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 William Fitzhugh, curator in the Department of
Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of
Natural History, says the Vikings were far from simply
brutish barbarians in horned helmets.
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Who Were the Vikings?
For centuries—indeed, ever since Viking raiders
savagely attacked England's Lindisfarne monastery in A.D.
793—the Vikings have seemed to many to have been
little more than blue-eyed barbarians in horned helmets. But
archeological investigations of Viking sites stretching from
Russia to Newfoundland have revealed a more human (if not
altogether humane) side to the Viking character. In this
interview with NOVA producer Julia Cort, William Fitzhugh,
curator of a new
exhibit on
Vikings at the Smithsonian Insitution, offers compelling
insight into this new image of the Norsemen and what he
perceives as their catalytic role in Europe's transformation
from a feudal society to an integrated group of modern
nation-states.
NOVA: What must it have been like for the monks at
Lindisfarne to be suddenly attacked out of the blue?
Fitzhugh: For them, the attack represented the
vengeance of Satan on the Christian outposts of Europe. It was
a terrible event, because the monks and the church centers had
set themselves up in small, fortress-like places where they
could pursue their studies and writings in peace, and it was
an invasion of the sanctitude of Christ and their religion.
This was totally unlike anything that had happened before.
There had been outlaws, but to have shiploads of brawny
characters show up at your isolated, supposedly sacred center,
this was the ultimate horror.
NOVA: What did the Vikings actually do in these
attacks?
 While ruthless, Viking attacks were more about
survival than subjugation, historians now say.
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Fitzhugh: Well, the attacks were very diverse. I mean,
one misconception we have is that swarms of Vikings raided
constantly all over the place, and it really wasn't that way.
For the most part, the raids were totally independent. They
were not the result of national armies or navies moving down
into Europe, but rather the actions of individual Viking
chieftains who grouped together followers and had one or maybe
several boats. Occasionally, as in some of the invasions of
Normandy, they organized whole flotillas and made a purposeful
kind of attack, but generally they were much more
individualistic. They had to find food, and they couldn't
carry their food with them. They had to live off the land, so
they drove people out and took whatever money and other
valuables people had. And, of course, the church centers and
monasteries like Lindisfarne constituted the major sources of
wealth at that time.
NOVA: Did they kill a lot of people in these raids?
Fitzhugh: In many cases they did. I think they were
relatively ruthless, but remember, this was a ruthless age
with far more than just peaceful farmers living peaceful
lives. All sorts of things were going on in the British Isles
and mainland Europe, including constant battles between rival
princes vying for kingship and control of local regions. The
Vikings were just another crowd, though a crowd that was
non-Christian and had no compunction about killing churchmen
or women or children.
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 Your typical Viking settlement would not have
contained blond, blue-eyed Norsemen alone, but a
cosmopolitan group of inhabitants.
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That said, in general I think the victims were men, because
the Vikings were great at absorbing people. They needed
slaves, they needed people to help row, they needed people to
help maintain their lifestyle. They regularly set up small
villages and centers where they could overwinter or stay for
months at a time, and they needed people to help run these
establishments. So I think if you were able to put yourself
back into the camp of a raiding Viking group, you probably
would find Italians and Spaniards and Portuguese and French
and Russians—a very diverse group built around a core of
Vikings from a particular region, say, southern Denmark or an
Oslo fjord. It wouldn't be just be blond, blue-eyed Norsemen.
NOVA: So what are the main challenges in finding the
truth about the Vikings?
Fitzhugh: Well, one of the major problems in Viking
studies is that we're biased towards the historical
accounts—early chronicles that all came from the church
centers or official reports to the kings or regional
authorities. It's always been that way. Only in the past 20
years or so have archeological and other studies begun to
provide information that fleshes out and in some cases
contradicts or even replaces the historical record. These
findings are giving us a totally different view of the
Vikings. We see them archeologically not as raiders and
pillagers but as entrepreneurs, traders, people opening up new
avenues of commerce, bringing new materials into Scandinavia,
spreading Scandinavian ideas into Europe. For instance, we see
silk that originated in Asia appearing in archeological sites
such as that at York (see
The Viking Diaspora). This contrasts sharply with the early accounts, which were
all from Europe, were inevitably based on victims' reports,
and were extremely one-sided.
Continue: The Icelandic Sagas
Explore a Viking Village
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Who Were the Vikings?
Secrets of Norse Ships
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The Viking Diaspora
Write Your Name in Runes
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Build a Tree-Ring Timeline
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| Updated November 2000
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