Norse and Aztecs · CHAPTER 2 ·
Viking expansion and the longship
Chapter 2 of Climate and Innovation: The Norse and the Aztecs, c. 790–1521: “The Ship and the Sea Road”
Viking expansion from about 790 rested on the longship, whose keel and clinker-built hull could ride ocean swells and land on any beach, and on the farms that built it: a warship’s sail needed over 1.5 tonnes of wool. Scarce farmland, Islamic silver and unguarded wealth drew raiders west, as at Lindisfarne in 793.
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The map above is the world of The Norse North Atlantic, 866 — Raiders become settlers: York, Dublin and the isles.
Part of IB History: The Norse and the Aztecs →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Norse expansion across the North Atlantic rested first on a single innovation, the Scandinavian ship, and on the farming society that could afford to build it. The longship had a keel, a strong spine along the bottom that let it hold a course under sail, and a clinker-built hull, made of overlapping planks fastened with iron rivets, which was light and flexible enough to ride ocean swells and shallow enough to land on any beach or row up a river. It worked much as a modern all-terrain vehicle does, equally at home on open road and rough ground. The sail that drove it was itself a farm product, because a warship’s woollen sail needed more than 1.5 tonnes of wool and decades of women’s spinning and weaving.
Why the Norse used this ship to go abroad is a question of push and pull. Only about 3 percent of Norway can be ploughed, power was concentrating in fewer hands, and young men needed wealth to marry and win status, while the Islamic world’s silver flowed north through the Baltic and the monasteries and towns of Britain and of Francia, the Frankish empire covering modern France and western Germany, lay unguarded by sea. The raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of northern England, in 793 announced the change, but trade and raiding were one economy. On the map, the red arrows trace both, and by 866 Norse rule has spread to York, Dublin and the Scottish isles. Raiders were becoming settlers, and the ship that had carried them as pirates now carried them as colonists.
The full story
The ship was the decisive invention because it changed what distance meant for people living along the North Sea. Archaeologists know it from boats buried as graves and wrecks sunk as barriers. The Oseberg ship, built around 820 and buried in 834, is 21.5 metres long and was rowed by fifteen pairs of oars; the Gokstad ship, built of timber felled around 890, carried thirty-two. Its overlapping planks flexed with the waves and absorbed their force, and its draft, the depth of hull below the waterline, was only about a metre, roughly waist height on an adult, so crews could beach it on any strand. By the eleventh century the warship Skuldelev 2, built near Dublin in about 1042, was 30 metres long and carried a crew of 65–70. A fleet like that could appear at a coast with almost no warning, and that surprise was the source of Norse power.
The ship also shows why innovation is a system, because each part depended on the farm behind it. Lise Bender Jørgensen calculates that the sail of a cargo ship needed well over 200 kilograms of wool and about ten years of work, and a warship’s sail more than 1.5 tonnes of wool and fifty to sixty years of labour, almost all of it by women. Iron for the rivets came from lumps of ore dug from bogs and smelted in charcoal furnaces, and the oak came from forests that took a century to grow. A single warship therefore embodied years of a farming community’s labour, which is why only chieftains who commanded many farms could launch fleets.
Raiding and trading grew together, which is why the map shows merchants’ routes beside war fleets, and both were driven by the search for wealth and status. James Barrett argues for a surplus of young unmarried men raiding to win the payment due to a bride’s family, and Ben Raffield, Neil Price and Mark Collard link this to polygyny, where a few powerful men had several wives, as some societies still permit today. Silver supplied the pull, since Scandinavian finds include hundreds of thousands of Islamic silver coins called dirhams, the dollars of the medieval trading world. When monks at Lindisfarne were killed or carried off in 793, the scholar Alcuin wrote from Charlemagne’s court that nobody had believed such a voyage from the sea possible. Yet the trading towns of Kaupang and Hedeby were thriving, and around 890 a chieftain named Ohthere told King Alfred of Wessex that he hunted walrus for their tusks and hides and collected tribute in furs from the Sámi, the herding and hunting people of the far north. Dublin, founded in 841, became a Norse town and York fell to a great army in 866, so the sea road built in war became a road for settlement.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Reading the ships: graves, wrecks and replicas
Almost everything known about Viking-age shipbuilding comes from three kinds of evidence, and each carries its own bias. Ship burials such as Oseberg and Gokstad, dated by tree rings to 834 and to the first decade of the tenth century, preserve the vessels of the very rich, chosen for display as much as for seafaring. The five Skuldelev ships, scuttled at Roskilde in Denmark around 1070 to block a channel and raised in 1962, show the working range, from a 16-metre ocean-going cargo ship built of pine in western Norway around 1030 to a 30-metre warship of Irish oak. The third source is experiment, in which full-size replicas sailed by modern crews test speed, crew size and handling in real seas, and the Sea Stallion, a copy of Skuldelev 2, sailed from Roskilde to Dublin in 2007. Replicas can show what a ship was capable of, though not what its owners chose to do with it, so the archaeology of ships must always be read beside the archaeology of farms and towns.
What caused the Viking Age?
Historians once named single causes, such as overpopulation, a warmer climate or the ship itself, and the field has largely abandoned them because none explains the timing. James Barrett argued in 2008 that each factor was necessary but none sufficient, and proposed that a bulge of young men lacking the wealth to marry, possibly sharpened by the selective killing of baby girls, made risky raiding attractive. In 2017 Ben Raffield, Neil Price and Mark Collard drew on evolutionary anthropology to argue that polygyny and concubinage created the same shortage of brides. Others stress politics, since chieftains competed for followers by giving them silver and fame, and Steven Ashby has emphasised the pursuit of status through travel and display. The silver evidence supports the economic side, with hundreds of silver hoards found on the island of Gotland alone. The debate matters for this atlas because it shows that even a technical innovation spreads only when a society has reasons to use it.
