I know vikings are romanticized constantly, but HOW and WHY were they so good at travelling...

I know vikings are romanticized constantly, but HOW and WHY were they so good at travelling, settling and expanding rule over other kingdoms/countries/communities?

Was everyone just shit or were the vikings just savage as fuck? I know it's a simplistic argument which I hope someone can answer correctly, but it seemed very much a viking's world back then and everyone else was just living in it

crude diagram very related.

Other urls found in this thread:

etymonline.com/index.php?term=viking
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

INB4 someone posts those screenshots.

It was those sick ass horns on their helmets.... Scary shit

They were once apex men.
Now, not so much.

>Vikings
You like a little baby. Watch this.

My uneducated stab.

You have a fairly egalitarian society =so no great disparities in experiences between classes of men, ergo the average scandi has more experience doing something other than farming than the average continental european
They're economy is dependent on fishing = common skill with sailing, proliferation of boatmaking and sailing skills amongst the said egalitarian common class instead of a more secretive upper class where the info is still precious
Weather and proximity of the sea results in culture of seasonal sea raiding = average scandi has more experience fighting than the average continental euro, thus resulting in a better recruitment base for soldiers. Contrast to the Baltics who had the same culture, but less access to open sea and also were genetically inferior.

So that's the ability.
Motivation comes from their decentralised tribal society allowing more autonomy which gives monetary incentive for adventure and the attempts by local rulers to unify these tribes driving out malcontents.

>genetically inferior
explain

underrated post

>travelling
good boats and lots of lumber
>settling
up north was kinda shit and they had motivation
>expanding
Well, they didn't do that great of a job at that

slavs

If your land was so shitty and infertile, you'd get in a boat and make your fortune overseas too.

Boats mainly

Depends on if you include the Normans into the equation.

Even then, you've got Russia, a lot of the UK and Normandy. If you put the Normans in their camp you've got the UK again and Sicily.

well a lot of those places didnt have people in the first place

So was most of the place that the Viking set the foot onto.

>people in this thread actually think the """vikings""" existed and went anywhere

The document that supposedly describes their greatest success and the dawning of the """""'the viking age""""" talks about fucking fantastic beasts and where to find them.

>Here were dreadful forewarnings come over the land of Northumbria, and woefully terrified the people: these were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine soon followed these signs, and shortly after in the same year, on the sixth day before the ides of January, the woeful inroads of heathen men destroyed god’s church in Lindisfarne island by fierce robbery and slaughter.

>fiery dragons were seen

>dragons were seen

>dragons

What sort of braindead cuck believes this nonsense?

VIDF will be along shortly to shit up this thread.

>there are literally komodo DRAGONS in existence today
Nice try, faggot

>one document that mentions vikings also mentioned dragons
>dragons are mythical creatures
>therefore vikings must be mythical creatures

Is that your train of thought?

Yes why not? The document mentions fucking dragons in the same breath it talks about these other guys. Why is one fake but the other DEFINITELY real?

It also mentions a church.
Does this mean churches are a myth too?

We have plenty of physical evidence for other churches. But none of dragons.

>Yes why not?

Jesus fucking Christ. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle isn't the only evidence of Vikings user. One briefly became the king of England for fuck's sake. Yorkshire still has hundreds of thousands of people with clear Scandinavian ancestry.

>But none of dragons.

Dragons aren't the part we're talking about you moron. Your argument was "dragons are myths, dragons are mentioned alongside vikings, therefore vikings are myths."

>"Hey dude! Did you see those dragons! Also dome guys attacked a church!"

Why are you so deeply set on believing one half of this ridiculous story but not the other?

You're right, user.

Churches aren't real.

As I said, there is plenty of evidence in the UK that Scandinavians visited besides the Anglo Saxon chronicle.

If you want to argue "Lindisfarne wasn't raided by vikings" that's one argument, it's a very fucking different argument to say "vikings didn't exist"

Those are just Scandinavian settlers user. I thought the official line was that "vikings" were just pirates and only a small minority actually took part in "raiding"?

