Viking At Coppergate

Erik the Red was a Norwegian Viking that was born in the 10th Century C.E, and his life contributed significantly to the outstanding legacy of the Vikings through his explorations. It is through the discovery of Greenland and its later settlement that cast Erik the Red’s legendary adventures into folklore. These two events are how Erik the Red played his role in Viking history, not through warfare, but through explorations. The adventures undertaken, and the feats achieved by Erik the Red cement his place in Viking History.

When one sees the word Viking, the mind firstly shifts to men who are uncivilized and unprincipled. Using evidence of achievements and victories will not only show how much they impacted Europe, but how sophisticated Vikings actually were. As Charlemagne’s empire ended, the people of Europe showed extraordinary resilience toward the new movements of the era. From 800 to 1200 CE, Vikings ruled medieval Europe. These Vikings, along with thick soil, are credited with shifting Europe from endemic violence toward cooperation and legal order. An attack on the Lindisfarne monastery off the coast of Northumberland in northeastern England marked the beginning of the Viking Age. Vikings began to appear in Europe due to Scandinavian raiders repeatedly visiting the Christian countries of Europe. At first they were content with just raiding lands, but soon they began to seize land and proclaim rule. They sought riches, not land. With this established rule, Vikings promised safety and began to reform the lands they had acquired. The people agreed due to starvation and possible attacks from eneimes. The new lands had a need for settled agriculture, defensive warfare and commerce. As the Vikings began to fulfill these needs they saw an expansion in cooperation and rule of law among the villagers.

The video that watched was a PBS documentary called Vikings Unearthed. The of the major differences that I saw when compeering this video to Jared Diamond’s Collapse or Wiesner’s text is the difference in technology. The video starts off where Diamond is and takes it to another level by using satellites to find new settlements and remains in America. The video talks about space archeologists and those people using the satellites to find lost cities, while Dimond focuses on the places we already know about. The video and both readings agree that the Vikings did not leave a lot behind so it is hard to figure out where their villages were located. Both Diamond and the PBS video describe how living in Scandinavia was hard because when it turned to winter the Vikings would need to live on ice. For a rural society, this was a big problem. PBS goes into depth on the cultural aspect of the Vikings. Like Diamond and Wiesner, the video talks about social stratification where some Vikings were more important than others. Jurls were at the topic of the social chain while slaves were at the bottom. Vikings were also

Viking expansion was caused by Christian churchmen, beginning with Alcuin, who attributed it to God’s doing. These men deemed the Viking raids punishment for religious laxity. However, an eleventh century Saxon cleric claimed that Viking expansion was actually the result of overpopulation and poverty in the Viking homeland. The Norse, or the Viking peoples, had gone to the Atlantic islands as landless sons, social outcasts, and political refugees because they were forced to leave their homes to search for opportunities elsewhere. The reason of Viking expansion is similar to that of the Europeans when they discovered and conquered the New World. The Viking emigration spread all over Europe, with the Danes spreading through Holland all the way down to Spain and in to the Mediterranean. The Swedes traveling east, across the Baltic

Instead of designing a structure with a central power, the Vikings devised an empire split into several clans consisting of warriors from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica). Division into clans instead of a centralized government allowed them to be more mobile and versatile in their expansion settling on multiple continents. Furthermore, according to archaeologist Mark Schwartz, this expansive geographical distribution was the result of trading, raiding, and settling new lands (Schwartz). Their geographic dispersal allowed them to plant a gargantuan-variety of crops due to large variations in the climatic conditions. An abundance of fertile land led to a drastic growth in the number of farms among the Viking empire.

On June 8th 793ce foreign ships brought an unexpected surprise to the Lindisfarne monastery situated off the coast of England; the Northmen had arrived. This attack marked the beginning of the Viking Age, an era of raids that shook the western world until its end at the battle of Hastings in 1066. According to those on the receiving end of the raids these Northmen arrived and promptly the

Leif Erikson was born of Norwegian descent around 970 AD in Iceland. He was the second of three sons of Erik the Red, an ambitious Viking who established a settlement in Greenland and named a lot of places he found along his voyage. (Phol 12) Erickson’s mother Thjodhild was an ordinary family woman. In contrast, Erickson’s grandfather, Thorvald Asvaldsson, who committed manslaughter and

