Northmen longphort driver#

The paucity of evidence regarding the acute constraints and opportunities of Viking-ship commanders of the 780s–850s is probably the main reason why, compared to general conditions, the search for immediate causes, or ‘trigger factors’, has been less intense and successful-Barrett ( 2010:297) finds the enterprise ‘unrealistic’. Footnote 2 The grounds for explaining the timing and location of the early Viking raids must be more precisely historically situated in order to frame the decision of Scandinavian ship commanders to direct young men’s violent potential into overseas raiding. For instance, young men’s urge to violently acquire wealth and glory has modest explanatory value since it may be regarded as a given, a generic feature of Germanic pre-state societies throughout the first millennium AD. Still, these factors are hardly unique to ninth-century Scandinavia. It seems likely that more or less all of these cultural and social factors played some role in motivating the Viking raids. A more purely cultural condition is emphasised by Price ( 2002): the connection between Norse religion and a fatalistic warrior mentality. Ashby ( 2015) favours a more general condition: pillaging was motivated by the social capital acquired through fame and glory.

Northmen longphort driver#

Sindbæk ( 2011, 2017) considers the influx of Islamic silver as the main driver behind the Viking incursions, and he regards bride wealth as an example of what he holds to be the more general significance in Scandinavia of silver: it was used to establish and maintain social networks over time. Barrett proposes that an assumed dearth of potential marriage partners in Scandinavia was a result of selective female infanticide, while Raffield and his co-authors propose that the supposed paucity of females was the combined effect of polygyny, concubinage, and social inequality. ( 2017) have suggested that young men’s search for treasure to pay bride wealth led them to pillage overseas.

For instance, several studies have focused on the practice of the bride wealth, whereby a man who wished to marry a woman had to pay a sum to her family. Recent scholarship has narrowed the scope of inquiry to cast possible causes in sharper relief against a general backdrop. Footnote 1 However, the immediate causes as to why the Viking raids began there and then remain undiscovered thus their outbreak and early phase must be considered unexplained (Ashby 2015:100). Historians and archaeologists have done admirable work in identifying the economic, political, and cultural aspects of Scandinavian societies that were necessary longue- durée conditions for the Viking incursions overseas. It is argued that coalitions and conflicts that arose from these interests, and new constraints and opportunities that emerged for these three types of agents, provide keys to understanding why and where Vikings raided overseas up to the mid-ninth century.Īround AD 800, Scandinavians began setting off on Viking raids across the North Sea, an activity that continued over more than two centuries. The peak in this trade on the threshold of the Viking Age invites a reconsideration of the coinciding and conflicting interests of Scandinavian long-distance traders, kings, and Vikings. Because of their high numbers and durability, whetstones retrieved in Ribe and other urban sites may be regarded as a proxy for long-distance seaborne trade from the Arctic. Geological analyses of whetstones retrieved in eighth- to early ninth-century Ribe, south-western Jylland, in present-day western Denmark, demonstrate that the majority were quarried near the aristocratic manor Lade (‘loading/storing place’) in Trøndelag, present-day central Norway, some 1100 km by sea to the north. 890, but in light of this paper’s findings, its history may be pushed further back in time.

Hitherto, the earliest firm evidence of this trade has been Ohthere’s account c.

During the Viking Age, Arctic Scandinavia was a source of exquisite furs, down, walrus ivory, and other commodities that met with high demand in England and on the Continent.