What Made the Vikings Tick?

Our clearest window on the Vikings appears in the early writings of Iceland – primarily the sagas, the greatest vernacular literature of medieval Europe. These stories of kings and common heroes help bring that age to life in our imagination.^1,2,3,4

Island 2013 778 Reykjavik – Perlan – Saga Museum: Flickr

The swan-breasted and swan-necked Viking longship  fueled the Viking age from 800 to 1066.⁵ An engineering marvel, these ships would carry merciless and relentless sea-rovers from Norway west  to the Orkneys, Iceland, Greenland and to L’Anse aux Meadows  in Newfoundland in the year 1000.^6,31 The Viking craftsmen built the hull first, overlapping the planks in what is termed the clinker-built or lapstrake style, and the internal cross beams were often tied to the ribs near the keel to provide added elasticity. They were the stealth bombers of the day.^7,8,9

Viking long ship museum; Flickr

Skimming over the rough waves of the north Atlantic by sail, or rowed up a river, these versatile and sleek swans took the adventurous and warlike Norse to lands more promising than their own, and they hungered in time for new homes in sunnier climes with more fertile earth.^10,11 According to the sagas, the unifying efforts of Harold Finehair, the first King of Norway, forced many freedom loving Norwegians to set sail west, and some of these displaced Norwegians, both nobles and farmers, transplanted their democratic and literary heritage and habits in Iceland, a fortress of Norse culture.¹²

The best poets of the period were Icelanders, and some even served in the court of English kings, so similar were the related Gothonic  languages. These poems often provide the skeleton on which the narrative of the sagas hang and the intricate nature of these poetic compositions ensure that seeds of history abide in them.^13,14 Viking poets used elaborate metaphors or kennings so that the ‘whale road’ was the ocean, and the ‘fish of the forest’ a dragon.^15,16

Humpback Whale; Flickr

The greatest of these poets, Egil Skallagrimsson, stood head and shoulders above his Viking peers. Jesse Byock in using science to illuminate the past credibly suggests that this ugly and massive man suffered from an ailment called Paget’s disease that deformed and thickened his bones. Egil also lived the Viking life and wrote of it with eloquence.¹⁷

Shipwrecked on the coast of England at the mouth of the Humber, Egil and his men find themselves near York, then ruled by his enemy Erik Bloodaxe, former King of Norway. Viewing it shameful to flee, he marches fully armed into the hall of Erik. The strong-willed Queen Gunnhilda suggests that they kill him outright, but it being night that was viewed as a crime, so Erik bids Egil goodnight, tomorrow he will die. A common friend, Arinbjorn  provides an unlikely way out; in the night Egil must compose a poem of praise about his enemy Erik, a head-ransom poem.

The next morning, he recites his poem in a clear, strong voice. The entire head-ransom poem appears in chapter sixty-three of the saga, a poem of twenty stanzas. Although Egil has killed kinsmen of the king and queen, he is set free, and this gets to something crucial about the minds of these men.¹⁸

Egil Skallagrimsson, Wikimedia

The Vikings prized a matrix of four interconnected virtues above all: courage, honor, generosity, and loyalty.¹⁹ A curious blend of fearlessness and fatalism guided them to face inevitable death with stoic fortitude, an idea captured in the poem Havamal, The Sayings of the High One: “Cattle die, wealth dies, kinsmen die, you yourself must one day die but word-fame never dies for him who achieves it well.”²⁰ The poem promises immortality to Erik, so he frees the killer of his own son, an act of incredible generosity.²¹

To the East  the longships took the Swedish Rus along rivers to build Novgorod and Kiev, the first towns in the country that would take their name, Russia. But the most highly contested prize was south , and in the Viking Age Norwegians and Danes shocked the shores of Ireland, the United Kingdom and France, a hammer from the North.^22,31

Settlement of Iceland, “Viking Expansion” – Wikipedia

The Norwegians created the first towns in Ireland including Dublin; and the great Dane Canute, the most capable King of medieval England, also ruled Norway and Denmark well;^23,24 the Norse Normans took England with William the conqueror in 1066 to end the Viking age and to seed English with French and Latin words.^25,26,31 But one, more significant contribution remains.

The eagerness of Vikings in the Danelaw to communicate with their southern Anglo-Saxon neighbors produced a friction that led to the erosion of the complicated inflectional word-endings, so that the English language increased in simplicity, clarity, directness and strength. ^27,28,30

         Professor Tom Shippey vividly explains the loss of grammatical word endings; someone from south of the Danelaw might say in Old English: “Ic selle the that hors the draegeth mine waegn.” A Viking a bit North might say it this way: “Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine.” With some words in common, they roughly understand each other; in time the inflections melted away and this remained: “I’ll sell you the horse that drags my wagon.”²⁸

This Viking-bred English dispensed from the north, insatiable in seeking distant shores, has a hoard now of about one million words.^27,28,29,30

Lastly, the Vikings soon turned swords into plowshares, and like all good immigrants, they quickly assimilated.³¹

End Notes

¹ Magnusson. Viking History Part 1: 0:40 – 2:03; 2:30 – 3:00.

