5 little known facts about Viking culture

Longships, berzerkers and big hairy men with axes is normally the extent of what most people could tell you about the vikings, and even though this image would be accurate, there was far more to them than the brutish warrior people they were known as by so many.

(A reconstructed viking longship, built on the same design as one found during an archeological dig)

The vikings first landed in Britain in 793 where they raided a small monastery on the island of Lindisfarne. For well over the next 200 years, the sight of viking longships coming closer to shore made entire towns pack up and run for their lives, something that happened until the arrival of William the conqueror in 1066. The problem with the vikings is they didn’t actually have any kind of written language and their rune system was too basic to relay more than a word or two, but much was written about them by the English when they temporarily settled here, and five interesting facts recorded about the way they lived are as follows:

Rights for viking women

It no secret that women have been treated badly throughout the world’s history, often being treated as second class citizens and not having anywhere near the same rights as men. For most cultures, women were seen as nothing more than mothers and housekeepers, and they couldn’t undertake certain work like blacksmithing or gain certain titles, but this wasn’t the case for viking women. Not only were they highly respected within their own culture, but they had rights that no other major civilization on earth gave to their women. Viking women could own property, become a warrior or even the leader of their own town or command troops in battle. Viking girls were often seen as equal to their brothers in terms of inheritance, and not usually “sold off” in arranged marriages like women from surrounding nations were.

They were amongst the cleanest people in Europe

Its understandable that people in the Middle Ages wouldn’t wash as often as people do now. Taking a bath would mean having to buy a very expensive piece of commissioned metal work from the blacksmith, then having to take the time to heat a pot of water over a fire and tip it in over and over again until it was full. Most of the working class couldn’t afford a bath in the first place, and it was much easier to just have a splash wash, but this wasn’t the case with the vikings. Old English texts mention how the vikings liked to take a fully body bath once a week, and took a special interest in the soaps and washing lotions the English had. It seems that living in a very cold environment your entire life makes it easier to walk into a freezing cold river to wash yourself.

Viking leadership relied almost entirely on force

The vast majority of viking territory was governed by independent settlements, who each had their own leader. Every once in a while someone would change their title to king and expect everyone else to do what they said, but you didn’t have to listen unless the person giving the orders has more warriors than you do. As an independent settlement with your own army, there’s nothing stopping you from attacking someone else and taking over their land, so long as they aren’t allied with anyone that could cause you trouble. The leaders of settlements often fought duels to determine who would be in charge, which often came up when closely aged brothers both wanted to be boss. It was also expected that you kill the entire family of the leader you just wiped out as a sign of your power and to remove any chance they may come back when grown up to seek revenge.

(If you had more weapons and the people to use them than the next village over, you could get away with anything you wanted)

Almost everyone in the viking community was a farmer

The huge scary looking berzerkers that people know as brutal killing machines would put down their weapons and pick up a shovel alongside everyone else in the settlement when not on a raid. Farming was done by anyone that didn’t have a job important enough for them to earn enough money not to farm, but unlike in other cultures it wasn’t seen as a peasant job. Normally the poorest people would take the worst paying and hardest jobs, and this meant working hard in a muddy field all day, which associated farm work with being poor, but this wasn’t the case with the vikings. Farming wasn’t seen as either honorable or for the lowest in society, it was seen as something you simply did. Everyone requires food and producing it would have been done by everyone, and it wouldn’t be an unusual sight in a viking settlement to see the chief milking his own cow or fetching his own eggs.

They were the biggest slave traders in Europe

At the time the vikings were most active (800 – 1000 AD), they engaged in a level of slavery that wasn’t matched by any other European country, and possibly no one else in the world during those years. Where ever they would raid, slaves were always taken to be brought back and sold as workers or sex slaves, often being treated like animals and sometimes worked to death as rowers onboard their ships. There were no laws protecting slaves that belonged to a viking, and if an owner wanted to beat their slave to death for no reason, they could do so without any consequences. There’s no official numbers of how many slaves they took because they didn’t have a written language, and neither did most of the people they attacked, but it estimated to be in the tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands.