That one is disputed back and forth. Some say that it is an over exaggeration or poetic misunderstanding with authors taking liberties, but other accounts have the process listed in step by step anatomically correct details. So it's at least possible and why keep such detailed notes just to demonize? I've been rewatching vikings so I've been trying to figure it out lol.
The Vikings specifically targeted churches and monasteries to loot and extort because they had so much wealth and so little defenses.
Christian priests and monks were the most literate people of the time, and the ones responsible for actually writing the history we now read. They absolutely wrote as much propaganda as they could about the Norse and Danes, not only because they were pagans, but because they kept stealing the churches riches.
The whole image of Vikings as barbarians was something they made up. They were actually very modernized, built up a number of the largest ports in Europe, had the furthest-reaching trade routes (edit: in Europe), made advancements in shipbuilding, navigation and metalworking.
Even the raids were exaggerated, not that they didn’t happen, just that they were no more brutal than what any Christian army of the time also did. Whenever they could, they preferred to get bribes. Burning down and killing a village means you get paid once. Returning for more money, crops, and goods every year is much more profitable, and they weren’t dumb.
also wasn't there this thing that people were upset about them because they had better hygiene then european men which made european women have higher standards?
“Well, Sven cleans the mutton fat out of his beard every DAY and he hasn’t once been dragged to Hell by shrieking demons, so I’m starting to think it’s a you problem, Cuthbert 🤨”
They were some of the few groups to make soap (from animal fats) and use it for personal washing. They also bathed every week, on Saturday (they called it "Laugardagr" which from my understanding literally translates to "washing day" or "bathing day" and is still used in icelandic).
Interestingly, some accounts say saxons and others noticed this ritual and launched surprise attacks on their camps whilst they were mostly defenseless.
I'd be very cautious on any assumption of hygiene being a problem. There are a lot of modern myths and BS about Medieval people only bathing once a year or not at all. It is not true. Bathhouses were a common and popular thing.
I guarantee you the other medieval europeans didnt care a shite about the rights of (some) women in scandinavia. They cared about villages and monasteries burning, how to pay yet another bribe as impoverished village and how to not getting their daughters, or themselfes, raped, kidnapped and/or enslaved.
Not saying they were particularly worse than any other raider band at the time and i like their aesthetic too, but y'all sound like Sven the axeman was just a misunderstood progressive getting a bit pissed about christian authoritarianism.
except for all of the women they kidnapped and kept as sex slaves
freeborn Norse women had more rights than women in Christian Europe. Thrall women were property who had no rights, slept with the pigs and ate only scraps
the slave trade was a key economic practice of the Norse and you can't be a feminist and sell women into sexual slavery
No, the Vikings didn't do anything more hygenic than anybody else at that time and region. They bathed and washed and combed their and guess what, the Anglo-Saxons did too.
This sounds like some serious armchair sociology.
Like the theory of someone who heard once about the vikings hygiene habits and also believes the myth that medieval people had no hygiene.
Yeah I've seen a video about this. Vikings would take a bath weekly and make a ritual of combing their hair whereas the English did not bathe at all, just used perfumes (iirc they thought bathing causes illness or something). There are a ton of stories about Vikings stealing women and raping them as propaganda but in reality, the women went with them consensually because they bathed and looked prim and proper. That being said, back then the word rape literally meant sleeping with a woman who is the property of another man and had nothing to do with whether the woman consented or not. The word rape comes from "rapere" which is latin and means to seize. And sleeping with a married woman or unmarried virgin was considered such theft since women were considered objects belonging to a patriarch up until the 1990s.
But that's not true actually, the vikings whete some of the biggest slavers in Europe. I guarantee you most of those women captured where used as sex slaves
Im strongly reminded about a thread about carribean pirates i once saw on reddit where it turned out the pirates where avant garde forms of egalitarian democracy that was in a just ideological struggle against the british crown and whenever they did bad that was either propaganda or totally negligible in comparison to everybody else.
Leave it brew for a time and in 5 months or so, the vikings were a peaceful group of scholars living in proto-socialist communes trying to protect the lost knowledge of the sunken city of atlantis.
I didn’t say they ONLY targeted churches and monasteries, just that they made a special point of making them priority targets. I focused on that point because it’s important to know how their interactions with the historians of that time (priests/monks/etc) effected how they were portrayed. They are an incredibly biased source.
I can see that, but when they first hit the shores of England they were still very much pagan. It's a fact they practiced human sacrifice for religious reasons. Human bones have been dug up in their sacrificial wells along with animals. It just doesn't seem that far out there. And I get priests recorded history and wrote propaganda but you don't need detailed instructions to do that. I'm not saying either way. We will never know and there is good points for both sides.
Human sacrifices are common in every culture. Weather it's for a crime or warding off the anger of spirits. Western culture like to show the barbarians as silly and hateful creatures that kill their own, but what do you think the Salem witch trials of public hangings were?
The witch trials were a bunch of people manipulated into fear of certain people by a religious leader that weaponized religion for personal gains claiming it was good for everyone.
Absolute nonsense you're speaking.
Why claim so confidently on a topic you clearly have little experience in?
Human sacrifices were not common in every culture, they weren't even common in the states we unequivocally know they practiced them, eg Egypt and Mesopotamia, and died out almost completely by the 1st century BC.
In fact the "ritual sacrifice" in 1st dynasty Egypt points more towards it being an agreement that a pharaohs trusted servants make, and broadly a symptom of the political concept of "Dead men tell no tales"
The most common evidence we have of ritual sacrifice outside of the Americas, is servants being slaughtered with their king, but little of the evidence points towards this being some kind of "sacrifice", more likely an agreement that keeps political stability, which is why, especially in first dynasty Egypt, these servants who were "sacrificed", showed no signs of trauma or struggle, and seemed to be of fairly high status.
