Who Were The Vikings?

Who Were the Vikings?

The word Viking in the Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language says that the word Viking means the following. "ViÐ'*king 1. any of the Scandinavian pirates who plunder the coasts of Europe from the 8th to 10th centuries. 2. a sea-roving bandit: pirate. 3. a Scandinavian. 4. U.S. Aerospace. One of a series of space probes that obtained scientific information about Mars." (1)

The Vikings lived about one thousand years ago in the lands that we now call Iceland, Lapland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. To most people the Vikings were raiders that got in their longboats and sailed somewhere and then went from town to town killing and pillaging. This is not completely true, because the Vikings were also great adventurers. They set up trading links and looked for land that they could settle down make a home and have a farm. But not to say that the Vikings weren't fierce warriors, because they were great warriors that won almost every early battle. Although they never had an empire, the King of Denmark ruled Norway and England for a brief time from 1030 to 1035.

The Vikings had many reasons for leaving their homeland and living up to being the great adventurers that they were. One reason to leave was that the land that the Vikings were living in was becoming over populated, such that one family couldn't own as much land, as he would like. Also the land in Scandinavia, that they lived on was very mountainous and had very little land that could be farmed. Likewise Sweden contained many forests that made it not fit for farming.

The Viking people were divided up into different classes much like many other societies. They were divided up by how much land and money that they had. There were the "kings" that ruled over each township. Below him came the rich noblemen, or jarls. The king and the jarls were the most powerful people in a township. Then below the jarls there were the freemen or the karls, which included craftsmen, merchants, and farmers. At the very bottom of the totem pole were the slaves otherwise known as thralls.

The majority of Vikings spent very little time away from home on raids. Instead they were at home working as farmers, growing oats, barley, rye, and vegetables, and tending to their cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats. They also kept fruits, such as apples, and nuts such as hazelnuts and walnuts in storage for the winter. Other thing of plenty where reindeer, rabbit, hare, and wild bears that were hunted, they also found cod, salmon, and trout in the Scandinavian rivers and streams. Still other Vikings worked as merchants, traveling far and wide to trade their goods. Some were even specialized craftsmen such as silversmiths, blacksmiths, and woodcarvers. But the most famous of all the skilled Viking workers was the master shipbuilders and excellent sailors.

Viking Lifestyle

The growing population of Vikings in towns such as Birka in Sweden, Ribe and Hedeby in Denmark, and Kaupang in Norway prospered for the trading that took place along this string of cities. The trading flourished even though Danish and the Norwegian Vikings were raiding all the cities over in Europe. The Scandinavian towns were built on major waterways that were easy to reach by ship which in turn made trading much easier.

The Viking houses were built on or near a water source for obvious reasons and also had access to their ships much faster being so close to the water. When there was no water source nearby they would dig wells and reinforce them with stones or wood that was sealed with a pitch. There were no sewers in Viking towns, but instead each house had a garbage heap. The larger towns produced their own goods such as pottery, products made out of iron, ships, glassworks, and leather products.

Towards the end of the Viking age, as power became more concentrated, the Viking towns became large prosperous cities. The biggest city of the Viking time was Hedeby; it was the biggest city in the Viking era. It covered about sixty acres and at the peak of its population it had several thousand citizens. As the kings became more powerful they soon had their royal homes built in the cities. The kings' armies would protect the traders from raiding and granted trading rights that helped the population of traders to grow wealthier.

A house to a Viking was a place to sleep and eat. It was also a reasonable place to store their possessions. The houses of the Vikings were not very fancy and usually consisted of one room. Some of the Vikings built their houses out of materials like stones, which were readily available. They also made them out from turf that was cut of surrounding fields, or out of heavy trees they would then plaster the house with mud, which provided better insulation. Some chose alternate ways to build homes such as to alternate turf then rock.

The availability of building materials depended on which part of the country they were in. Few trees grew in Iceland, the Shetland, and Orkney Islands, or in northern Britain. To solve the problem of not having trees to use to build their houses the Vikings used the stones that were cut off the cliff sides and mountains. But in Sweden and Denmark there were vast forests of oak, birch, and pine that provided adequate building supplies for their homes, workshops, barns, and ships.

To raise a new house, Viking builders made straight and heavy oak posts and put them in deep postholes to be used as roof supports. Then the walls were put up, which were made out of pine planks. They would place the planks verticality into the ground, then lashed to the oak posts, plastered with a mixture of straw, mud, and animal dung. The Vikings also made walls of logs that were laid down on their sides with notches in the ends. They also made walls out of lattice out of tree branches, which were then covered with a mud and straw mixture. The advantage to this was it would let light into the building. Normally the houses of the Vikings did not have windows in them, but in some cases they would use thin animal membranes that were translucent to let light in.

The roof was made out of blocks of turf or blankets of reeds and thatch that were laid down over planking of birch bark, this served as a way to keep the rain and snow out of the house. In the center of the roof there was a hole cut out to let smoke out from the cooking fires. In some of the houses there were no support posts used on the inside so they would put wooden poles on the outside to keep the walls from collapsing under their own weight.

Digging houses out of the ground made some of the Viking homes, so that the floors would be below ground level. But there was a disadvantage to having the floor below