Violent Raiders to Proponents of Peace

With all the recent attention given to the annual awarding of the Nobel prizes (I wonder why?) I began to mull over the fact that the most coveted of these prizes is the Peace Prize and that it comes out of a nation that was once a very violent culture. Are the Nordic people now more peaceful than other cultures in the West? Have they evolved further along the continuum that leads from brutality to civility?

Before I discuss the evolution of culture, I have to say that the Viking age was from roughly 800 to 1050 AD, so it is far beyond the time period of “Bound by and Oath”. I must also confess that I have a personal interest in the Vikings, being that DNA tests showed that my family came, not from the UK as we had always believed, but from southern Scandinavia. Of course, my maiden name was registered in the Domesday Book, so we had reason to think that we had been in England for a very long time. We do also have Irish and Scottish (Celtic) ancestry, but perhaps only more recently acquired than we had always believed.   

The warrior culture of the Celts existed in Britain long before even the Romans arrived and then was magnified by the warrior cultures of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who migrated to the British Isles during the “invasion” which began in the mid fifth century and continued for a few centuries thereafter. Those were dangerous times to be alive in Europe.

But were the Vikings more violent than other raiders?  It is not an easy question to answer, but our primary historical evidence was written by monks who wanted to prove a point – that the Northmen were violent heathens. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles recorded the attack on Lindisfarne in 793, recounting a series of terrifying natural events that took place and were seen as portents, then continuing with the following:

“on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy- island by rapine and slaughter”.

That isn’t a lot to go on, if you ask me.

It turns out that most of what I “know” about the Viking raids has been implanted in my mind by TV and movies, and we all know how Hollywood loves blood and guts. What were they basing their depictions on? Fantasy fiction is the best answer I can come up with. From the horned helmets and unkempt hair to their constant desire to rape and pillage, they really do Viking culture an injustice.

The attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne (Holy-island) was the first recorded raid by men in longboats from over the sea. You might ask why the Vikings attacked a monastery? It was not an overt attack on Christianity. They most likely saw the abbey at Lindisfarne with its hoard of gold and silver and fine jewels as easy pickings since it was not guarded. (The locals respected the community of monks who lived there.) Perhaps for the Vikings the monks were just in the way, and probably unarmed, and therefore were easily dispatched.

Overall, we have little actual evidence that the Vikings were any more brutal than any other raiders from Europe at the time. Like anything else, you must examine the source.

As to how the Scandinavians became such peace-loving people, I have no idea, but perhaps there is a clue in the way they have ordered their civic lives. The Nordic countries feature on the list of “Happiest Countries to Live” year after year. Maybe if your standard of living is comfortable, your education, and healthcare are taken care of by your government through taxes paid by everyone, and you are encouraged to look outward rather than focusing on your own circumstances, that contributes to your likelihood of loving peace and working for it.

If any of my readers have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.