Vikings! Vikings! Vikings!

>The Vikings saw the raids as a chore, nothing more
Proof?

Thanks for the recommendations. I came across Forndom as well
>The Last Kingdom is unwatchable garbage
Really? It gets praised a lot on Veeky Forums and /tv/

>were they actually extremely able seafarers?
Yes. Their naval architecture and engineering was quite soundly the best in the world at the time (rivaled only in some areas by Arabic designs) and capable of navigating across the Atlantic and through a great variety of tangled inter-European rivers.

>deadly warriors?

Vikings had a warrior culture and there are quite a few accounts of specific Viking martial achievements (stamford bridge comes immediately to mind). They weren't some sort of Godly divine magic warriors, but they were certainly powerful warriors in their own right, and did belong to a culture that heavily emphasized personal strength and martial ability. Any viking worth his salt was able to fight, and fight well.

Also, they tended to raid monastaries, churches, and commercial centers. Lots of money and loot to be found, but they rarely found any real resistance.

Have a (You) for being a fucking retard.
(You) get one too.

Vikings lived in a warrior culture and were adept as a result; the modern interpretation of them being 'great warriors' is as fair as it is for any other martial culture (Sparta, chivalric/Bushido subcultures in Europe and Japan, etc). It didn't magically make them superior warriors in and of itself, but it did mean that anyone born to that culture knew how to fight properly.

>stamford bridge comes immediately to mind
Didn't they lose that one or were you being sarcastic?

Forndom is great! I listen to Flykt regularly.

The Last Kingdom might improve after the first episode, but I really don't care to find out. Endless cliches, ersatz action, and a romance less believable than the Flat Earth theory.

Stamford bridge chronicles a single Norseman who held off the entire English army for long enough to mount a full retreat, including killing Englishmen with his bare fists once his weapons had broken. It's the most verifiable instance of a single Viking engaging in combat heroics we have and is generally agreed to have happened, though details may have been exaggerated.

Any movies or shows you find authentic? Anything that came out of Scandinavia?

According to the little bit of The Poetic Edda I've read. It has this little bit at the beginning where it describes Viking culture and mentions they saw the raids like a hunter sees taking down a deer. Sure there might be a bit of joy in a job well done but still it's not a big deal. Now how knowledgably the author really is I can't say.

This too. The raids where about getting what they needed and fucking off.

It just occurred to me that I might have come across as a dick by asking for "Proof". I didn't mean to imply that you were making shit up, I was just interested in the source. Appreciate the reply. Don't mean to sound like some faggot, just something that was niggling at me.

Norsemen were a North Germanic people who were mostly farmers & fishermen. Among them were traders, raiders, mercenaries, adventurers, and explorers called "Vikingar" or "Weacingas" in Old English now called Vikings. They were among the last major pagan forces in Europe and were often used as elite guards in the Byzantine empire. Western Europeans hated them because they usually got the more violent sort.

Beloved by geeks after Skyrim & LOTR came out, they are now scorned by other geeks who are now obsessed with knights.

>LOTR
Huh?

they bathed, washed their hands and face, dyed their clothe and took great care of their hair and beards

Far from authentic, but the Norwegian comedy Norsemen is fucking hilarious for two episodes before they completely ran out of jokes. Set design and costumes are gorgeous too, those are certainly authentic.

I'm sorry I don't have more suggestions, there's a lot of bad misconceptions about Vikings, and they almost always leak into the media they appear in.

Raids are not the same thing as conquests or wars. Norsemen outright conquered territory in Scotland, France, Spain and Sicily (albeit the last two as a result of the fall of Rome and before the Viking Age began proper), and ruled lands by other means across Russia and Greece, including forming the first proper Russian and Baltic states. Claiming that raiding was all that the Norse did to fight is just not true.

>movie
Vicky the Viking
Hells warrior
Erik
>cartoons
Vicky again
>p&p rpg
Yggdrasil

Oh hell no dude nothing wrong with expecting someone to back up a claim.
While we're on the subject though, I do have The Poetic Edda right here. It's basically legit poems from the Viking age that makes up a good portion of their religion. I could probably look up some stuff if anyone wants.
Some of the advice that Odin gives in here is actually pretty funny because I seriously thinks he's being a sarcastic jerk.

