5/17/2023 0 Comments Mythic nordic warriors![]() They deliberately used fear-tactics to intimidate a civilian population, and it worked. They spread destruction, rape, murder and theft, taking slaves, gold and plunder back to their homes across the North Sea. Contemporary chronicles make for gripping reading, as Britain is plagued by these heathens from the sea they appear as brutal, invincible, cruel and utterly savage, with an almost supernatural ability to appear at any time, at any place. They immediately became a hated and feared foe the famous prayer, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was, ‘From the Northmen’s fury, O Lord preserve us’. The Vikings had appeared on the shores of Britain before their infamous assault on Lindesfarne in 793, but this raid is significant for its impact and consequences, heralding as it did the beginning of the Viking Age. The word ‘Viking’ provokes a vivid landscape of images bearded axes and painted shields, longships pulling out of the mist, brutal contests of speed, skill and ferocity.īut, outside of the popular imagination, what were these Scandinavian warriors who came to Britain as raiders, really like as soldiers? How well do aspects of this myth compare to the historical record and why has the myth endured? My aim here is not to discredit the Vikings as combatants, but to create a more balanced picture of these Norsemen as raiders and warriors. An aura of romance and danger surrounds them. They are portrayed as existing in great freedom, able to move and raid at will, unbound by the stifling normality of the lives of more settled peoples. The impression is that Vikings are ferocious and cunning warriors, unmatched in battle, and able to overcome any enemy by either sheer force, or by a kind of lateral thinking that makes a mockery of their foes’ conventional tactics. The language of Viking combat is astonishingly well-known we are aware of a range of foreign and specialist words, such as ‘Valhalla’, ‘berserker’, or ‘valkyrie’, usually only known by academics and devotees of a historical field. They have lived on in the popular imagination, and the success of The Last Kingdom, Vikings and dozens of videogames and books feed an ever-growing appetite. It’s intriguing that Vikings as explorers and warriors regularly top polls of the greatest historical warriors. This is not an isolated occurrence in 2017 the videogame For Honor was released, announcing its Viking warriors as, ‘the greatest warriors the world had ever known’, who are ‘Wild, free and utterly without fear’, and went on be a widely popular game that still has an active following. As of 3 rd March, despite the game being still in early access, it has attracted more than 5 million players worldwide. On 2 nd February this year, the Swedish games studio Iron Gate released Valheim, a survival and crafting game set in an imagined Viking afterlife.
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