Norse Influence (ish)

For this week we all got assigned an aspect of information that we would need to use for context of CT. We were to try and incorporate or show our knowledge of our specialty areas throughout these presentations. As for me, my specialty area is Norse (Viking) influence on the Middle Ages. Awesome right, I picked an area that we can easily see and relate to throughout the semester. I touched on this briefly in my presentation today (Thurs), that the fact that we don't have many religious artifacts, manuscripts, etc. is due to the Vikings. When they started invading the northern British Isles sometime around 800 AD (date is debatable) like I mentioned in my presentation, they took for themselves things of value (religious and otherwise) and destroyed manuscripts.

For now, I will make light connections between Norse culture and the culture of the people in the Age that we have been studying. To start off, I would like to talk about the way Vikings were raised. Unlike many world cultures we have learned about through our basic history courses, Vikings were raises to be physically strong and self-reliant. They had no use for educating themselves through math, literature, or philosophy. Running, jumping and wrestling were substituted for the education they may have received in another culture. As soon as a child could carry a weapon, his training for battle began. In the war aspect,the Vikings are very similar to the culture of warriors we studied during our Beowulf unit. The greatest honor a Viking could have was to die in battle, and therefore enter Valhalla ( Norsemen heaven). Another incentive for battle (outside the honor of dying in it) was that a great voyage that brought fame or fortune to a group of Norsemen might earn all who took part the rank of a noble.

The social class system is another similarity that Norsemen share with people of the Middle Ages. The Norsemen had kings ( king definition for them was more similar to the way a Lord of a castle would act) that would govern a small group of people and an area of land about the size of a county. The majority of Norsemen were free farmers that payed taxes and pledged their loyalties to their local leader or noble. There were really only two classes to put it simply, if you were a farmer or "peasant" if you will, you grew up surrounded with the idea of battle and war, so if your king ever called upon you to fight you would. In this way I guess you could say peasants were knights as well. And through war and battle one could move up into the ranks of the nobles. Another connection I found between the way of life of the Norsemen and those of which we studied during the Beowulf unit is blood feuds between tribes and marriages for diplomatic reasons. They used marriage to settle disputes between two conflicting tribes.

Religion was an area that Norsemen differed in from that of Middle Age society in that they were polytheistic and believed in their own gods. Gods that we hear of in their myths and legends like Thor the god of thunder. Norse mythology is very similar to that of Greek mythology, which like Dr. comber expressed when Trevor said something about Norse mythology, brings about the question of how all these ancient mythologies were so similar between peoples spread about across the globe who apparently had no form of contact with these other civilizations.

I chose for my specialization to be Norse influence on this time period because in the opening weeks of this class I heard that the Vikings come up and I simply thought that in all the years of history that I've taken I always hear about the Vikings, but never actually learn about them so hear would be my chance to take what I learn about a subject I'm interested in and incorporate it with the topics of discussion in class. 

Citations

International World History Project. World History Center. Web. 9 September 2008.