>I know magic spells
>that no woman knows
>and no man, either
>The first is called Help
>it will help you
>in lawsuits and sadness
>and all kinds of worries

LOTR is 60% Norse

They lost that one for many reasons not related to personal prowess, but one man held the bridge against an entire army long enough to kill 40 men.

Remember, the Anglos tended to exaggerate the numbers of the vikings greatly, the great heathen army was recorded to have more warriors than the entire adult male population of Scandinavia at the time, when in actuality it was only around two thousand men (approximately a thousand warriors in the initial invasion, but men world head home and other men would come seeking glory to replace them, with a peak of around 2000 vikings present in the British isles at any point) who conquered 3/4ths of Britain in a campaign of sieges lasting around 12 years. There was right around a million people in Britain at the start of the invasion. Two thousand heathen warriors destroyed three armies that outnumbered them approximately 10 to 1 each, and were only stopped by Wessex, because Wessex was better supplied to defend a war of maneuver and siege.

In Francia, there is archeological evidence to support claims of tens of thousands of Viking Warriors, and in Francia, the only effective defence was a campaign of castlization to neutralize the viking mobility advantage, with the Franks building armoured bridges over every river and abandoning the coasts to the Northman for almost a hundred years (really until the taming of Rollo), but there is no evidence to back Anglo claims of 100,000 heathens being routed by Wessex.

Elaborating on the belief system portrayal in Vikings again: the way the characters view the gods is superbly done. Even the more cynical characters still hold a vested faith in the Divine, a faith that regularly affects the choices they make and how they interact with the world.

The thing that they totally whiffed on was their depiction of a priest (Gothi). He's some twisted 300-looking mother fucker with no eyes and a creepy hut. In reality, Nordic priests were the more zealous (and wealthy) of a community, and they led their friends in neighbors in prayers, rituals, and festivals. They didn't have any standard clothes or identifying iconagraphy - the Nordic religion was mostly localized, the exception being a great blot that was held in Upland (I believe).

Oh, and another recc: go check out The Old God's DLC for Crusader Kings 2. Turn off all the supernatural shit before you start your game, and you have an extremely authentic way to experience the Viking Age.

What was Kievan Rus, and who was Rurik? And where do they fit with modern Russia, Varangians and Slavs?

Essentially, the Russians invited a prominent Norseman named Rurik who had dealt fairly with them before to rule over them once their prince died. He did the job so well that it formed a dynasty that established the first 'proper' Russian state, modeled after a variety of Norse traditions at the time combined with Continental models.

This is a massive simplification, but basically what happened.

Most of it, yeah, except all the elven shit in the Silmarllion. Fun fact most of Theoden's awesome speech in RoTK is directly lifted from a verse in the Völuspa about Ragnarok.

Any banter, war cries, quotes that are worth knowing?

Why didn't they just shoot him with arrows or charge him with a horse?

Because he was on a narrow bridge. That's how one person was able to hold off more than one person from advancing in the first place.

My favorite line of Nordic poetry is from the Hávamál, a great source for hints at Vikings at their lifestyle and culture, as well as some awesome witticisms:

>A man must be a friend
>to his friend,
>for himself and for the friend

I often simplify this in my head to "A man must be a good friend, both for himself and for his friend which sounds a little smoother to me.

Another good one a few stanzas later:

>There is more about the one
>whom you mistrust
>and whose disposition you suspect:
>you should laugh with him
>and speak other than your thought.
>There should be repayment for such gifts.

Odin is specifically telling people to be deceitful, it's awesome.

Both of these can be heard wonderfully in 'Gibu' by Wardruna.

Nah, the Silmarillion is very Norse too. But not as much as LOTR.

>Tulkas is basically Thor
>Morquendi and Calaquendi = Dark and Light elves
>Elbereth is based on Odin in his aspect as Starmaker
>Sauron based on Loki
>Twin gods of battle and glorious death who got axed because they were too edgy for a Christian story

>Were they actually extremely able seafarers and deadly warriors or is that mostly myth?
Good seafarers, they managed to reach North America some centuries before Columbus.
In matters of warfare they used basically the same strategy that most of other west europeans used. They had a bit of advantage by being taller than most, but that's all.

Good metallurgy skills too, often overlooked. They weren't DA BEST as some historical revisionists might like to suggest, but they were still damn good.

Who we the best?

Difficult to say, and it's not an area of archaeology I'm well-versed in. I know they were the best of their time in Western Europe, but not much more beyond that. Sorry I can't help you out more!

