Dukasaur wrote:patches70 wrote:thegreekdog wrote:
Funny (to me) aside - My mother watches the Bible religiously (pun intended) but won't watch Vikings because it is "too violent." I laughed in her face.
ha ha, you should tell your mother that the vikings were never conquered through force of arms. They were defeated and integrated when they were converted to Christianity. For the most part I think. They went around hacking and looting and killing and in the end it was bowing before the cross that finally allowed them to be absorbed. A somewhat ignominious and anti climactic end I should think.
The word "Viking" was a verb, not a noun. Basically it meant something like "go out and seek your fortune because there sure as hell aint no work in your home town."
Contrary to popular belief, the Vikings were not genetically predisposed to be violent or bloodthirsty. They wanted the same thing that any of us wants: just to sit at home with good food, good beer, and a decent blowjob every now and then. Unfortunately, the rocks of Scandinavia don't provide much agriculture, and climate change destroyed the fishing they depended on, so off to "Viking" the men had to go. But it was never meant to be a permanent life change for them, just an emergency measure. Once they found new profitable lives for themselves they settled down and became just ordinary people, even though for a long time the bottleneck of survival they had passed through made them a bit tougher than average.
Oh, I've never had anything against the northmen. They did what they had to do at the time I suppose. They were a tough bunch, I'll give them that. There was quite a bit of negative propaganda about them at the time. Which is to be expected I guess. Culture clashes, they get messy sometimes.
And this is kinds of LOL, though I mean no disrespect-
Duke wrote:and climate change destroyed the fishing they depended on
Burning a lot of fossil fuels were they? Is that man made climate change?
I think it's safer to say that the northmen simply outgrew the resources they had available. That is there were too many of them to be fed with the current state of their fisheries. But you may be right, I'm just a bit skeptical with that particular conclusion of yours. As you say, their soil wasn't the most fertile for farming.
I've never heard anyone of any note tying viking expansion to climate change.
The theories are that they outgrew their resources, looking for revenge, looking for wives, seeking new trade routes and that it was just easier for them to go raiding than it was to try and clear land to provide greater resources for farming in a natural climate that was not conducive to farming in the first place. But never climate change per say. But, who knows, maybe.