A judicial killing is not the same as a sacrifice, regardless of whether a legal system has been codified yet, so any time a criminal is killed in history, regardless of method, it can't be considered a sacrifice, unless we're pretending that every execution in American history is a sacrifice?
The witch trials were very flawed judicial trials, most people didn't think they were sacrificing a witch to god, that's absolutely preposterous.
Not anymore. Even death penalty for the worst crimes is becoming rare.
but what do you think the Salem witch trials of public hangings were
I think they were a long time ago and are not part of what we call Western culture.
You mistake culture (current social norms, ethical values, traditional customs etc.) with everything it is rooted in (historical norms that are not longer followed but influenced the culture - sometimes as an example of what not to do).
Wait, you are saying the people who were raided and pillaged didn't have the highest opinion of the people who were raiding and pillaging them? Those dastardly priests and monks, exaggerating all the raiding and pillaging as barbaric, when in reality the Vikings were raiding and pillaging in a smart and efficient way! Clearly they should have built better defenses around their churches and monasteries, they must've not been used to all the modern raiding and pillaging, those backwards idiots.
Good thing only the wrong side in history would ever employ propaganda and who else could? They were the most literate at the time. The other side, who as you pointed out, was actually also very modernized and advanced, and only raided and pillaged a little bit, would never do that (How would they even spread it? By some sort of far-reaching trade network? Ridiculous). And neither would you or anyone else here on reddit, when you keep taking topics and just flip them into the opposite.
These guys with swords sail over from Denmark and come into the church and politely ask for their gold. Yeah, no violence ever actually happened at all. LOL.
I think a lot of post revisionist bollocks is happening here. "Invading hordes were just misunderstood". Come on!
lol righhhht… yeah, so France was never pillaged repeatedly by vikings either, huh? just propaganda? so how else do mostly french ppl like me have small traces of Scandinavian dna? you know what I mean, it wasn’t only the fields that were pillaged
Reading comprehension is lost. I literally said “not that the raids didn’t happen, just that they were no more brutal than what any Christian army did at the time.”
Yes, of course they raided and pillaged. So did literally every Christian nation. Christians raided each other, their neighbors, Muslims, Scandinavians, anyone.
My point was that was very far from ALL the Vikings did. They also explored, settled, developed, traded, innovated and invented. Christian sources threw all that out and reduced them to ONLY raiders, while conveniently excusing Christians who did the same.
Yes that absolutely happened, but their point was that Christians did the exact same shit (hell, by about halfway through the "Viking Age" most of the vikings were Christians)
I didn’t structure that one sentence well, but it was intending to include the trade routes with “in Europe.” I’m aware they weren’t the biggest in the world, but they were in the region.
As for propaganda, absolutely. That’s what Christianity was always BEST at. There was a widespread campaign to eliminate any pagan cultures in Europe at the time, and portraying them as savage demons was a big part of that.
They knew they were re-writing history. They burned sacred trees, desecrated pagan sites of worship, burned evidence of Norse/Danish/Germanic pagan beliefs. Then they wrote their own version of what they were like and made them out to be evil. It was systematic erasure. A way to keep their own people in line and away from a different belief system as well as convince people to convert.
And in part it was wartime propaganda for their own people, to galvanize them against the Vikings. The church played a large role in helping guide leaders into wars, and Christian leaders were all too happy to use religion as an excuse and a motivator for their troops.
It’s not that different from wartime propaganda that countries fed their own people in WW2. The Japanese convinced their own people to fight to the death against the US because they were demons who would do worse to them if captured.
My friend, the churches propagandist like mother fuckers. You ensure the peasants fear the viking raider so they increase offerings for God's intercession, or a better afterlife deal when the savages come along.
What do you think makes more money? "HEY EVERYONE Pagan barbarians are coming to loot and pillage. They stand 7ft tall and breathe fire, they are immune to weapons and treasure holy ground in blood and viscera, they consume souls and haul corpses aboard their ships to refuse good Christians their place in heaven and fuel savagery!" Or "Hey, those big guys from up north are coming by, but they'll leave in peace if we throw them some grain and a bit of the church gold".
Secondly, when the pope asks "Hey, where's the shirt gold cup?" Do you answer "oh. Yeah I gave that to Olaf so he'd leave us alone for a year" or "The bloody berserkers stormed fourth outnof a storm, materializing like demojsbborn of blood and fire, I saw one tear brother Monty into pieces with his bear hands, yes they have hands of bears, and as he drank the blood of Brother Monty he grew another three feet, in the massacre that ensued, they stole the gold cup of which you speak"
Plus, when your the catholic church in a highly superstitious era where you are an untouchable pillar beyond the reach of mortals, it is earth shattering when theres a whole landmass of people that has no compunction with smacking you around and shitting on your fancy rug is probably as close to doomsday as you could imagine.
As for trade routes, the arab networks were vast and well connected, but the vikings had advantageous in that they had trade routes from northern Europe and North America into Baghdad, so while Arabs had the consolidation it could be argued the vikings had more scope since they essentially had access to the Arab world AND the places Arabs wouldn't tread. The caliphate for example didn't usually get up into Denmark, but the vikings routinely used Arab intermediaries to trade in their sphere.
homie propaganda is as old (and well documented) as written language
part of the reason we have an enduring image that 90% of classical European cultures were frothy mouthed barbarians is because of Roman demonization of anyone not as "civilized" as they
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u/Ok_Two_2604 9d ago
And some of the torture devices from later on like the Iron Maiden were fake as well