Who Were the Vikings, Really?

Close your eyes for a second and picture a Viking. What do you see? If you’re like most kids, you might picture a huge, hairy guy with a horned helmet, holding a big axe, screaming as he runs into a stone church to steal gold and burn everything down. Maybe you’re thinking of the tough, axe-wielding villagers from *How to Train Your Dragon*, or the fierce raiders from your favorite history video game. For a really long time, that’s the only picture most people had of Vikings – brutal, violent, one-note bad guys who only existed to raid, pillage, and fight. But guess what? That picture is only half the story, and today we’re going to unlock the full, messy, amazing truth about who the Vikings really were.

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Where Did the “Mean Viking” Myth Come From?

To understand why so many people think Vikings were only violent raiders, we have to look at who wrote the history books first. Most of the written records from the Viking Age (the 300-year period we’ll talk about soon) were written by monks in Christian monasteries across Europe. And guess who loved raiding monasteries? Vikings! Monasteries had tons of gold, silver, fancy cloth, and food, and they were usually built on isolated islands or coastlines where no army would think to look – perfect targets for quick raids.

The most famous early record of a Viking raid comes from a monk named the Venerable Bede, who wrote about the attack on Lindisfarne, a small monastery on an island off the coast of northern England, in the year 793 CE. He described the Vikings as “heathen wolves” who “came from the sea like a plague, burned the holy church, killed the monks, and took all the sacred treasures as plunder.” Of course the monk was going to write the Vikings as terrible villains! If someone broke into your house and took your favorite video games and snacks, you’d probably write in your diary that they were the worst person ever, right? You wouldn’t write about how they might share their candy with their little sister or help their mom fix the roof. The monks’ records were written from a place of pain and anger, so they only told the bad parts of Viking life.

The “horned helmet” myth comes from a different place: 19th-century opera. In the 1870s, a German composer named Richard Wagner wrote a series of operas called *The Ring Cycle*, which was based on old Norse myths and Viking stories. For his stage productions, he wanted the Viking characters to look extra fierce and dramatic, so he added horned helmets to their costumes. The helmets looked so cool that Hollywood movie makers started using them in Viking films too, and soon everyone thought all Vikings wore horned helmets in battle. But archaeologists have

But archaeologists have never dug up a single horned helmet from a Viking battlefield, burial mound, or village site. Not one, anywhere in Scandinavia, Britain, or the rest of Europe. Why? Because horned helmets would be a total hazard in a fight! If you were charging at an enemy on a boat or a horse, they could grab the horns and yank you off balance. If you were running through a forest, the horns would get caught on tree branches and leave you trapped. The only real Viking helmets that archaeologists have found are simple, rounded caps made of thick leather or iron, sometimes with a small metal strip across the nose to stop sword blows. Wealthy warriors sometimes decorated their helmets with tiny metal birds, wolves, or even a little metal “wing” on each side to look extra fierce – but no horns. That silly horned helmet myth started in the 1870s, and it’s about time we put it to bed for good.

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When Did the Vikings Live, and Where Did They Come From?

The time period when Vikings traveled, raided, traded, and settled across the world is called the Viking Age, and it lasted exactly 273 years, from 793 CE to 1066 CE. That’s not as long as you might think! If your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was already an old man when the Viking Age started, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather might have been alive to see it end. To put it another way: the Viking Age started about 180 years before the first castles were built in England, and ended about 900 years before the first iPhone came out.

All Vikings originally came from a cold, rocky, forested part of northern Europe called Scandinavia, which is made up of three modern countries you might have heard of: Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Before the Viking Age started, most people in Scandinavia lived in small farming villages, growing barley and wheat, raising cows and sheep, and trading with their nearby neighbors. They didn’t travel far, and they mostly kept to themselves. So what changed to make them start sailing across the ocean to raid and trade?

Two big things, mostly. First, the population of Scandinavia got bigger and bigger, so there wasn’t enough good farmland for all the young people who wanted to start their own families. If you were a young Viking man with no land to farm, your best option was to sail somewhere else to find new land, or to steal stuff from richer places to get rich quick. Second, Vikings invented (or perfected) a super cool new kind of boat called a longship, which we’ll talk about a lot more in Chapter 3. Longships were fast, sturdy, and could sail in both deep ocean water and shallow rivers, which meant Vikings could go almost anywhere they wanted – even to places no one had ever heard of before.

Not all Vikings went to the same places, though! The Vikings from each Scandinavian country had their own favorite travel routes:

• **Norwegian Vikings** loved sailing west, across the cold North Atlantic Ocean. They went to the Shetland and Orkney Islands, then to Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and even all the way to North America. They were the best sailors of all the Vikings, because they had to navigate rough, stormy ocean water every day.
• **Swedish Vikings** loved sailing east, following big rivers like the Dnieper and Volga deep into what is now Russia, Ukraine, and even Turkey. They traded furs, honey, and amber for silk, spices, and gold from the Byzantine Empire (the big, rich Christian empire based in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul) and the Abbasid Caliphate (the big, rich Muslim empire based in Baghdad, modern-day Iraq). Some Swedish Vikings even worked as bodyguards for the Byzantine Emperor! They were called the “Varangian Guard,” and they were famous for being super loyal and tough fighters.
• **Danish Vikings** had the shortest travel routes, because Denmark is right next to northern Germany and England. They mostly raided and settled in England, France, and the coast of Germany. In fact, the whole region of northern France called Normandy (which means “Northmen’s Land”) was given to a group of Danish Vikings as a gift from the French king in 911 CE, to stop them from raiding Paris. Those Vikings settled down, learned to speak French, converted to Christianity, and became the “Normans” who later conquered England in 1066 CE.

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