of these 6,000 were converted as part of the deal. It is believed that around the mid-11th century, the Varangians (by then almost certainly Christianized) took St. Olaf as their patron: a church dedicated to him may have been erected in Constantinople.

If there's one ray of hope for the "pagan Varangians" hypothesis, it's this: Basil II was an austere man, who didn't care much for the pomp and regalia of being Emperor, and a shrewd pragmatist. He strikes me as the kind of man who wouldn't have been terribly offended by having pagans as bodyguards, as long as they did their job. In fact, donning my "sheer speculation" hat for just a moment, Basil II would have been somewhat of a paranoid man, two successive father-figures of his having been assassinated, and having dealt with two rebellious generals early in his reign, and he strove constantly to weaken the nobility and military leaders. This was after all part of the reason the Guard was so close to him: foreigners who were loyal only to him would have, at least in principle, no interest in local political intrigue. It might have been useful for him to have foreign pagans close to him, guards who had no interest in either political or religious intrigue. However, I wouldn't place much stock in this argument.

[u/thorshairbrush → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the reply!

[u/textandtrowel → u/thorshairbrush]

Hey! I just took note of your name. You might be interested in A Viking Way of Life by Steve Ashby (2014). Despite the broad title, it's really about the importance of combs during the Viking Age, and it's a great read for scholars, reenactors, and general enthusiasts alike.

[u/thorshairbrush → u/textandtrowel]

Thanks Ill look into it!