While some historians might revel in the opportunity to have their towns raided by Vikings, if for no other reason than to finally be able to study this mysterious group of people first-hand, there are plenty of others who of an entirely different mindset. Indeed, raids by Vikings have always struck fear into the hearts of those living in western European coastal towns. They were swift, they were fierce, and they made wonderful fodder for modern day books and films.
Of course, the Vikings are long since gone from this world (though their legacy lives on in the cultural heritage of the Scandinavian people), so there is really no hope for historians of being able to witness an actual Viking raid.
Still, enough information has been gathered by scholars over the years to enable us to finally look past some of the traditional misconceptions about Vikings and begin to piece together what a real raid might have been like.
A Viking Raid
First off, many of the popular images of Vikings are surprisingly accurate. For instance, if one was unfortunate enough to be living in a town somewhere along the coast of Europe during the height of the Viking age, which occurred sometime between June 8, 793 (the first officially recorded date of a Viking Raid) and sometime in A.D. 1066 (considered the peak of Viking activities) and slowly died away somewhere around the time the Normans (from France) captured England, a Viking raid might have come upon a person's town before they knew anything was wrong.
They used swift, shallow-drift vessels to row into town quickly and with great speed and agility overtake their relatively slow defenders, usually along the coasts of Britain and France. It was pure hit and run. They came, they destroyed, the left.
However, once the Vikings were upon a person, they might have taken a break from trying to fight their attackers off and notice a couple surprising things which popular Viking mythology has gotten wrong.
First, a person might be sad to discover the fact that none of them seem to be wearing metal helmets with horns sticking out of them. It is odd, one might think, because every picture of a Viking most people have ever seen shows them with metal helmets with horns sticking out of them.
A person in a town being raided by vikings surely wouldn't realize until they researched it a little bit later that there is really no record of such helmets existing in Scandinavian or Viking history (though it might be noted that the Norse god Thor wore a helmet with wings on it, which is somewhat similar, but not really the same thing at all).
Second, as one looks around at the hordes of Vikings swiftly overtaking their town using a particularly deft form of close-quarters combat, you might notice that they all seem just a little bit shorter than they had always imagined them being, and not quite as massive.
Again, when one attempts to understand this curious fact later, it is realized that this is just another of the many misconceptions we have about Vikings, who according to historical record, averaged about 5'7” in height, which is a little bit below average for a full-grown male today (also, it was said that Vikings possessed an early form of soap, with which some of them bleached their hair. Imagine, even the traditional Scandinavian blond hair wasn't always as real as is assumed!).
Now, providing a person was one of the few lucky ones who successfully fought off the Viking raid, they might watch these short, hornless, bleached-blonde raiders finish sacking the village and return to sea, where they might continue along the coast until they find another helpless town to raid.
Analyzing the Raids
While this event may indeed sound fearsome to today’s audience, it is important to always look at things in the proper historical context. For the time, Viking raiders really weren’t as unbelievably barbaric as they might seem. In those days, for many people throughout Europe and Western Asia, warfare and battle was almost a way of life.
Political lines were not firmly drawn, towns were being won or lost in battle by various authorities, and the lines between war and peace were tenuous at best. The Vikings, in actuality, were just another drop in the bucket during the middle ages. What made these raiders from the north different, however, and thus more fearsome to those coastal towns, was the fact that they did not just come to rob and steal. They also seemed to take special care to destroy items of religious value – they would pillage Christian monasteries and other holy sites, which earned them quite a bit of hatred in a highly religious time.
This being the case, the Vikings were indeed hated and despised as pagans amongst a Christian continent, but they truly didn’t do much to help their case. They most likely reveled in the fear they inspired, and surely still would if they were around today.
References:
"Ancient History: Vikings." BBC.
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