Lindisfarne in the sources
The attack on Lindisfarne is famous because the people who wrote history were its victims, and that shapes every account of it. The northern version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle surrounds the raid with portents of fiery dragons and famine and dates it to the sixth day before the ides of January, which historians usually correct to 8 June, since nobody sailed the North Sea in midwinter. Alcuin of York, writing to King Æthelred of Northumbria, treated the raid as God’s punishment for the sins of king and people, and his letter to Bishop Higbald offered consolation. These are moral texts written by churchmen for whom pagans destroying a holy island had a clear meaning. Archaeology tells a broader story of Scandinavians already trading around the North Sea for decades before 793. The raid was therefore a turning point in English perception, while for the Scandinavians who made it, it probably continued patterns of travel and trade that were already decades old.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A scarcity of farmland at home. Norway is mostly mountain, forest and rock, and only about 3 percent of its land can be cultivated, so good farms along the fjords were limited and passed to eldest sons. Younger sons and landless men needed another route to wealth. The ship gave them one, first by carrying them abroad to raid and trade, and later by carrying whole families to new land in the islands of the west, where a farm could be claimed by anyone willing to clear and defend it.
Silver from the Islamic world. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Abbasid caliphate and its neighbours minted silver coins in enormous numbers, and a great share flowed north through the rivers of Russia and across the Baltic in exchange for furs and slaves. Scandinavian finds of these dirhams now run to hundreds of thousands. This flood of silver gave chieftains the means to reward followers and made trading towns such as Hedeby rich, which in turn drew raiders toward wealth wherever it gathered.
Unguarded wealth across the North Sea. Christian monasteries in Britain and Ireland held gold, silver and books on coastal islands chosen for their solitude, and they had no defences against an attack from the sea. Kingdoms such as Northumbria were divided by civil wars, and the Frankish empire of Charlemagne’s heirs split after 840. The ship let Scandinavian crews pick targets where local power was weak, strike and be gone before an army could gather, so political division abroad multiplied the value of mobility.
A society organised for voyages. Norse society could raise the crews and materials that voyages required because chieftains commanded followers bound to them by gifts and oaths, much as a modern company commands employees with pay and loyalty. Farms produced the wool for sails, and assemblies settled the quarrels that would otherwise have kept men at home. The voyages abroad were therefore the overseas extension of institutions and loyalties that already worked at home, carried across the sea by men who expected to return richer.
THE TURNING POINT
Lindisfarne, 793. The raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria, is the conventional start of the Viking Age, and it earns that place because it changed how Europe perceived the sea. Scandinavians had probably traded with Britain for decades, and the number of people killed was small beside later attacks. What changed was that the most learned men of Europe now understood that the sea, which had protected holy places, had become a highway for anyone with the right ship. From this moment, coastal Europe began to reorganise its defences around a threat that came by water.
What it changed
Settlement follows the raiders west. Once the routes were known, raiders were followed by families seeking farms. Norse settlers took the Northern Isles, the Hebrides and the Faroe Islands in the ninth century, and the next step west, across 500 kilometres of open sea to an empty Iceland, came in the 870s. Chapter 3 follows those settlers into a volcanic island with no king and no native people.
Norse towns and kingdoms in Britain and Ireland. Within a generation, raiding had turned into rule over whole regions. Dublin became a Norse trading town from 841, York became the capital of a Norse kingdom after 866, and the Danelaw of the 870s and 880s placed eastern England under Scandinavian law. These places tied the Norse world into the economy of western Europe and gave it the markets and churches that later colonies would depend on.
Walrus ivory enters the story. Ohthere’s account shows that walrus tusks and hide ropes were already valuable goods in the 890s, traded from the far north to markets in the south. This luxury would later become the economic engine of the Greenland colony, whose hunters ranged far up its west coast for walrus. Chapter 4 shows how much a distant society can come to depend on a single export.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Viking expansion driven more by the ship or by the society that built it?
The ship was necessary, since without a seaworthy, shallow-drafted vessel no amount of ambition could have reached Lindisfarne, Dublin or Iceland. Yet similar ships existed in Scandinavia for a century before 793, which suggests that the technology waited on a reason to be used. The social evidence supplies that reason: scarce land, a surplus of young men without the means to marry, chieftains competing in silver and fame, and an inflow of Islamic coin. Lise Bender Jørgensen’s calculations also show the ship as a product of society, since one warship’s sail consumed decades of women’s labour that only a well-organised farming economy could spare. Historians still disagree about which social factor mattered most, partly because the written sources come from the victims and say little about Scandinavian motives. The transferable insight is that an innovation spreads when a society both can afford it and has a motive to use it, and either alone is not enough.
An interesting fact
The grandest Viking ship burial yet found was made for two women. In 834 the Oseberg ship was hauled ashore beside the Oslo fjord and buried under a mound of turf with the bodies of two women, one probably in her seventies or eighties and the other about fifty. Around them lay a carved wagon, three sledges, beds, tapestries, kitchen tools and the bodies of horses and oxen. The clay of the mound sealed out the air, so the ship survived to be excavated in 1904, and it shows that the most honoured burial of the age could belong to a woman.
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