Hey Veeky Forums, what are some good ways to break away from the cliches in your typical totally-not-vikings culture? I'm trying to find ways to make my setting's typical 'northern barbarians'/norse into something a little more stand out. It's so easy to find things on 'vikings' but little for actual norse culture.
Can Veeky Forums recommend me some good resources or media on the norse?
They like cheese a lot and actually spend more time trading then raiding for one. The Norse were massively prolific traders and sailors and nearly all of their runic writing we have that's left behind is basically trading lists of what they bought or sold.
Raiders were a relative minority among them but since they tended to raid churches (who had lots of good stuff but few defenders) and were usually the only people around who can read and write they got to decide how they'd be remembered.
They also weren't a unified culture at all, consisting of many different tribes and groups all throughout the migration period.
By the time they were actually "Vikings" and raiding England and taking large parts of it over they had actually dropped their old deities for being Christian like pretty much the rest of Europe (outside of the Lithuania area) had.
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>They like cheese a lot
Noted.
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I just make them proper pre-christian norse.
They do have vikings, but they're merchants most of the time. The stories still exist but it's also obvious to anyone around that they come from a bunch of booty-bothered, less civilized offshoot of their culture.
There's really not a lot we know because their culture was annihilated and deliberately erased when Christendom came.
We do know that the Scandinavians were primarily fishermen and traders. We know that they discovered the Americas, and that they sailed as far as India in the far east.
They were usually disunited as hell. They mostly used spears and bows in combat. Their primary defensive implement was a large shield, armor was expensive. Their successors were employed by the Byzantines as the Varangian Guard.
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They aren't from the north. They are southern merchants who armed themselves in defense against pirates and raiders, but turned to pillaging when they became feared. Why not? So now they raid the southern coast, giving thanks to their recently exalted war god who rewards cunning and victory above all else. Far from mindless brutes, these raiders are tactical and methodical. They trade what they dont need to allies and steal what they want from the rest.
You want my honest opinion?
Get MORE vague, not less
When you try to build particular counterpart cultures you'll keep forcing them into a certain framework
The Northmen of my setting lived simply, wore animal skins or cloth tunics/cloaks & trousers, and divided themselves into various tribes and clans
Sounds like it could be anywhere in Northern Europe. Some hunt, some are pirates, some live under tribal kings, others farm, etc
They're pretty glum people overall but have a sense of humor underneath
>By the time they were actually "Vikings" and raiding England and taking large parts of it over they had actually dropped their old deities for being Christian like pretty much the rest of Europe (outside of the Lithuania area) had.
This isn't really true. During the 'Viking Age' they were generally not Christian. They hardly even had exposure to Christianity in that time period.
Highlanders.
Alternately, Borderers.
They didn't use bows that much, they considered them cowardly, and they wouldn't have been very effective in the wars they fought because of the lower population and the prevalence of shields.
They used them for skirmishing and picking off the odd dude here and there. You're right that they weren't particularly useful and that they were culturally sneered at, but they DID make use of 'em.
They used them, but by no means was it something that they 'mostly' used. Most common would be spears, and seax. Everyone at the battlefield would have those two in addition to a shield.
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Heres some ideas
>They only raid settlements of known evil doers
>they sometimes raid each other over stolen contracts and bad deals
>since they generally don't have a lot of room on their ships so even the traders are armed and trained
>communities and guilds form around what goods and services can be traded
>being a JUST guard or soldier is frowned upon and considered to belong in a low cast
>often dreams of owning land and a large farm to raise a family.
That's usually my go to Barbarian.
>what are some good ways to break away from the cliches in your typical totally-not-vikings culture?
Historically accurate Vikings, not even trolling.
All female
If you have the time I would suggest you go read some of the sagas we have preserved and translated. Burned njarl is pretty good. The saga of Egil, and the saga of Erik the red are all good, and give some interesting insight into everyday vikings.
It was highly dishonorable to steal from someone, but killing them in combat and then taking there stuff was fine. Also it's not murder if you challenge them in public first.
The "Realm of the Elderlings" books have a !notviking group of people known as the Outislander's which aside from raiding are also known for enjoying trade (like the Norse of old).
one thing that does make them strand apart is their many decentralized clans (actually still like the Norse) and their matriarchy stating that Woman are given the land and men are given the sea which makes the woman lords and farmers and optional raiders and defenders, but makes the men the standard warrior class.
Why were duels outlawed in the first place?
