Viking 9.0

[Erminia Scharnberg]

Vikingswere seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden),[3][4][5][6] who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.[7][8][9] They also voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Greenland, and Vinland (present-day Newfoundland in Canada, North America). In their countries of origin, and some of the countries they raided and settled in, this period is popularly known as the Viking Age, and the term "Viking" also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a whole. The Vikings had a profound impact on the early medieval history of Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, Estonia, and Kievan Rus'.[10]

Expert sailors and navigators of their characteristic longships, Vikings established Norse settlements and governments in the British Isles, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast, as well as along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes across modern-day Russia, Belarus,[11] and Ukraine,[12] where they were also known as Varangians. The Normans, Norse-Gaels, Rus' people, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies. At one point, a group of Rus Vikings went so far south that, after briefly being bodyguards for the Byzantine emperor, they attacked the Byzantine city of Constantinople.[13] Vikings also voyaged to Iran[14][page needed] and Arabia.[15] They were the first Europeans to reach North America, briefly settling in Newfoundland (Vinland). While spreading Norse culture to foreign lands, they simultaneously brought home slaves, concubines, and foreign cultural influences to Scandinavia, influencing the genetic[16] and historical development of both. During the Viking Age, the Norse homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

The essential three elements of the word "Viking" are: the original meaning and derivation or etymology; its medieval usage; and its current modern-day usage. According to some authors, these three elements are often confused in popular and scholarly discussions. Also, the etymology of the word has been much debated by academics, with many origin theories being proposed.[19][20]

It has been suggested that the word viking may be derived from the name of the historical Norwegian district of Vkin, meaning "a person from Vkin", but people from the Viken area were called vkverir, ('Vk dwellers'), not "Viking", in Old Norse manuscripts. The explanation could explain only the masculine grammatical gender (vkingr) and not the feminine (vking); the masculine is more easily derived from the feminine than the other way around.[24][25][26]

Another etymology that gained support in the early 21st century derives Viking from the same root as Old Norse vika, f. 'sea mile', originally meaning 'the distance between two shifts of rowers', from the root *weik or *wk, as in the Proto-Germanic verb *wkan, 'to recede'.[27][28][29][24] This is found in the early Nordic verb *wikan, 'to turn', similar to Old Icelandic vkja (kva, vkva) 'to move, to turn', with "well-attested nautical usages", according to Bernard Mees.[29] This theory is better attested linguistically, and the term most likely predates the use of the sail by the Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe, because the Old Frisian spelling Witsing or Wīsing shows that the word was pronounced with a palatal k and thus in all probability existed in North-Western Germanic before that palatalisation happened in the 5th century or before (in the western branch).[24][29][30]

The Old Norse feminine vking (as in the phrase fara vking) may originally have been a long-distance sea journey characterised by the shifting of rowers, and a vkingr (masculine gender) would originally have been a participant on such a sea journey. In that case, the idea behind it seems to be that the tired rower moves aside on the thwart when he is relieved by the rested rower. This implies that the word Viking was not originally connected to Scandinavian seafarers, but assumed this meaning when the Scandinavians began to dominate the seas.[27] Even the word vikingr did not necessarily possess negative overtones, nor was it always associated with violence, and only in the post-Viking age would negative overtones be attached to the word.[31]

The earliest reference to wicing in English sources is from the pinal-Erfurt glossary which dates to around 700. The glossary's Latin translation for wicing is piraticum, or pirate in modern English. Whereas the first known attack by Viking raiders in England was at Lindisfarne about 93 years later.[35][36] In Old English, the word wicing appears in the Anglo-Saxon poem, Widsith, probably from the 9th century. The word was not regarded as a reference to nationality, with other terms such as Normenn (Northmen) and Dene (Danes) being used for that. In Asser's Latin work, The Life of King Alfred, the Danes are referred to as pagani (pagans); historian Janet Nelson asserts that pagani has become 'the Vikings' throughout the standard translation of this work, even though there is "clear evidence" that it was used as a synonym for Danes, while Eric Christiansen avers that it is a mistranslation made at the insistence of the publisher.[37] The word wicing does not occur in any preserved Middle English texts.