Actually, scratch that, I just remembered: Damascus steel swords are widely considered the best of the period. The only problem is that (IIRC) there's no surviving artifacts that can confirm or deny the contemporary claims.

>Good seafarers, they managed to reach North America some centuries before Columbus.

Yea, pity the colonisation attempt failed.
They couldn't sail to newfoundland directly, they had to leapfrog their way from iceland to greenland and then to newfoundland.

It's a pretty dangerous route.

Seconded, Hávamál is great.
It is said to have been advice given by Odin, on how to behave and live.

On ones legacy.

Livestock dies.
Friends and family dies.
I too will die.
But one thing I know will never die,
is the judgement of a dead mans life.

>doing a realistic setting on Vikings
If you focus on them as "vikings" you've already failed.

>being this much of a kill joy

You must be fun at parties. Sure the Vikings usually only raided during hard times, but that doesn't mean a fucking RPG setting should hold true to history. Unless you have some players that are seriously into early medieval economics...

This. I´m a fucking autist about vikings, and this is the only game I´ve liked on the subject.
Is the Scandinavia in the VIII century, before the proper viking era, but all the nordic beliefs (trolls, elfs,magic, the gods...) are real. Is a reallly smooth blend of history and fantasy, and an easy and theme-fitting system.

>But one thing I know will never die,
>is the judgement of a dead mans life.
That to will die.

Indeed, user. Only death is eternal.

We do know that the traditional Damascus steel was made from a type of crucible steel called "wootz" steel and that Damascus imported that steel from India.
The Vikings imported crucible steel as well and forged what are known as Ulfberht swords due to the engraving they had of "+ULFBERH+T" on the blade.
But modern replications of crucible steel don't result in the wavy pattern Damascus steel is known for. To do that, it takes layers of different steel types and forge welding them together into a single billet.
Pic related is a modern recreation of an Ulfberht sword. Just wanted to post what the pattern on the steel looks like. Very minimal lines.

>no mention of 13th Warrior
youtube.com/watch?v=mraO8JZbSkg

The 13th Warrior is a fine film, no doubt, but I would hazard to guess that the many anachronisms that feature in the film make it unsuitable for OP's purposes.

Good seafarers and merchants. Bad to okay warriors that only ever won against anglos (lel) and baltic slavs.
>and were often used as elite guards in the Byzantine empire.
Those were Kievan Rus and Normans. While both of those originate in one way or another from scandinavian settlers they're far from being "vikings"

Well, eventually all things dies, but you also proved that there is some truth to that verse.
Marcus Aurelius died how many years ago?
Yet we're still talking and learning about him.
Thus his tale lives on and so do our judgement of him.

Rurik founded the Rurikid dynasty, which ruled Russia into the 1600s something. A kinsman of his, Helgi of Holmgard, ruled Kiev and tried to sack Constantinople, so that's cool

I love Vellekla and Hákonarmál myself:

"Sooner shall the Fenriswolf devour
The race of man from shore to shore,
Than such a grace to kingly crown
As gallant Hakon want renown.
Life, land, friends, riches, all will fly,
And we in slavery shall sigh.
But Hakon in the blessed abodes
For ever lives with the bright gods."

Reading the Saga of Hakon the Good is so sad towards the end

this guy slaps ur gfs ass, what do

>only ever won against anglos (lel) and baltic slavs.
>"I don't know what I'm talking about" the post

Both Vikings and the Last Kingdom are terrible historical representations, utterly awful.

>Why didn't they just shoot him with arrows or charge him with a horse?
Presumably he had a good maile coat, he ended up dying when they speared him in the groin from a small boat/barrel half (likely an actual boat called a Coracle in the modern era, but that name hadn't been invented yet, and the Saxons weren't going to worry about peasant names for peasant things), and he was probably surrounded by too many dead to get a good charge going, the bridge had been the focus of the fighting most of the morning by the time he told his comrades to disengage.

Probably too many living men too close to shoot him either.

>we could have had a series depicting harald fairhair uniting norway so he can finally marry the woman he loves
>instead we get a manlet that got cucked

champions duelling it out prior to a battle was hardly unheard of
see: ali during the muslim conquests. the irish were pretty big on this too

>books

these are ok

stopped watching when they used the slave as a toilet. Is this a common feature in Scandinavian humour?

