One sparkling August morning in 1970, I awoke in the small town of
Roskilde Denmark. I was hitchhiking to Copenhagen but had been warned that the youth hostels were full so I stopped short. So that morning I knew I was 30 km from downtown Copenhagen and absolutely nothing else about Denmark. By the end of the day I had become a serious fan of things Viking because of a 1962 find of five ships of various sizes in the mud near the main harbor. The good people of Roskilde had built a museum in 1969 to house these finds that from the
looks of things, has grown in size and sophistication since then.
I have a sister who has compiled a thorough genealogy of our family. All eight of my great-grandparents came from the Viking "belt" that extends from Denmark in the south to
Uppsala /
Birka in the north. Because of geography, the explorations / raids / settlements of the Danes and Norwegians went west. These are the best known Vikings because of their importance to British history—William the Conqueror was a Norman (northman / Norwegian), after all. The
Swedish Vikings went east and influenced the history of Russia and the Ukraine. Between a great-grandfather from Bergen Norway and two great-grandparents from Gotland, I have the range of Viking roots well covered.
In 1970, I knew none of this. In fact, the universe of Viking historians was pretty damn tiny. As my interest in the subject grew, I discovered I had latched onto a very obscure topic. For example: I found my way into a relationship with a woman who was half Norwegian. Since I was still a redhead, tall, and pretty good with a hammer, I thought that as a romantic gesture I would make her a Mjolnir (Thor's hammer) as a piece of
costume jewelry / good luck charm. I made it of wood and leather and it turned out quite nice. It might have worked as romantic gift except that 1) She had never heard of Mjolnir. 2) She had never heard of the Viking pantheon of gods. 3) She had no idea what this gesture was supposed to mean. This was 1994. Amazingly, pop culture has caught up with my obscure hobby. I was watching an episode of Jeopardy not long ago (a guilty pleasure indeed) when they had a category on Viking mythology—all three contestants could have gotten them all right.
These are my people. I have lived in Scandinavia on two occasions. No one I know acts remotely like a Viking raider. So the question that has fascinated me for the last 48 years has been—how did the Vikings become Scandinavians? My Lutheran preacher father claimed that because the Viking Age mostly ended with the coming of Christianity to the north, this was the defining event. I always had a lot of problems with that explanation because goodness knows, there have been plenty of bloodthirsty Christians in history.
My pet explanation is those Viking boats. No longships, no Viking Age. These were amazing craft. Able to travel long distances over open and often stormy oceans at high speed, shallow enough to navigate narrow rivers, and light enough to be hauled over portages. At the height of the Viking Age, their influence stretched from North America to Constantinople because of those boats. The folks who went out in raiding parties could be violent thugs—the folks who built the boats had to be highly skilled, in love with precision, and supported by other skilled trades like steel making. It requires a sophisticated society to float a navy that can conduct overseas raids. The peaceable producing classes had to stay home and build boats. The young bucks went a-Viking—mostly to get a grubstake so they could buy a boat. None other than Thorstein Veblen thought Viking raiders were mostly young men out having fun with dad's boat.
A recent find in Ribe Denmark gives new evidence for what simply had to be true—that Viking settlements had to be communities of skilled people. Those boats did not emerge from thin air. A boat demands a boatbuilder. Anyone who has ever built or maintained a boat will emphatically explain just how difficult this is to do.
