Vikings

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The Vikings were the seafaring peoples of Scandinavia during the period conventionally dated from the raid on the English monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 — the Viking Age. The word “Viking” named an activity before it named a people: in the Old Norse sources a víkingr is one who goes raiding overseas, and most Norse-speakers of the era were farmers and traders who never did so. What is gathered here is not the raiding but the world the raiders came from: its gods, its picture of the cosmos, and the literature in which both survive.

Before Christianity reached the North, the Scandinavians held a polytheism with no fixed scripture and no central creed — a religion of practice, sacrifice, and local cult rather than doctrine. Its gods fall into two families, the Æsir and the Vanir: Odin, restless and treacherous, god of war, poetry, and the dead; Thor, who guards the world with his hammer against the giants; Freyr and Freyja, of fertility and of a magic called seiðr. The cosmos was imagined as a great ash tree, Yggdrasil, holding nine worlds, and as a history with an end — the foretold doom called Ragnarök, in which gods and giants destroy one another and a renewed world rises from the sea. The dead might go to Odin’s hall of the slain or to other halls; the sources do not entirely agree, and were never meant to be a system.

Almost everything known of this mythology comes from a later hand and a different faith. Iceland converted around the year 1000, and it was Christian Icelanders of the thirteenth century who wrote the texts now relied upon: the Poetic Edda, an anonymous collection of mythological and heroic verse, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, composed in part as a handbook for poets who needed to understand the old pagan allusions. The sagas of Icelanders, set in the settlement age but written generations afterward, supply much of the rest. This gap between the pagan world and its surviving record is the central problem of the field: Snorri arranges the gods into a coherent account, and scholarship cannot always tell where he preserves genuine tradition and where he imposes order, or borrows Christian and classical learning, on material that had none.

For the practitioners themselves the gods were neither allegory nor system but powers to be dealt with — propitiated at the feast, invoked at the grave, trusted or feared. The comparative impulse that sets Odin beside other dying or self-sacrificing gods, or reads Ragnarök against other myths of an ending, is a modern reading; it can illuminate, and it can flatten. What the texts give, read on their own terms, is a religion attentive to fate above all — a sense that even the gods are bound toward an end they foresee and cannot escape, and go on acting anyway.

→ Related: Middle Ages