The Vikings! - Crash Course World History 224 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi I'm John Green; this is Crash Course World
History, and today we're gonna talk about
one of our most requested topics ever, the
Vikings.
Me from the past: Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Finally
we get to talk about Thor and Mjölner. This
is one of my areas of expertise! I've read
all the comics! Like both Thor and The Avengers.
John: Here's a crazy thing that happens in
the next twenty years me from the past, the
Avengers and Thor become like, not nerdy.
Like right now me from the past, in 1994,
you are suffering mightily for your love of
Mjölnir, Thor's hammer, but in the future
loving Mjölner is like, cool.
[Intro]
Alright so this is Crash Course, so we're
mostly gonna skip the blood and guts and thunder
and lightning and sailing and dragons and
all that stuff that you can get in Game of
Thrones.
Instead we're gonna try and figure out what
we actually know about the Vikings and how
we know it.
As it turns out, we actually know quite a
bit about the Vikings. They were people from
Scandinavia, modern day Norway, Sweden, and
Denmark, who sailed around the North Atlantic
and Baltic regions and briefly to North America,
raiding, trading and spreading their influence
to places as diverse as Ireland and Greenland
and Normandy and Kiev during the so-called
"Viking Age" between 750 and 1100 C.E.
The Vikings were great sea men. What did you
think I was gonna make it through this video
without saying seamen once?
They were able to cross the Atlantic without
the aid of a compass or triangular sails.
They were fearsome warriors. Although their
reputation as bloodthirsty wild men of the
North is probably exaggerated. You gotta remember
that history is shaped by those who wrote
it, and all of those like bloodthirsty men
of the North narratives were written by like
victims of Viking raids. So history isn't
always written by the winners, but when it's
written by the losers, they're really bitter
about the winners.
Viking expeditions were a mixture of raiding
for booty, trading for goods, and eventually
searching for land to settle on.
Like most people in most places at the time
the Vikings were primarily agriculturalists,
and when they settled in places like Iceland
and Greenland it was to grow crops and raise
animals.
So how do we know all these things? Basically
the same way we know about most of the pre-modern
world, through a combination of archaeology
and writing.
There is of course guest work involved as
with most pre-modern history, and some modern
history, and we need to be careful not to
take what we dig up or read at face value,
but we do have a pretty good record about
the Vikings.
Like archaeology tells a lot about how the
Vikings lived. The most dramatic examples
are, of course, the ships that have been discovered
through which we know a lot about what the
Vikings like to trade, for instance.
But with the Vikings we also have a pretty
substantial written record. Although we need
to be careful with it for a number of reasons,
the first is timing. Much of what was written
about the Vikings comes from the 13th century,
after the Viking age.
And it was written by authors who had an interest
in making the Pagans seem as different from
them as possible to highlight the civilizing
role of Christianity.
Now the Vikings were not illiterate; people
knew how to read and write runes, but most
of these runic inscriptions are really short
and don't tell us that much about Vikings.
It's nothing about like about Thor's hammer
or what ever it's all like "I trade three
sheep for two loads of lumber!"
Some of you Viking fans, and I know that's
most of you, are saying, "but what about the
sagas?" We tend to use the word saga to describe
anything that's long and drawn out but when
you're talking about Vikings it means something
very specific.
A saga is a long, narrative epic written in
Old Norse from the 13th century or later.
And the date tells you something right away,
the sagas were written centuries after the
Viking Age. So we have to be careful when
using them as historical sources.
The sagas we associate with the Vikings are
called the sagas of the Icelanders, which
look like this in Icelandic. And they purportedly
describe Viking travels and adventures in
the 10th and 11th centuries.
People used to see them as relatively accurate
historical documents, but now most historians
recognize them as fictions. Like Viking historian
Teva Vidal, who provided much of the information
for this episode, says it's best to think
of the sagas as a kind of pseudo history.
They don't provide a completely accurate picture
of what it was like to be a Viking or what
happened to Vikings, but they can provide
some useful detail.
Alright let's go to the Thought Bubble, and
while you're there by the way I'm gonna grow
a Viking beard and change shirts.
Now your stereotypical Viking is a burly blonde
or redheaded fellow with a big beard and a
bigger sword who learned the important lesson
that it's not about killing dragons; it's
about learning to train them so they can execute
your wishes.
But the real stereotypical Viking was probably
a hard bargaining trader enmeshed in a complex
network of pan-European trade. I know how
you guys like it when I talk about trade.
So at the beginning of the Viking age, the
Viking's primary interaction with the rest
of Europe was through raiding.
Alright, hold on Thought Bubble; the Vikings
didn't have horns on their helmets. Sorry.
Anyway, this bit about raiding was especially
true on the coast for obvious reasons. In
heavily forested places without many large
settlements, raiding was not a very good option.
The earliest recorded Viking targets were
often monasteries, like the one at Lindisfarne
that was attacked in 793. Monasteries made
good targets because they were relatively
isolated, full of treasure, and monks usually
aren't very good fighters, except, of course,
for Shaolin monks.
Now the Vikings were able sailors, but they
didn't quite make it far enough afield to
raid kung fu monasteries.
Anyway, this brings up two important points.
First, the Vikings were not motivated by religion
even though they sacked monasteries; they
were after loot. Second and more importantly,
Viking raids were not intended to destroy
people or towns, although, they have that
side effect.
