We will endeavor here to restore what was undoubtedly the authentic figure of these Scandinavian navigators who so defrayed the history of the West between 800 and 1050 approximately.
For many reasons, some obvious, the Scandinavians were probably, from the beginning, great sailors and shrewd traders. Their famous boat (knôrr, skeid, snekkja, etc., but never longship...) seems to have been designed quite early (6th or 7th century), and its technical characteristics made it an outstanding vehicle:symmetrical hull mounted with clapboards, one-piece keel ensuring a minimum draft, central mast fixed in a special beam giving it relative mobility, single rectangular sail, rudder to starboard aft and made of a short oar held by a soft leather strap, etc.
Already before 800, the merchants of the North had fixed routes along which they had founded counters. There are at least four of them. One, internal to the Baltic, source of amber and skins and furs. The second, called the Northern Route (nordrvegr), ran from southern Norway to Murmansk via the North Cape and across the White Sea, also for skins and furs. A third, known as the western route (vestrvegr), the best known, allowed three variants:one, due west, towards England and Ireland; another, famous, along the Dutch, French, and Spanish coasts where these navigators practiced cabotage and, via the Strait of Gibraltar, could end up in Byzantium; the third, by rivers and lakes, due south towards northern Italy; the traffic involved luxury goods in small quantities, including wines and spices, honey, fine weapons, glassware, and especially slaves, as the Norse practiced this trade on a large scale. The eastern route (austrvegr) was mainly taken by the Swedes:starting from the extreme east of the Baltic, it descended to Byzantium by Russian rivers and lakes; again, this route had two variants:one direct via the Black Sea; the other, more to the east, by the Caspian, being able to go as far as Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Baghdad, and cutting the two great caravan routes coming from the Far East. If these routes were gradually institutionalized by the Vikings, they were in place long before them.
It took, before the end of the 8th century, the remarkable conjunction of two phenomena - the dismemberment of the immense Carolingian Empire and, in 711, the capture of the Strait of Gibraltar by the Arabs, thus cutting off East-West relations in the Mediterranean - so that these merchants turn into predators, when circumstances allow it; their goal was in fact either to acquire wealth by all possible means (for example as mercenaries, which we know little about), or to settle in more lenient places, with more fertile soil:the English Danelaw , Southern Ireland, our Normandy, Iceland, then the principalities of Novgorod (Hôlmgardr) and Kiev (Kcenugardr) which, united, will be at the origin of the “Russian” State. From then on began the Viking movement, which owes its dark prestige only to its tactics and the nature of its prey. The Scandinavians practiced the coup de main with astonishing rapidity and formidable efficiency. Seeming to appear out of nowhere, they swooped down on their prey - abbey, monastery, priory, open city, etc. - when it was defenseless (on the day of a big local festival, for example), they methodically looted it, set it on fire and immediately set off again on their fast, flexible, light and almost invulnerable boat. There was enough to inspire solid terror. Their attacks being for the most part directed against the property of the Church, and the clerics being almost the only ones who know how to hold a pen, it is to them that we owe the horrified chronicles, the incredible annals, in short, the excesses, hyperboles and disfigurements of reality on which the West has since fed. They saw in the Vikings henchmen of Satan - an image that has not completely lost its pugnacity. We can distinguish various phases in this phenomenon:from 800 to 850 there is a period of trial and error during which the Scandinavians become aware of the vulnerability of the West; from 850 to 900 real raids are carried out by audacious leaders who do not hesitate to lay siege to cities like Paris or London; then, from 900 to 980, a phase of colonization begins; the ultimate repercussions, which are mainly due to the Danes, take place between 980 and 1050, with larger movements but which never had the magnitude that the chronicle assigns them. The movement will end by itself, essentially for two reasons:the first is the Christianization of the North, between 950 and 1050, which, among other consequences, will dry up their major source of income, the slave trade; the second is due to the fact, internal, that the Scandinavian countries organize themselves into States, on the "southern" model, with a strong centralized power and the collection of taxes, which puts an end to the maneuvers of the independent "kings of the sea" , the Vikings having to pay the king a share of their income.
The Viking movement would have been unthinkable without the culture and civilization that underpinned it - the Norse had a religious, ethical, social and political tradition. The Vikings, who had qualities of order and organization, were discoverers of land and colonizers, but also legislators and good administrators. The “Icelandic miracle” (twelfth to fourteenth centuries) and all subsequent history bear sufficient witness to this. It should be noted that the Vikings, and more precisely "the Viking myth", are part of what should be called the "myth of the North", which has conveyed a number of misconceptions. In the Germania (end of the 1st century), Tacitus exalts the German pure and hard to stigmatize the spinelessness of decadent Rome. In the 7th century, Jordanes (Getica) saw in Scandinavia the vagina nationum, the officina gentium.
In the 17th century, the Swedes Johannes Magnus and Olaus Magnus claimed to make everything come from Sweden or the North, and in the 18th century, their compatriot Olof Rudbeck (Atland sive Manhem) located Atlantis and Eldorado in his country! a fairly understandable reflex, the small Scandinavian countries, which history has relegated to the background for a long time, remember that they experienced an incomparable hour of glory between 800 and 1050, and they are partly responsible for the Viking myth. great romantics of the North - the Dane Oehlenschlager, the Swedes, in particular Tegnér and Geijer - will sing in dithyrambic terms of the Viking, lover of freedom, tamer of the seas, regenerator of the West, ancestor of chivalry (something quite surprising), before he became the Nietzschean superman - all views that our own romanticism has further magnified. From this comes the profusion of illustrations, statues, paintings, frescoes that sing of this paragon of bravery. ours, contempt for death and healthy barbarism! Constant confusions with the Wagnerian universe have completed this imagery, which continues today in certain comics and films where the superb brute laughs at the storm or plays the archer. Fire, blood, voluptuousness and death, purple and gold, valkyries, wolves, crows... The Viking has given, from age to age, the measure of our literary and artistic fever.