The term is just a catch all for "raiders/invaders/traders from Scandinavia", we could just as easily say "northmen" "pagans" "heathens" "the norse" etc. Hell even after they Christianized a lot of people still call the likes of Cnut the Great and Harald Hardrada vikings. Anyway, are you just trying to create a semantics argument now? For the sake of ease I'll just grab the wikipedia definition, if you want to go
>wikipedia
then provide a better definition.
>Vikings (Danish and Bokmål: vikinger; Swedish and Nynorsk: vikingar; Icelandic: víkingar), from Old Norse víkingr, were Nordic seafarers, mainly speaking the Old Norse language, who raided and traded from their Northern European homelands across wide areas of northern, central and eastern Europe, during the late 8th to late 11th centuries.

In regards to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, historians already agree that it's embellished to shit, but inaccuracies in historical chronicles are par for the course and the entire job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Again, disbelieving the Lindisfarne raid is different from disbelieving the existence of vikings at all.

Well we can also talk about the fact that we find more anglo-saxon currency in Denmark than we do in England during the period of the Danegeld.

But they were actually paying the vikings to keep the dragons out or something who knows.

link didn't work for some reason

hey you know what youre right. i forgot how england, scotland, ireland, france, spain, italy, sicily, middle east, and the byzantine empire didnt have any people before the vikings showed

But the raid on Lindisfarne is obviously bullshit. Which in turn calls into question other sources about these so called "vikings".

>OK so this crazy story about vikings riding dragons attacking a church isn't true, but the other stories are definitely real!

Well if those fuckwits writing about dragons inferred that Britain was populated it clearly wasn't.

>But the raid on Lindisfarne is obviously bullshit.

No, the mention of dragons is obviously embellishment.

>Which in turn calls into question other sources about these so called "vikings".

So now you've jumped from "A source that mentions vikings also mentions dragons therefore all the sources are as illegitimate as that one, because they mentioned vikings and vikings are mentioned in the same source as dragons."

This rationale also discredits literally any source mentioning a monastery as questionable, because monasteries were mentioned in the same breath as dragons.

Canada, Greenland, Iceland and most of British Isle and Russia are empty. And I said most, not all. And like OP was talking about how good the Viking in sailing, settling, and expanding not which land is the most populated.

So the bit about dragons is an embellished, but the spoopy """vikings"""" bit is not also embellished in any way?

Why have physical remains of monasteries. We do not have physical remains of dragons. Or any if the vikings that supposedly attacked that one monastery.

There's no physical proof and the written record talks about Harry Potter monsters, but it definitely happened exactly like it says!

>Or any if the vikings that supposedly attacked that one monastery.

You're shifting goalposts from "remains of vikings" (there are scandinavian burial sites in Britain) to remains of very specific vikings.

The vikings left plenty of fucking physical evidence, and they left plenty of genetic evidence as well. People have run tests on residents of areas that were under Danelaw.

You keep ignoring every time I point out any alternate evidence and desperately clinging to your retarded roller-coaster rationale of something being said in the same breath as dragons though, so I'm obviously wasting my time with this argument.

Also I'm guessing the Vikings asked a monastery nicely (snugly from their home in Scandinavia) for this chest housing the bones of a saint, among plenty of other shit in Scandinavia that belonged to Brits.

BOATS

Out of nowhere comes genetically inferior. They weren't even slavs by then lad

I've never mentioned anything about Scandinavian settlement. I couldn't give a shit about who settled where and what bones or genetics were left. My issue is the one document we're supposed to use to base the age of these wondrous super pirates on, has Lord of the Rings level fantasy bullshit in it that we are expected to close our eyes and ignore, while mindlessly swallowing the rest.

Obviously the best course of action is to immediately jump to the conclusion that big hairy men in furs, carrying axes and burning torches, stole it in the middle of the night.

That's literally the only possiblity, with no other ways in which a reliquary could move around Europe.

>while mindlessly swallowing the rest.

Nobody advocates this, and acknowledging the existence of norse raiders isn't the same as believing they're "wondrous super pirates". The presence of shit from monasteries in Scandinavia dated to a period when the norse weren't Christian should be pretty fucking telling that these goods probably weren't taken by asking gently. Nor would the tribute payments offered by English kings have been given if viking attacks hadn't been an issue, again of which lots of coinage is dug up in Scandinavia.

If you're going to go around brainlessly dismissing swathes of historical chronicles based on them containing a few nonsensical embellishments you're not going to have much history left to study, anonymous.

user, you're going to believe whatever the fuck you want, let's just cut this argument. Neither of us are getting anywhere.

You're right, this is all a conspiracy by historians to fuck with you.

