The importance of the sea to those lives who are dictated by it may not be easy for a lot of modern society to understand: the majority of North American culture has been conditioned by a terrestrial lifestyle.The maritime milieu of the North Sea and of the entire Baltic region is a completely different cultural environment than the majority of society in Western Europe and North America.
For the Vikings, the water was a frontier to overcome and conquer, not a barrier.
Viking Trade and Communication
The Scandinavians forged a remarkable trade and communcation network east and south, across the Baltic, through the rivers of Europe, and reached all the way to the Middle-East.
The very name of "Norway" points to the nature of their society: the region was the so-called "North Way" to the hinterland sea routes to the north of Europe.
The Viking Longship
The Viking longship, a result of this unique maritime environment, emerged as a dramatic symbol of Viking culture. These ships gave the Vikings incredible mobility across the entire region during the early Medieval period.
The sailors ability to navigate far inland, and the immense speed at which the ships could sail, granted the Vikings an enourmous advantage over the rest of European society. The ships could be rowed far up river, and even run up onto beaches, and carried over short distances between two bodies of water.
Viking Expansion and Settlement
By the 8th century AD, the Vikings were capable of sailing across the open ocean, which is exactly what they did. The spread towards the British isles, pillaging and burning villages and churches as they travelled. They were looking for wealth, adventure, and prestige.
The voyage to the British Isles would not have been easy, either. In a time without maps, compasses, or knowledge of latitude or longitude, the two day sail across 180 nautical miles would have been treacherous to say the least. The vital ingredient for early success was experience, guts, and a little luck. Especially given the treacherous landscape of the northern Scottish isles.
The Viking Legacy
The Vikings travelled across the globe as one of the first truly maritime society's. They travelled to the British Isles in the 8th century, settled Greenland and Iceland by the 11th century, and reached Canada shorty after to establish the first foreign contact with the continent, 400 years before Columbus.
While most of their colonies overseas eventually collapsed, the role of the landscape in their rise, and eventual fall, cannot be underestimated. Cooling global temperatures and more violent sea conditions made it more and more difficult to communicate with their colonies in the North Atlantic.
The legacy of the Vikings is still widespread throughout the northern regions of Scotland, and in remote islands that dot the Baltic and the North Atlantic.
Sources:
- Julian Richars, Blood of the Vikings. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001.
- Ann Ritchie, Viking Scotland. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1993.
- Barbara E. Crawford, Scandinavian Scotland. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987.