In the history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontifi, written by Adam of Bremen and completed in the 1080s, the term generally referred to Scandinavian pirates or raiders.[45]

The word Viking was introduced into Modern English during the 18th-century Viking revival, at which point it acquired romanticised heroic overtones of "barbarian warrior" or noble savage.[46] During the 20th century, the meaning of the term was expanded to refer not only to seaborne raiders from Scandinavia and other places settled by them (like Iceland and the Faroe Islands), but also any member of the culture that produced the raiders during the period from the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries, or more loosely from about 700 to as late as about 1100. As an adjective, the word is used to refer to ideas, phenomena, or artefacts connected with those people and their cultural life, producing expressions like Viking age, Viking culture, Viking art, Viking religion, Viking ship and so on.

The scholarly consensus[51] is that the Rus' people originated in what is currently coastal eastern Sweden around the eighth century and that their name has the same origin as Roslagen in Sweden (with the older name being Roden).[52][53][54] According to the prevalent theory, the name Rus', like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden (*Ruotsi), is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row" (rods-) as rowing was the main method of navigating the rivers of Eastern Europe, and that it could be linked to the Swedish coastal area of Roslagen (Rus-law) or Roden, as it was known in earlier times.[55][56] The name Rus' would then have the same origin as the Finnish and Estonian names for Sweden: Ruotsi and Rootsi.[56][57]

During and after the Viking raid on Seville in 844 CE the Muslim chroniclers of al-Andalus referred to the Vikings as Magians (Arabic: al-Majus مجوس), conflating them with Zoroastrians from Persia.[59] When Ahmad ibn Fadlan encountered Vikings on the Volga, he referred to them as Rus.[60][61][62]

The Viking Age in Scandinavian history is taken to have been the period from the earliest recorded raids by Norsemen in 793 until the Norman conquest of England in 1066.[64] Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea for sea routes to the south.

The Normans were descendants of those Vikings who had been given feudal overlordship of areas in northern France, namely the Duchy of Normandy, in the 10th century. In that respect, descendants of the Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, had Danish ancestors. Two Vikings even ascended to the throne of England, with Sweyn Forkbeard claiming the English throne in 1013 until 1014 and his son Cnut the Great being king of England between 1016 and 1035.[65][66][67][68][69]

Geographically, the Viking Age covered Scandinavian lands (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden), as well as territories under North Germanic dominance, mainly the Danelaw, including Scandinavian York, the administrative centre of the remains of the Kingdom of Northumbria,[70] parts of Mercia, and East Anglia.[71] Viking navigators opened the road to new lands to the north, west and east, resulting in the foundation of independent settlements in the Shetland, Orkney, and Faroe Islands; Iceland; Greenland;[72] and L'Anse aux Meadows, a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, circa 1000.[73] The Greenland settlement was established around 980, during the Medieval Warm Period, and its demise by the mid-15th century may have been partly due to climate change.[74] The Viking Rurik dynasty took control of territories in Slavic and Finnic-dominated areas of Eastern Europe; they annexed Kiev in 882 to serve as the capital of the Kievan Rus'.[75]

There is archaeological evidence that Vikings reached Baghdad, the centre of the Islamic Empire.[79] The Norse regularly plied the Volga with their trade goods: furs, tusks, seal fat for boat sealant, and slaves. Important trading ports during the period include Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang, Jorvik, Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod, and Kiev.

Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its seas and rivers for trade, raids, colonisation, and conquest. In this period, voyaging from their homelands in Denmark, Norway and Sweden the Norsemen settled in the present-day Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norse Greenland, Newfoundland, the Netherlands, Germany, Normandy, Italy, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,[80] Ukraine, Russia and Turkey, as well as initiating the consolidation that resulted in the formation of the present-day Scandinavian countries.

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