>honing your fighting skills just on par to your intellectual skills
The end of obesity right there
> Hey Veeky Forums, what are some good ways to break away from the cliches in your typical totally-not-vikings culture?
>Can Veeky Forums recommend me some good resources or media on the norse?
UNREAL WORLD.
>honing your fighting skills just on par to your intellectual skills
>The end of obesity right there
But obese people have already honed their body and their mind.to the same standards.
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Debatable. Grave robbing and taking from the dead were taboos in Norse culture. If you stole from the dead the superstition was that they would haunt you. Now whether or not that applies to freshly killed foes I'm not 100 certain, and I would be willing to bet pilfering corpses after a battle was pretty common, but I don't think it was a universal practice, and I would be willing to bet such conduct would be frowned upon.
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Doing the real Norse.
No, seriously. We reached the point where the cliche is so far away from source, you can actually play real-world Norse straight and everyone will be amazed about this fresh spin about vikings of yours.
Or you can go for King of the Dragon Pass as source and have some fun with totally not vikings
Have them be trying to live up to another culture that has faded or is extinct, trying to act as their successors.
Imagine Vikings doing their utter best to act like Romans, but they're still obviously barbaroi. Leaders garbing themselves in Roman armor that was hundreds of years old before their people rose into prominence.
I guess someone was watching 13th warrior one time too many
Base it off of a 'northern' culture aside from the Norse. Slavs, Inuits, Mongols...
Nah, just a historical fiction book trying to do a more grounded take on King Arthur. At a meeting of some military leaders, one of them was wearing Roman armor, and I just wondered how he must look to all these Dark Age petty kings. Like Rome reborn or something like that.
>garbing yourself in shitty roman armor
>when your people literally picked up the method for mail from trading with its inventors
(And I don't mean Rome, fucking Romaboos, romans took soap, the plow and most of their military kit from barbaroi)
What's so bad of roman armor? Apart from looking dumb
Their society is a matriarchy.
What a stupid idea
Segmentata is expensive as fuck to make because you can't really make it one standard size and be good.
Also it's not anywhere near as good as the romaboos insist it is, hamata is almost as good for most things, better against archers, which the mediterranean wasn't really known for outside of cretan mercs.
The norse peoples were active traders, adventurers and raiders.
You can differentiate your setting by having them be the most widespread people in the world. Everywhere you go to theres some norse trading post/tavern/mercenary/sellsword/even the odd established Norse Kingdom.
The local intermarriages have produced unique mini cultures of half norse wherever they go. Sometimes mistrusted in foreign lands, the communities of Norse offer near unlimited hospitality to fellow norse and barring a blood feud will always back a fellow norse up if asked. Norse who abuse this privilege are quickly killed off.
The only point I disagree on is about how during the Viking Age they were already mostly Christian. Some groups from Scandinavia were Christian by then, but during the time of the North Sea empire when Denmark owned most of Scandinavia and England, they were still quite Pagan. However this is right before the transition to Christianity, so it wasn't long after that when large parts of Scandinavia began to convert.
>Mongols
Finns?
Gotcha, thanks for the explanation family
A real matriarchial culture would use men for infantry, and field mostly female riders and archers. Female riders make sense, because they generally weigh less.
A talented warrior would be accepted in any branch of the military, regardless of gender.
Raiding parties tended not to use bows, but there is plenty of evidence of them at large battles.
I read a paper that theorized the lack of use of bows in raiding was because generally the fighters who got in to the town/church/city got to pick the best loot, so no one wanted to stay behind and shoot while getting stuck with the leftovers of the loot. But during large battles with armies, there was plenty of bow use going on.
>female
>archer
I want this meme to end
Make the main base to be slavs instead of scandinavians. You can still have some nice "northern barbarian" stuff since there was a lot of cultural interchange.
We all want many things.
I know....
WE WUZ VIKINGZ AND SHIYEEET
>muh popeye armed archers
Daily reminder that too few skeletons showed the deformation for it to have been standard with all archers and that the english warbow a shit.
I mean, if you killed them, you've bested them in combat. If your team kills them, your team has bested their team. There's a contest of combat and to the winner go the spoils.
If you're robbing a grave of some guy, funeral rites have probably already been observed and it's a big taboo not to go rooting around in there. Also, you probably didn't kill the guy, and if you did you've already laid claim to the guy's stuff or let it go and now it's too late. Taboos against digging up graves is also pretty universally cultural because of infectious stuff you can unearth, interpreted as a curse from the dead.