So after an initial phase of raiding and terrorizing,
the Vikings realized there were better ways
to get rich. One was extortion; they built
up such a reputation that often times they
didn't need to actually raid a place to get
them to give up their goods.
Eventually, though, the Vikings turned to
trade and settlement. Which as we've seen
over and over are the most reliable paths
to wealth. Not necessarily the most fun. Thanks,
Thought Bubble, and thanks for getting some
of the blood and the guts and especially dragons
in there.
So Viking settlements, like their raids and
trading missions, were about gaining wealth,
this time in the form of usable agricultural
land. Like they weren't colonizers interested
in creating Viking states or a Viking empire,
and how much Vikings influenced the places
that they raided was pretty varied.
In England, where the Vikings established
a territory called the Danelaw, there was
a hybridization between the Britons and the
Scandinavians, while in Normandy and Russia,
where Vikings were always a small minority,
they blended with the dominant culture very
quickly. In regions where they could become
a majority of the population like Iceland
and Greenland, Scandinavian culture came to
dominate which is why we see such close cultural
affinity between these regions of Scandinavia
proper today.
Like those Icelandic sagas we were talking
about? People living in Iceland can read them
today because they're written in the same
Icelandic. Whereas if English readers try
to read the Canterbury tales, which were written
hundreds of years later, it's difficult to
even get the fart jokes.
So much of the reason we seen Greenland, Iceland,
and the Faroe Islands as part of a larger
North Atlantic Viking world is because they
were all tied together by trade.
The Vikings established trade in manufacturing
hubs in places as diverse as Hedeby, Roskilde,
Birka, Dublin, and York. So the Vikings- ohhhhh!
It's time for the open letter.
But first let's see what's in the globe today.
Oh look, it's a Viking longboat beating against
the current, borne back ceaselessly into Nova
Scotia.
Hey there Leif. So your dad, Eric the Red,
was exiled from Iceland to Greenland because
of manslaughter. Now I know what you're thinking,
kicked out of Iceland for manslaughter? I
thought that's how people got TO Iceland.
I'm just kidding, Iceland, I visited you once
and you were amazing!
Anyway, Leif, you decided that Greenland was
not far enough afield and you took the Vikings
all the way to North America. Where in North
America? We're not quite sure, but we're pretty
sure that you did go there. There was some
raiding, some trading, some strife with the
indigenous people. And then, you didn't settle
the land and kill 95% of American Indians,
and for that Leif Ericson, I say good job!
Best Wishes, John Green.
So anyway the Vikings traded all sorts of
things including tools and weapons and jewelry
and building materials and also soapstone
which they use to make cooking vessels, whereas
like we would probably use, like, ceramic
pottery, or these days you know steel or that
wizardry that non-stick pans are made out
of.
Man, it would suck to be a Viking. You've
got soapstone pots, no horns on your helmet,
and like all you can do is travel from Dublin
to York. Best case scenario, you get to go
to Canada, which, you know, not that great.
But Viking trade was often able to turn what
had been a cultural bathwater into like a
big important commercial center. Kiev was
probably one such center before it had been
a Khazar trading post.
Another was Dublin, which was probably a fishing
Village before the Vikings turned it into
a thriving center of trade. Dublin eventually
grew so large and powerful that the Dubliners,
not the James Joyce short story collection,
but the actual Dubliners, were able to kick
the Vikings out.
Okay wait we should also probably talk a little
bit about mythology and the Norse pantheon
because you know, Thor.
As with much of our knowledge about the Vikings,
our understanding of Norse mythology mostly
dates from after the Viking age. There are
some artifacts like Thor's hammer pendants
and picture stones from Goathland. But most
of the myths that you might know come from
later, written accounts like the Prose Edda
from Iceland and you know, Marvel Comics from
New York.
So most of the people who were describing
Viking religion were Christians, and they
characterized the Vikings as Pagans because,
you know, they could only describe religions
in terms they knew of and that was like Christianity,
or Pagan Greco Roman you know Gods of Olympus.
So it can be tempting to draw an equivalence
between Norse mythology and Greco Roman mythology,
but that's not really about Viking religion;
it's more about like the way Christians imagined
Viking religion.
Yes, I realize that the Greek pantheon and
Roman pantheon are different. I just want
to emphasize that any resemblance between
the Greco Roman and Norse mythologies are
mostly coincidental.
I mean yes, there is a God responsible for
thunder in both of them, but there is a God
responsible for thunder in most polytheistic
religions. Now of course we know thunder,
as my four and a half year old son told me,
is dinosaurs walking around heaven.
So in the end when it comes to Viking religion,
we have a lot of stories from after the Viking,
but we don't have a lot of knowledge about
how they actually practiced and worshiped.
So there's a brief introduction to the role
of Vikings in world history. I know you probably
wanted more blood and guts; there was a little
bit of blood and guts but, you know, it's
mostly trade.
The eventual success and influence of the
Vikings was really about settlements and the
exchange of goods, and, in the process, the
exchange of cultures.
But of course fighting and killing get a lot
more attention than trade, which maybe one
of the reasons that we remember the Vikings
so vividly. I mean, they made their biggest
influence in Greenland and Iceland, and nothing
against Greenland or Iceland, but we're talking
about a combined populations somewhere in
the neighborhood of half of Columbus, Ohio.
So we may remember the mythology and the barbarian
attacks because that's kind of what humans
are wired to remember, but for me, the real
lesson of the Vikings is that they show in
microcosm something that happens again and
again in world history. When raiding gives
way to trading, good things often happen.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
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