Martin Rundkvist
People have strange heroic ideas about the Viking Period. The reason is that they specifically read *heroic* literature, much of it written as historical semi-fiction hundreds of years later. It's like basing your ideas about the 1100s on Walter Scott.
Viking Period archaeology in Scandinavia is deeply unheroic. It concerns itself overwhelmingly with the non-Viking activities of farmers.
Most runestones deal with modest land inheritance.
Pepijn
The more I learn about the Viking Period, the more I am secure in my conviction the best job during that period was any-job-but-Viking.
Shore based admin support sounds like a Viking Period dream job.
Pepijn
>The aim of most Vikings was to buy a farm and get married.
Is this comparable to Roman centurions and legionaries receiving a plot of land as a retirement pension for the "second part of their life"?
Martin Rundkvist
"Viking" was a job, not an ethnicity. Most Scandinavians at the time were never Vikings, and only the short-livedest, unluckiest young men were Vikings for their whole lives. The aim of most Vikings was to buy a farm and get married.
Martin Rundkvist
In the 790s, the Scandinavians put sails on their ships and went to raid their first literate area, England. Thus opens the so-called Viking Period, which is an artefact of written history.
Archaeology has demonstrated that before that time, the Scandies had been raiding *each other* at shorter range with rowing ships for at least 1100 years.
From Hjortspring c. 340 BC to Salme c. AD 750.
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