The Vikings! - Crash Course World History 224

Hi I'm John Green; this is Crash Course World History, and today we're gonna talk about one of our most requested topics ever, the Vikings.

Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Finally we get to talk about Thor and Mjölner. This is one of my areas of expertise! I've read all the comics! Like both Thor and The Avengers.

Here's a crazy thing that happens in the next twenty years me from the past, the Avengers and Thor become like, not nerdy.

Like right now me from the past, in 1994, you are suffering mightily for your love of Mjölnir, Thor's hammer, but in the future loving Mjölner is like, cool.

[Theme Music]

Alright so this is Crash Course, so we're mostly gonna skip the blood and guts and thunder and lightning and sailing and dragons and all that stuff that you can get in Game of Thrones.

Instead we're gonna try and figure out what we actually know about the Vikings and how we know it.

As it turns out, we actually know quite a bit about the Vikings.

They were people from Scandinavia, modern day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, who sailed around the North Atlantic and Baltic regions and briefly to North America,

raiding, trading and spreading their influence to places as diverse as Ireland and Greenland and Normandy and Kiev during the so-called "Viking Age" between 750 and 1100 C.E.

The Vikings were great seamen. What did you think I was gonna make it through this video without saying seamen once?

They were able to cross the Atlantic without the aid of a compass or triangular sails.

They were fearsome warriors. Although their reputation as bloodthirsty wild men of the North is probably exaggerated.

You gotta remember that history is shaped by those who wrote it, and all of those like bloodthirsty men of the North narratives were written by like victims of Viking raids.

So history isn't always written by the winners, but when it's written by the losers, they're really bitter about the winners.

Viking expeditions were a mixture of raiding for booty, trading for goods, and eventually searching for land to settle on.

Like most people in most places at the time the Vikings were primarily agriculturalists, and when they settled in places like Iceland and Greenland it was to grow crops and raise animals.

So how do we know all these things? Basically the same way we know about most of the pre-modern world, through a combination of archaeology and writing.

There is of course guest work involved as with most pre-modern history, and some modern history,

and we need to be careful not to take what we dig up or read at face value, but we do have a pretty good record about the Vikings.

Like archaeology tells a lot about how the Vikings lived. The most dramatic examples are, of course, the ships that have been discovered through which we know a lot about what the Vikings like to trade, for instance.