>they weren't Christian, therefore the only possible way they would have a Christian relic is by taking it by force in on of their dragonback raids

Why did they do it? Did they just set out into the sea and be like "lol we dont know what we'll find or if we'll die but we'll do it anyway"

Jesus what is going on ITT?
Dane here, let me just set a few fucking facts straight:
"Vikings" is a name, or rather a name given to a specific AGE in Scandinavian history from about year 800-1100.
So every Scandinavian citizen in that period of time are generalized as VIKINGS.
Period.
Second, they are NOT well known at all for keeping record of their accomplishments. In fact extremely little is recorded by the Vikings themselves. So that's why we have to rely on second hand witnesses and recordings, and guesswork by historians based on archeological findings.
So if one recording said "the Vikings came riding on fucking dragons!!" Well then use your fucking brain for once and think "well ok we know that dragons does not exist, but perhaps the victims were so fucking scared and got their ass handed to them, so when they had to report to the king, and they would not embarrass themselves more they would say: "there was nothing we could do sire! They had fucking dragons!"". And stuff like that is not new and has similar has been made in historical recordings all over the world.

Also Vikings travelled all over the world because their society was very autonomous, their society structure was flat so the lowly commoner was only one or two classes beneath the thane. And everyone was highly skilled different abilities like sailing, farming, hunting, and combat.
In short Vikings was a very fast, mobile and agile society, compare to their contemporaries.

So there you have it.

Your post is wrong.

It's called the Viking Age, sure, but not everybody who was Scandinavian was known as a viking.

A viking was a raider-trader who went overseas from his homeland in Scandinavia.

>A viking was a raider-trader who went overseas from his homeland in Scandinavia.

Most of the times the term comes up it's referring to Scandinavians who are not in Scandinavia (since they're usually drawn from reports of people in the many places they visited).
Many reports often referred to them by terms like "heathens." The general discourse still lumps these names in with "vikings" and the "viking age" tends to encompass Scandinavians in general.

>The term is also commonly extended in modern English and other vernaculars to the inhabitants of Viking home communities during what has become known as the Viking Age. This period of Nordic military, mercantile and demographic expansion constitutes an important element in the early medieval history of Scandinavia, Estonia, the British Isles, France, Kievan Rus' and Sicily.

>but it seemed very much a viking's world back then and everyone else was just living in it

yes user, youre right, and you know the answer too, it was because they were so ubermesch nordic racialy pure, thats why

seriously tho, they were good at building ships and had a developed culture of trade and raiding, powered partly by how their society worked and partly by the fact they lived in skandinavia and had to figure out how not to starve to death, these things are rather clear and simple and easy to find out on anywhere like wikipedia or wherever

but what is it with these threads lately, how come people are so confused and amazed by the fact some humans were good or bad at something?

im sure there isnt going to be one post in this thread that goes into how viking ships were built or which goods they traded or how important fishing was or whatever, its all gona be about how vikings were awesome and then how no, vikings were shit

like those threads about polinesian colonisation of oceania, whats the point of them? i dont mean the subject, its a interesting historical subject, but no one actualy discusses it, the question behind the threads, just like this one, is pretty much 'how come they were so uber? was it because they are better than everione and genetically superior? yes yes it was, how else could they use wood to build a seafaring vesel'

i mean i know Veeky Forums is basicaly /pol/ with dates, but it seems like even the dates part is getting left out, like every other thread is just a inferiority complex pissing contest the point of which is to push some autistic racial discourse

...

They just wanted to get out. They did live on the northern edge of the world, and climate swings. There wasn't enough room for everyone to share the pastures and the rumors of riches came from anywhere else but Scandinavia it'self, it's always been told that Norway sucks to live in evident from litterature, so it's been better to go south despite societies that were normally more dangerous and oppressive but in turn gave opportunities.

If a guy had to get from Norway to Germany he couldn't walk, there were no bridges to Denmark and so he had to use a boat, everyone used boats. Culture around boats yielded specialization in building well made boats.

They never had horns on their helmets.

they randomly stumbled across a better boat design, pure luck

Viking isn't even a noun, it's a verb.

It literally means "Baying"(Bay as in the Bay of Pigs).

It probably originally meant to go fishing with their nets in the bay.

Actual meaning of the word viking

etymonline.com/index.php?term=viking

I gotta get me some of that free real estate..