Viking At Coppergate

     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.

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.

The Vikings were Norse seafarers, who mainly spoke the Old Norse language. They raided and traded from their Northern European homelands across wide areas of northern, central and eastern Europe, during the 9th to 11th century. The Vikings originated from Scandinavia, and the beginning of the Vikings expansion often originates from the raid of the Lindisfarne Monetary on 8 June 793. The Vikings were the first Westerners to sail to Iceland, Greenland, and over to the New World. However, the story of the Vikings is also an important story for the development of the Christian world in the West. Throughout this essay, I will explain the importance of Viking religion, Viking trade, and how the Viking age had an impact on the way Western and

The Vikings were a very successful group of warriors from Scandinavia. They started raiding and violently attacking other places because of their lack of resources. The Viking homeland was rural and people worked as fishers or farmers. Scandinavian people got their fish from the sea, but because the soil in that area was not very fertile, there wasn’t enough grain being grown to feed the rising population. “As Scandinavia's population grew, food shortage became a common problem. Looking for new sources of food and wealth, some Viking leaders decided to take what they needed from other people” (Doc. A). When the Vikings attacked cities, they took everything they could and then burned what was left of the destroyed city. “And the Vikings came on them just like a storm and cut them down, carried off everything, and burned the place” (Doc. B). Because of this, there was no one left to come after them, or anyone to avenge

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)

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 Vikings invading eastern Britain and northwest France, and eventually settling in both regions, come mainly from Denmark. The Swedes raid across the Baltic and penetrate deep into Russia as traders.

Considerable difference and similarity can be observed in the records of the Vikings and the different peoples that they interacted with. This largely has to do with geography, as the landscape of Viking Age Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were divided and rugged; this lead to various groups of people vying for power. When a person or group lost a power struggle, they would often use the waterways of the North Sea to gain access to potential raiding lands. The seafaring technological advances of previous centuries enabled interaction between the raiders of Sweden, Norway and Denmark and the peoples of Ireland and the Carolingian Empire. Because of the technological advances and geographical situation, the Viking raiders were able to interact with many different peoples but also come from the same fundamental background. This caused a multitude of similarities between the Viking activity in the Carolingian Empire and Ireland, but there were also many differences.

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

The "Vikings" were an ancient people that inhabited Northern Europe and Scandinavia known as the Norse (also known as Northmen or Norsemen). The Norse people were spread across Northern Europe, particularly in the regions known today as: Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, and Finland), Germany, Denmark, Poland, Netherlands, the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Ireland, and the surrounding islands), Iceland, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

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.

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

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

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.