What caused the Viking Age?

Antiquity, Sept, 2008 by James H. Barrett

Introduction

The Scandinavian diaspora of the late eighth to mid-eleventh centuries AD known as the Viking Age was both widespread in scale and profound in impact. Long-range maritime expeditions facilitated a florescence of piracy, trade, migration, conquest and exploration across much of Europe--ultimately extending to western Asia and the eastern seaboard of northern North America (Brink & Price in press). This diaspora contributed to state formation and/or urbanism in what are now Ireland, Scotland, England, Russia and the Ukraine--not to mention within Scandinavia itself. It was one of the catalysts leading to fragmentation of the Carolingian empire and it created the semi-independent principality of Normandy.

As one of the last 'barbarian migrations' of post-Roman Europe, it is also among the best documented. Its study is thus uniquely important for an understanding of European history. It also provides good examples of three processes of relevance to the archaeology of the wider world: the potential impact of small-scale but highly militarised non-state communities on neighbouring 'complex societies', the development of transnational identities in a pre-capitalist world and the seaborne colonisation of islands. Studying the causes of the Viking Age is potentially as illuminating and complex as interpreting the decline of the Roman Empire.

Many discussions of the causes of the Viking Age have been conducted in contexts that are regional (e.g. Nasman 2000a; Vesteinsson et al. 2006). Others address the problem within broad narratives (e.g. Roesdahl 1991: 187-94; Richards 2000: 18-19; Byock 2001: 82-4; Sawyer 2003a: 106-9; Hadley 2006: 16-21; Woolf 2007: 52-7). Yet others challenge the relevance of the Viking Age as a socio-economic watershed or a useful unit of analysis (e.g. Svanberg 2003: 201-3; Hodges 2006).

The hesitancy in some quarters to view the 'Viking' diaspora as meaningful may ultimately owe its roots to a reaction against the gross misuse of Viking Age archaeology as racist propaganda by the National Socialists and others between 1920 and 1945 (see Muller-Wille 1994; Nondier 2002:509-11). Nevertheless, there is a problem to resolve, and to understand the early Middle Ages in Europe one must consider developments both within and between regions (cf. McCormick 2001; Wickham 2005). Nasman (2000a) and Svanberg (2003) demonstrate that Scandinavian material culture was highly regionalised in the period under consideration.

Despite these practical and historical impediments, a small number of studies have sought to grapple with the causes of the Viking Age in holistic fashion, limiting the danger of information overload through varying combinations of generalisation and case study (e.g. Sawyer 1982a; Lund 1989; Myhre 1993; Hernaes 1997; Randsborg 2000; McCormick 2001; Simek 2004). Adopting this tradition, what follows combines an overview with more detailed consideration of early Viking Age (particularly late eighth- to early ninth-century) Scandinavian raiding in the west. It starts from the premise that cause must precede effect in time. This may be obvious, but the disproportionate abundance of evidence from the middle of the ninth century and later has often led scholars of the Viking Age to read history backwards, from the known to the unknown, potentially skewing our understanding of causal chains.

Collectively, previous scholarship has considered the causes of the Viking Age in terms of one or more of the following:

* Technological determinism;

* Environmental determinism;

* Demographic determinism;

* Economic determinism (the growth of urbanism and trade);

* Political determinism (the weakness of neighbouring empires and/or the centralisation of power within Scandinavia);

* Ideological determinism.

Each explanation combines these factors in differing configurations, creating a wide variety of possible models. It would be impractical to review the resulting historiography in a work of this length. Instead, this paper will return to first principles, the ingredients of the story of the Viking Age, briefly considering them in light of both present knowledge within 'Viking studies' (including archaeology, history and related fields) and insights from the social sciences (specifically anthropology and sociology). In so doing it seeks to present a brief overview of existing wisdom, to challenge several problematic assumptions, to introduce a few new issues which have not yet received the attention they merit and to propose a new explanation.

Technological determinism

Among the traditional 'causes' of the Viking Age, the demotion of naval technology and seafaring knowledge is perhaps the most surprising to the non-specialist. The high level of technological skill and social signalling embodied by boats and ships in Viking Age Scandinavia has been reinforced by all research since the first great ship-burial excavations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Crumlin-Pedersen 1995; Owen & Dalland 1999; Westerdahl 2008). However, it is equally clear that large-scale seaborne raiding, conquest and/or migration could have emanated from Scandinavia long before, thus reducing the causative power of Viking ships.