CONCLUSION

THE END OF THE VIKING ERA

I’ve been with sword and spear slippery with bright blood. And how well we violent Vikings clashed! Red flames ate up men’s roofs, raging we killed and killed.

—Egil’s Saga

DESPITE ALL THIS BIG TALK ABOUT NORMAN Conquests, berserker warlords, and epoch-changing invasions, the Viking Age in Europe didn’t exactly end with one epic good-versus-evil sword fight to the death atop an active volcano with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Instead, the Viking people, who were spread out in settlements from Kiev to Dublin, gradually began to settle down, mellow out, and start trying to act like civilized human beings for a change. They married nice locals, bought farms, raised families, and paid their taxes. They adopted Christianity, built churches, and went to Sunday school. Whether they were trading furs in Constantinople or fishing off the coast of France, they learned the local languages, adopted local customs, and gradually integrated with the civilizations around them. Before long, alarm bells screaming out warnings of an impending Viking apocalypse became a thing of the past.

But even though these guys were eating with forks and not killing people at the dinner table, nobody ever really for-got all the chaos they’d brought into the universe. In a very short period—a little under three hundred years—the Vikings had completely changed the entire Western world. The Viking homelands of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden had begun as a loose confederation of pillage-hungry warlords and emerged as three powerful European kingdoms that were big boys in international politics. In 793, England was an island divided into four kingdoms, none of which had ever heard of a Viking before. By 1066, it was a single, unified, powerful kingdom with a large Scandinavian population, ruled over by a guy who was descended from Vikings. Ireland had become completely intermeshed with Norse culture, which had brought plenty of wealth via trade, and the capital of the country to this day is a city founded by the Viking Turgeis the Devil. The entire northwest coast of France was called Normandy after these men, and was ruled by descendants of Hrolf the Walker. To the east, the town of Novgorod had gone from a small city-state dominated by the Viking leader Rurik to the beginnings of modern-day Russia. Viking trade had united most of the world by sea lanes, and settlements had popped up in Greenland, Iceland, and even (temporarily) the New World. Sure, the Vikings’ methods were harsh and occasionally brutal, but by the time they were done, the map looked a lot more like it does today than it did when they started.

And that’s not a bad thing to hang your axe on.

 

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