Hell, Siberians think scientists are stupid fuckers because they keep digging up frozen mammoths and shit, which they stay the fuck away from. They stay the fuck away from that stuff because it carries dormant diseases from thousands of years ago, chief among them any form of horrible prion brain-eating disease that makes you go crazy and feral. Might actually be a real-life origin of the wendigo myth.
Too few skeletons showed deformation for what to be standard?
So Norse gypsies?
This.
Longbows were pretty unusual in how much they asked of the people who used them anyway. Most people would do well enough with smaller bows or recurves or other stuff like that.
>considered them cowardly
>raiders who principally fought by ambush
user, I...
>the matriarchy is the patriarchy but everything's flipped
Now I'm no expert, but weren't most examples of matriarchies just having female elders in charge or having property and family lineage by decided by the mother's line, but men would still do all the fighting?
A real matriarchal culture would use men for the military and, at best, have some high tier woman managing everything.
Woman would still be making "dinner for the warriors" and similar jobs. What changes is that it's more praised and "dinner makers" make the political decisions instead of soldiers.
Deformation, you dingus
The period of Danish settlement of England by the Danes (mostly) who had previously been raiding and warring there preceded the actual Christening of Denmark by more than a hundred years.
They were sowing fields on English soil in the 9th century, while the first Archbishops of Sweden, Norway and Denmark were not appointed until early 12th century, and at that point there was still a hundred years or so to go in most places before the general population could really be called Christian.
The first chiefs and whatevers that "converted" did so back in the 9th century, but they had no central authority and it was very individual between different small groups, and generally accepted that the conversion was often done for other reasons than genuine faith. Fashion, practicality, as a prerequisite for trade with picky christians, that sort of thing.
So basically what said.
These. Aside for being built better for fighting men have always been and always will be more expendable. What would change is being a soldier would not be nearly as romanticized.
You seem to confuse "not knowing" with "not caring."
It's their hearts that are weak.
Yes, and even the "family lineage decided by the mother's line" thing is not even granted. That's called a matrilinear society, not a matriarchal one, and both things are independent. You can have matrilineal patriarchal societies.
Daily reminder that a hunting weight bow does jack shit against any form of dedicated protective armour at more than spitting distance.
You can pretend like warbows weren't heavy all you like, but it's a well documented and tested fact that even something like a 60lb bow, which is more than you really need to hunt any type of game (45 is fine even for hunting moose) does not actually reliably penetrate riveted mail armor even at a distance of only a few yards.
Weaboos get out.
What a wonderful way to kill off your own civilization. Dead in a few generations due to declining birth rates because there aren't enough women. Stupid gits who think gender doesn't matter and men and women's roles are completely arbitrary.
Exactly. Which is nothing weird, by the way, not all cultures of the past had the same degree of admiration towards the soldier. Apparently nobody liked the job in some periods of ancient egypt, probably the ones where the soldiers were mostly foreigner mercenaries.
Looting the enemy is pretty much universal, if you've defeated them you've earned their stuff.
This is different from looting a designated burial site where someone has been interred with religious observances and so on and so forth, which is why one is generally nothing anyone gets bothered by, and the other is taboo.
But that's a Finno-Korean hyperwar RPG.
I vaguely remember that in the 1700s British soldiers weren't well regarded by most people (at least, the average redbacks, not the officers).
I don't think anybody who's ever had to deal with soldiers and armies has been all that fond of them.
Have them trade in amber and make them genuinely interested in the cultures they visit, to the point where their own religion and culture has melted away to become a conglomeration of beliefs from all over the world.
I've always hated how fictional matriarchies tend to give women all of men's roles. Matriarchy is not the same as role-reversal, it just means women are more respected and empowered by culture and society.
A matriarchal society would not have female soldiers or probably even generals because war is a masculine power, and in a matriarchal society feminine power would be more respected than masculine power.
Its not even like the reason women were never in the military was because of patriarchy. Its that no one wanted it.
Really, who wants women to participate in war? As a man, there are few desires stronger than protecting women (that you care about), you've been born with aggressive instincts that help you get hyped for killing (if you need to), and you have enough physical strength to make up for two women anyway. Your instincts help you cope with fighting because someone HAS to protect the "clan", but what is even the point if your women, the lifeblood and heart of your clan, are dying alongside you. Men don't even like fighting women (unless they're in the mood and situation for rape I guess).
Women don't want to fight. Fighting sucks, why would they? Sure they may care more for their "clan" than their own life and be willing to fight, but its hard to really get into it when half the population has been all "No, please sit back, I GOT THIS." your whole life. They don't want you to fight, They want to fight for you, you kinda don't want to fight, they are like twice as good as it anyway, there is shit to do around home so we don't all starve and are kids don't die while the war goes on. Fuck it.