A climate cool down led to Greenland becoming uninhabitable, and then a plague in Norway reduced the pressure for colonization, dooming the mainland colonies and causing trade with Iceland to cease for a hundred years or so.

It was a bad time.

olaf tryggvason got killed too, the man who had christened leif erikson and had tasked him to make the greenlanders christian

The Hölmgang was fucking hilarious. The farmer guy goes through this whole process to acquire poison to win, but Arvid just splits him in half with one hand.

Like I said originally, only the first two episodes are good. I will grant that the particular gag you mentioned is kind of the start of all the issues.

You make it out like the great heathen army fought the rest of Britain all at once with its population of millions.

Some things to point out
>Britain was not unified
England itself was divided in to 4-5 kingdoms at the time of the arrival of the great heathen army.
>they defeated several armies before being stopped by wessex
Again they defeated armies separately. Only Wessex and Mercia were willing to work together to stop them, they had the army trapped and starving until the Mercians decided to pay them off in the hope they'd leave. Wessex went home and the next year the army attacked Mercia.
>The 3 most powerful Kingdoms, one was in a civil war
Northumbria was in the middle of a civil war at the time of the invasion and East Anglia decided to give the norsemen horses to fuck off, they returned the next year and captured it.

>English armies were larger than the heathen one
The Anglo-Saxons actually defined an army as a group of 35 armed men (a ships crew). It dates back to their own arrival in Britain. They simply claim it was a great heathen army, they don't inflate the numbers but its likely that they were a force of veterans from fighting in France.

2000 fighting men is actually a huge force for Anglo-Saxon England who typically only had armies of a few hundred fighting men who were supported by the fyrd, I personally think the heathen army was closer to 1000 which is why they didn't choose to fight the Mercian-Wessex combined army which would have only been slightly larger with fyrd assistance.

the banter with the shieldmaiden getting involved in the raping was pretty good admittedly.

>posts map that proves his point

Beating the Russians I suppose counts but the story goes the Russian invited the norsemen to rule them, didn't like them, kicked them out, hated each other more and invited them back again. The rest of that map shows raiding areas and even Norman fucking Italy for some reason.

>There's no way they're all... that big? Surely it's exaggerated somehow?

>No... they were pretty average.

>Last Kingdom

Books are worthwhile. Cornwell is pretty reliable.

Some +ULFBERH+T swords are wootz steel, others are locally made crucible steels. There are a couple places in Sweden where there were small deposits of ore with high enough purity to get a good crucible pour with old methods, but they weren't big enough to supplant bog iron in the economy, and they played out by the 1200s.

A here is a minimum of 35 men, it doesn't have an upper limit, and while only about 1% of the population of any if the 4 kingdoms were under arms, each kingdom outnumbered the norsemen significantly.

Yes, they kept the kingdoms politically isolated from each other, but that's not a strike against them, that's another factor in a successful invasion and one that too many generals throughout time neglected.

Didn't they develop a reputation for being monsters because they recovered from wounds in combat while British and other Europeans were dying from infection?
They drank fucktons of mead, a honey wine and honey is a natural antibiotic since it contains hydrogen peroxide and the alcohol content in ancient viking mead was not that high so they had to drink a lot in order to get drunk

Immediately slap him in the face and accuse him of being argr, then beat his ass like the niding he is at the resulting holmgang.

They were mostly raiders and not really warriors the way knights were.
They could still hold their own but since their equipment was pretty light (no shit, just light) they couldn't hold their own against a well armed opponent/force, especially if it was fortified.

As far as seafarers, not really either. They went around coasts for the most part, but they were pretty good at it.

>their equipment was pretty light (no shit, just light) they couldn't hold their own against a well armed opponent/force, especially if it was fortified.

Absolutely this. Most vikings were farmers with desolate fields that picked up a wooden roundshield and a spear, determined to return with enough riches to support themselves.

What most people imagine as vikings were actually 'hirdmen' (pic related), a small yet highly trained and well-equipped band of warriors that served a noble or wealthy landowner. Since they were ludicrously expensive to keep on hand (they produced no goods and did little else except train), a hird was as much a status symbol as it was a practical retinue of bodyguards and vikings.

>As far as seafarers, not really either. They went around coasts for the most part, but they were pretty good at it.
They were some of the first people to sail out of sight of land and follow a set longitude for multiple days out of sight of land.

The minimum has nothing to do with the issue that Anglo-Saxon armies fighting each other rarely reached one thousand unless they were on a defending side of things. Its part of the reason the Kingdoms remained to static for so long, defenders outnumbered the attackers.