Vikings were a group of people from Scandanavia (modern-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden) who navigated the North Atlantic and Baltic Regions, sailing to destinations in the south to North Africa, and east to Russia, Constantinople (“Istanbul”) and the Middle East, as ‘hit-and-run’ looters, traders and colonists. Notably, the Vikings were seen as a barbaric clan by their victims, especially to those in Europe with whom they had an imposing influence. Equally, as the Old Norse (the language of the Norsemen) translation of the word ‘Viking’ signifies, the Vikings were feared as fierce and ruthless pirates. However, most of these people may not have called themselves Vikings since only a few engaged in raiding and pillaging, which was seen as a

In Jared Diamond’s novel 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed' he discusses many civilizations that moved away from their homelands, grew in population, and then either failed or succeeded in their new environments. Throughout this essay I will attempt to explain the Collapse of the Greenland Norse, one of the many societies to rise and fall. The Greenland Norse faced multiple challenges including economical, agricultural, and unfriendly neighbors. Alongside Greenland other North Atlantic islands faced geographical challenges that lead to some of their falls as well. Yet, first I will discuss why the Norse left Scandinavia in search of new terrain.

The Viking boats were the best and fastest in the world at the time and could travel at a whopping 18.5 kilometres per hour and could cover over 200 kilometres per day. They were able to reach such speeds because they were the first to master the sailing techniques of the longboat. Some of their weaponry and armour were so intricately crafted that there were very few societies that could craft things like the Vikings until many years after the Viking age. Some of the Viking building techniques were also very advanced for the time. For example, before they conquered and settled the Viking city of Jorvik (previously York), the building techniques were very rudimentary and consisted mainly of post and plank constructs.

     As the digging continued Prof. Gustafson and Mr. Shetelig began to unearth what they believed was a Viking longship.  Instead, what they found was a class of Viking ship called a karv.  A karv is shorter than a longship and unlike the naval longship, is used in everyday life to transport people or goods. They were mostly used in shallow waters. This was further supported by the fact that the discovery was close to an ancient riverbed. (Brøgger, 1921) Like many other Viking ships it was clinker built.  This means each board of the hull overlaps the one below and is attached with iron rivets.

Coming from Scandinavian countries, predominantly Denmark and Norway, the Vikings began raiding the British Isles in the late 700s (James). The Vikings primarily targeted monasteries, because that is where most of the wealth was concentrated (Loughrey). These raids were very violent, people were killed, and the survivors were sold into slavery (Loughrey). These violent raids earned the Vikings the reputation of barbarians, much like the Mongols a few centuries later in Asia. After some time, once the Vikings exhausted most of the wealth in the monasteries, they turned their interest into settling the British Isles (James). By the late 9th century the Vikings had conquered most of England (James). However, even though these Viking kingdoms did not last very long, the Scandinavians who resided there stayed. These Scandinavians would go on to change the British Isles in many ways. Despite the violent and negative impacts of Viking raids on the British Isles, once the Vikings settled down, they had a significant and positive peaceful impact on the British Isles culturally, politically, and economically.

The Vikings were a group of Scandinavian raiders that were around from about the 8th century to the 11th. They mainly attacked the British Islands , the Frankish empire, England, but they also plundered places such as the Iberian peninsula and northern Africa. Vikings did not always settle into the places that they found, for instance after exploring North America they left the place never to return again. Even so, after landing on Greenland they colonized themselves there, and ancestors of the Vikings still live there today. So now that you know a little about the history of the Vikings lets go into detail about the specifics of the Viking age. (Peter Sawyer, Oxford Ill. History of the Vikings p. 1-19)

It is here where for many centuries fishermen and traders survived and from these very shores the Vikings organized a vast maritime trading network. The Vikings ventured across the Atlantic Ocean to Iceland, Greenland, and ultimately North America in the late 10th century to establish colonies throughout. To this day, Norway retains a robust fishing industry boasting one of the world’s largest merchant marine fleets. During the late 20th century, vast reserves of natural gas and petroleum were discovered in Norway’s North Sea bringing a new source of prosperity to the country according to Sager, R. D. et al. (1997).

The beginning of the tenth century marked a time of exponential growth, as well as vast conflict for the Viking city of Dublin. Indeed, much of this conflict stemmed from Dublin’s growing economic power on the island. Much power was actually represented by wealth and trade, as mentioned in Taxation, Tolls and Tribute: The Language of Economics and Trade in Viking-Age Ireland by Mary A. Valante, “By the middle of the tenth century, evidence from Irish and other sources suggests that the Norse towns at Dublin and Limerick maintained almost exclusive control over long-distance trade in and out of Ireland.” (242) At the time, Dublin began to serve as a hub for the Viking Kingdom of Dublin.