If ANYONE wanted women to fight, it would have happened somewhere by now. We would have martial arts somewhere developed by women to help compensate for lesser strength, more historical examples of female units or leaders, etc, effectiveness aside.
The only people who want to see women fight are those with no real concept of what real violence is like.
>Raiders were a relative minority among them
Their traders and raiders were the same people. Whether they traded or raided depended on how fortified a given town was compared to their own numbers.
Read the study from the arab on the Rus. You'll learn a lot of neat stuff from it, although keep in mind the arab was pretty biased.
I'd really like to screencap this, but I don't know how.
So I guess I'll just sit here in awe and hope that someone more capable stumbles upon this
Here is a head up. Women did fight in battle and stuff. It was a bit rare but it did happen.
....It doesn't say anywhere in that post that they didn't. The post just explains a frustration with a common portrayal of matriarchy that is, frankly speaking, impractical, counter intuitive, and wasteful. Isolated examples don't change the fact that the system breaks down when employed beyond the immediate individual. A clan with no birthing age females is a dead clan... or a very rape happy clan. Neither seem particularly healthy for the growth of a stable form of society.
While men can admittedly start having children fairly young and be able to have kids even into their 50s, it's not as if mid-teens through the 40s is particularly small amount of time either.
Childbirth would understandably cause a lot of problems for the body, especially before modern medicine, but a woman could conceivably have three kids before she's thirty and have done her duty as far as childbirthing and left the rearing up to older women. And even forty is still young enough to be fit.
Here friendo.
Windows has a built in tool called "Snipping Tool" that you can use for such things. From win 7 upwards I think.
>We would have martial arts somewhere developed by women to help compensate for lesser strength, more historical examples of female units or leaders, etc, effectiveness aside.
You do see those things in the East though, now if people want to accept it or write it off as Far Eastern mysticism is another thing.
Most war bows didn't require great musculature to use however.
>We would have martial arts somewhere developed by women to help compensate for lesser strength
Wing Chun?
Given how devastating it was during the Hundred Years War history would disagree with that statement.
Not really.
>how devastating it was during the Hundred Years War
No, Deeko Keeko
Modern anthropology has in minds of some, "never found an actually matriarchal culture/society." Though my anthropology professor believes that this has more to do with matriarchal societies not being exact reversal of gender roles. There is one Chinese culture called the Mosuo which is probably the best example of what matriarchy really is in his mind.
Consequently, that could be a really good northern civilization.
They rarely excelled though. From memory, I think the only military disciplines where women had a real impact were marksmanship and piloting.
The only one I can think of is Naginatajutsu and that has more to do with Japanese traditions than with any particular female aptitude for skewering people with glaives.
>Every bow is a yeoman longbow
I want these meme to end
>these instead of this
I want this meme to end
Wing Chun, but for some arbitrary reason its not considered a martial art?
>I want this meme to end
I want this meme to end
>>I want this meme to end
>I want this meme to end
I want this meme to end
>wanting wanting wanting this meme to end to end to end
I don't want this meme to end
I only read the wikipedia article, so maybe you know something I don't, but it looks like the only thing wing chun has to do with women is that there is a legend of its founding which includes the first two practitioners being women, but which the article clarifies is probably only a legend, and which sounds exactly like a legend to me.
I want everything to end
I want your want for everything to end to end
It's poorly organized and worse at regulating practitioners. It doesn't promote any kind of physical training during class time and because it's a martial arts "for the streets" it doesn't have an emphasis on sparring or physical contact. So you get a bunch of higher level practitioners who are shit fighters because it turns out fighting is tiring and getting hit hurts, a lot more if you're stronger.
It's the Cross fit of Kung fu, where it can be effective if you have really, really good basics but if you don't develop those first it's pretty much useless.
Also, no idea why people say it would be good for women. A male Wing Chun practitioner would still wreck the shit out of a female one given the same level of skill. And once again, you would need a strong physical foundation for it to be really effective in the first place, so probably a less skilled practitioner would wreck a more skilled woman in a real fight.
That's the problem with citing anything Eastern, its easily brushed off as a legend. Supposedly it was invented by a woman who made Wing Chun so she could fight off a larger, male suitor. The idea being punching on the center line with straight jabs while inside the reach of her larger opponent.
The French had to chop off archers fingers to cripple the military power of England.