I wouldn't say the Danes kept each Kingdom isolated, its more of a failure of the Kingdoms to unite against a common enemy. They all kept trying to pay them off in the same way they had dealt with raiders before. The way Vikings usually operated in England was they would capture a city and the King would pay them to leave and they usually did.

If you read the Chronicle you can see they all tried to pay them off.
>East-Anglia in 866
>Northumbria in 867
>Mercia in 868
>Wessex in 871
>Mercia in 872
>Mercia in 873
>Wessex in 876
>Wessex in 877
In 878 we have the recorded size of a Danish army being defeated
>Healfden landed in Wessex, in Devonshire, with three and twenty ships, and there was he slain, and eight hundred men with him.

That is the "End" of the heathen armies conquests. This Healfden was leading a single army, more Dane armies were settling further north and its probably fair to say they were either content with what they had or refused to coordinate with each other properly to defeat Wessex. If the Danes were operating as Vikings it would have just been a bad few years for the various Kings, there was no way for them to know they intended to stay in England.

Hell, has there ever been an authentic protrayal of Vikings on tv or film?

Authentic, certainly. Realistic? None that I can think of.

>Authentic, certainly.
Well, Vikings and The Last Kingdom have already stated to be shit in this thread. What else can you recommend?

I try to differentiate between 'authentic' and 'realistic' in media. A bit pedantic, perhaps (and errors are inevitable), but it can help sort out what you're looking at. Here's what I mean:

Authentic media has the trappings of historical accuracy, but none of the grit or substance. This usually translates to looking, acting, fighting or sounding very realistic, or retaining some completely realistic elements, while not portraying events through a completely historical and accurate light. This is where both Vikings and Last Kingdom fall - their costumes (excluding armor), mannerisms, and beliefs are all very realistic, but their fighting, armor, weapons, and stories are implausible, inaccurate, or a complete work of fiction.

Realistic media are a historical pieces that focus on actual events and historical accuracy. Any errors or oversights regarding historicity are either accidental or deliberately included to accentuate drama. Vikings is not realistic - it makes no attempt to depict vikings as they actually were, as it is more concerned with telling the saga of Ragnar and his sons. I can't say anything specific about the Last Kingdom because it's an unwatchable abortion. So far, I haven't seen, read, or played any truly realistic depiction of vikings.

An example from a different period of history to illustrate my point: Saving Private Ryan (Authentic) vs. Band of Brothers (Realistic). To use another WW2 example, Red Orchestra 2 is a very authentic game, but you can't say it's wholly realistic.

I'm not saying one is inherently better than the other, just that you can usually tell the difference. Holy fuck I think I'm autistic.

TL;DR: Authentic = Feels Real, Realistic = Is Real

In an effort to provide actual help, however, I can recommend you read the Hávamál (beyondweird.com/high-one.html - my favorite translation) and the Völuspa (sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe03.htm - great footnotes) before starting on the rest of the Poetic Edda (sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/ - all of the best Nordic poetry). They're about as accurate as you can get when it comes to the Viking age, with the exception of the oldest runestones. Even the Poetic Edda is a likely bastardization of what the vikings actually spoke, wrote, and believed, as it's components were mostly written centuries after the fact.

As for non-primary media, I can heartily recommend Vinland Saga with absolutely no compunctions.

got a link for a torrent or direct dl?

>Vinland Saga
Where a kid dual wielding knives slaughters people wholesale? What do you find authentic about that?

Enough of Wardruna, time to listen to something new:
youtube.com/watch?v=uK2Z574EQ_k
youtube.com/watch?v=J4Hgy-j1WdA

Sorry, didn't mean to imply it was authentic or realistic, it's just a quality read.

Great fodder for a viking RPG setting.

ufile.io/cmogu
ufile.io/kku09
ufile.io/4hk5i
ufile.io/iaxo2

...

Thank you, user.

Anyone know a good place to start a kingdom in Mount & Blade Viking Conquest?

>northlanders

Brian Wood has a follow-up series called Black Road but not read it yet.

>Black Road
It's shit

some Hirdmen for Saga

Any opinion on Skyrim?

I've started my viking campaign just two days ago. My players raided a japachinese village, wrecked a mage tower, stole a shitton of gold and saved/kidnapped a waifu for themselves. It was a blast.