THE VIKINGS ABROAD

It is possible to divide Viking activity abroad into a number of distinct geographical spheres, reflecting the character of this activity. Most simply, historians talk about an eastern and western sphere of Viking influence. The west, including those lands surrounding the North Sea, the North Atlantic, and, to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean, was the main sphere of activity for Danish and Norwegian Vikings. Viking activity in the east affected Finland, Poland, the Baltic States, Byzantium (the empire including present-day Turkey and Greece), Russia and the area covered by the former Soviet Union, and was dominated by Swedish Vikings. However, although geography meant that Norway was orientated to the west, Denmark to the south, and Sweden to the east, Swedish Vikings were, for example, involved in raids in England, and it is known that there were Norwegian visitors to Russia. The traditional view of Viking activity in the East and West respectively was one that contrasted trading with raiding, with settlement taking place in both spheres of influence.

However, more recently, Viking scholarship has distinguished a number of subspheres: the North Atlantic, the British Isles, continental Europe, the Baltic, European Russia, and Byzantium. This reflects in part the increase in archaeological data, which has allowed scholars to present a more complex picture of Viking activity abroad, but it is also a result of

The desire to move beyond the simplistic image of the Vikings as destructive raiders in the West and constructive traders in the East. There is much archaeological evidence that the Vikings were involved in trade in the West, and the real difference between East and West may be the absence of rich religious establishments and contemporary monastic chroniclers in the East. Obviously the motives for and the nature of Viking travel abroad varied considerably over the 300-year period that is the Viking Age, given that the people known as Vikings come from areas as different and as far apart as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. When trying to present a summary or survey of Viking activity abroad it may therefore be more useful to talk about the different types of activity, rather than where it took place. In the final analysis, Viking activity was nothing if not opportunistic.

However, it is important to realize that not all Scandinavian travel in the Viking Age was necessarily “Viking” in character. For example, some Scandinavians went on pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem, and others paid diplomatic visits to the courts of kings and emperors. It used to be common to regard the Vikings as barbarian outsiders who inflicted themselves on the rest of civilized, Christian Europe. However, the Vikings were not more savage or primitive than their neighbors. What separated them from the rest of western Europe was religion: the Vikings believed in the pagan gods Odin, Thor, Frey, and a whole range of different deities at the beginning of the Viking Age. Yet in the course of the Viking Age they were converted to Christianity; they gradually abandoned their old writing system, runes, in favor of the Roman alphabet; and they were integrated into the mainstream of European culture and Christendom.