How to Understand the Vikings: A World View

In order to understand the Vikings, author Neil Price asserts in Children of Ash and Elm, 2020, that we must understand the world they lived in. Their world wasn’t one of facts as we understand them. Instead, it was a world of facts as the Vikings understood them.

Other Beings

The Viking world is inhabited by others. The term includes people from other nations. It also includes the gods, their messengers, spirits, and other beings that would now be considered folklore. The Vikings didn’t question that these creatures existed any more than we question that there are dogs and cats. They knew these other beings were as real as the sea, the trees, and their families.

It would be a mistake to call the dwarves, elves, and other beings supernatural. To the Vikings they were natural and normal. There was no question that, even if they couldn’t be seen, the creatures were around and influenced people and events.

How Did the Vikings Understand the Multiverse?

The Norse conception of existence includes a multiverse of different beings. It may have started with Ymir, two realms, and Ginnungagap, but at the time of the Vikings, it was a collection of universes with each group of beings living in their own universe. At the center of the universes was Yggdrasil, an ash tree that connected the universes and could function as a travel byway for those who knew how to use it to get to the other realms.

How Did the Vikings Understand the Individual?

In Price’s reading of the sources, a Norse person was not one self but four, each partly independent:

• The hamr (‘shape’): the body, the shell that carried the rest. For those with the gift, the hamr could change. A neighbor down the fjord might be known to turn into a bear when irritated (see Did Viking Berserkers Exist?).
• The hugr (‘mind’ or ‘thought’): a person’s essential self, which could travel outside the body and perhaps survived death.
• The hamingja (‘luck’): something like fortune given a life of its own. Luck could be lent, inherited, or run out and leave you, literally. The sagas treat a lucky leader as a real military asset, and an unlucky one as a liability.
• The fylgja (‘follower’): a guardian spirit, often female, attached to a person or a family and linked to the ancestors. She usually appeared in dreams, and seeing her awake could be an omen of death.

The Slaves

One unfortunate reality recent tales often gloss over is that the Vikings were human traffickers. They bought, owned, traded, and enslaved other people, who they treated as property. They were no longer people. Owners could kill slaves on the whim. Owners could also sexually abuse their slaves, both male and female. There were different categories of slaves, and a very few may have won their freedom. However, even those who attained freedom were still beholden to the family that had kept them as slaves. Snorri told a myth of how Heimdall created the three classes, and it shows how the Norse explained that order to themselves.

Understand the Vikings

It is difficult for us to throw off our modern sensibilities and think back to what it may have been to be a Viking. In some cases, we would only want to experience the good parts of Viking life. Avoiding the child mortality and the preference for male over female children, the illnesses that were incurable in that time period, the malnutrition that appears to have ravaged the lower classes, and the enslavement of others isn’t necessarily the best way to learn about Viking life. We may not want to experience those things, but they are important if we want to understand the Vikings and learn how they thought, felt, and saw the world. Through the confrontation of the complete reality of Viking life, we can gain insight into our own nature, learning how to overcome our weaknesses and become better people. The site also has a shorter answer to “What is a Viking?”