²Hauptmann.

³“Icelandic Literature.”

⁴Byock.

⁵Magnusson. Viking History Part 1: 0:40 – 2:03.

⁶Magnusson. Viking History Part 2: 3:30 – 6:11.

⁷Magnusson. Viking History Part 2: 8:10 – 8:51.

⁸Magnusson. Viking History Part 3: 10:15 – 11:41.

⁹Magnusson. Viking History Part 4: 0:00 – 2:30.

¹⁰Magnusson. Viking History Part 3: 10:15 – 11:41.

¹¹Magnusson. Viking History Part 4: 0:00 – 2:30; 7:45 – 10:55.

¹²Magnusson. Viking History Part 5: 3:30 – 9:37.

¹³“Icelandic Literature.”

¹⁴Byock.

¹⁵Magnusson. Viking History Part 4: 3:40 – 4:15.

¹⁶Byock.

¹⁷Byock.

¹⁸Green. Egil’s Saga. Principally chapters 36; 43-45; 48; 49; 57–60; 62-64.

¹⁹ Potter: “The Vikings were cruel and relentless sea-rovers who honoured three virtues above all: courage, loyalty, and generosity.” (27)

²⁰Magnusson. Viking History Part 2: 6:11 – 7:03.

²¹Green. Egil’s Saga. Principally chapters 57–60; 62-64.

²²Magnusson. Viking History Part 7: 2:47 – 6:30.

²³Magnsson. Viking History Part 7: 7:00 – 8:12.

²⁴Cantor: “The most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history was the early eleventh-century Danish conqueror Canute.” (166)

²⁵Magnusson. Viking History Part 8: 0:55 – 3:20.

²⁶Magnuson. Viking History Part 9: 0:00 – 1:22: 4:08 – 10:01.

²⁷Potter: “No less far-reaching was the influence of Scandinavian upon the inflexional endings of English in hastening that wearing away and leveling of grammatical forms which gradually spread from north to south. It was, after all, a salutary influence. The gain was greater than the loss. There was a gain in directness, in clarity, and in strength.” (33)

²⁸McCrum: 70-71.

²⁹Crystal: 32 (loss or rapid increase in loss of inflectional endings due to Vikings in Danelaw); 119. “It is difficult to see how even a conservative estimate of English vocabulary could go much below a million lexemes. More radical accounts, allowing in all of scientific nomenclature, could easily double this figure.” (119)

³⁰“BBC Documentary English Birth of a Language”: 35:00 to 37:20

³¹”Vikings, the Founders of Europe” passim.

Works Cited

“BBC Documentary English Birth of a Language” YouTube. 27 July 2013. Web. 19 August 2015.

Byock, Jesse. “Egil’s Bones.” Scientific American, January 1995: 82 – 87. Web. 22 August 2015.

Cantor, Norman. The Civilization of the Middle Ages. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print.

Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Green, W. C., translator. Egil’s Saga. 1893. Web. 23 August 2015.

Hauptmann, Katharina. “Icelandic Medieval Literature and Sagas.” Wall Street International. 24 May 2014. Web. 22 August 2015.

“Icelandic Literature.” Wikipedia. Web. 22 August 2015.

Magnusson, Magnus. “Viking History Part 1 – Part 9.” YouTube: 21 October 2014. Web. 19 August 2015.

McCrum, Robert; William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Print.

Potter, Simeon. Our Language. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd. 1950. Print.

“Vikings, the Founders of Europe.” YouTube. 3 December 2014. Web. 28 December 2015.

Works Cited: Fair Use Images

(For the Video)

            1. Island 2013 778 Reykjavik – Perlan – Saga Museum; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Klaus Nahr

            2. Viking long ship museum; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Suw Charman-Anderson

            3. Settlement of Iceland, “Viking Expansion” – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            4. Clinker – caravel; Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            5. Gokstad ship replica and a small boat at Borgpollen; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Juanjo Marin

            6. “Harold Finehair” Battle of Stiklestad, Pal Christian Eggen som konge i spelet 2014; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            7. Iceland Lomagnupur; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Niklas Sjoblom

            8. Saga Museum; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Alyson Hurt

            9. Humpback Whale; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Robbie Shade

            10. Egil Skallagrimsson 17c manuscript; Wikimedia: Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            11. Luigi Cattaneo Museum, Institute of Human Anatomy, Bologna; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Scott D. Haddow

            12. stormy_seas_; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Ishtaure Dawn

            13. The snow queen; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Michal Grajkowski

            14. The Vikings are coming; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Chris Jones

            15. The King Defended; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by CGP Grey

            16. Immortal; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by KOREphotos

          17. (Repeated image) Settlement of Iceland, “Viking Expansion” – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            18. Canute – North Sea Empire; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            19. William the Conqueror; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by B

            20. Danelaw; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; Google search labelled for noncommercial reuse with modification

            21. Oxford English Dictionary Entry Slips; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Media Specialist

            22. “We shall beat our swords into plowshares.” Sculptor E. Vuchetich; Flickr: Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial reuse with modification by Mark B. Schlemmer