Last September my mom went back to school, with a five-year plan to earn a Master’s in History. She’s currently taking two courses, one on the history of the Middle East and the other on British history up to 1400. I thought she must surely be learning something that I could use on my blog. When I asked she happily shared with me an essay, from which I distilled 11 things you didn’t know about the Vikings

1. In the early Vikings attacks on the British Isles (9th and 10th centuries) the attackers in any given raid probably numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands. (Their ships held fifty men at the most.)

2. While the Vikings initially wreaked destruction on the English church, contemporaries viewed the attacks as divine punishment, a result rather than a cause of spiritual decline.

3. Soon after their initial raids, the Vikings established settlements in Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland. Even today in Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland (the Hebrides), the population is a hybrid of Celt and Norse. DNA analysis shows this (the red-head gene is Norse; the Celts had black hair).

4.  It was not unusual for leaders in Ireland, Wales, Devon, and Cornwall to hire Vikings as mercenaries in their many disputes.

5. Viking settlers tended to privatize land ownership in the areas where they lived (Northumbria and southeast England); before their arrival rural land was mainly held by monasteries and great families.

6. Stirrups are thought to have been introduced to England by the Vikings.

7. They also brought the practice of counting in dozens and half-dozens, rather than tens and fives.

8. The Vikings gave us some personal pronouns and many everyday words (happy, window, take, call, egg, sister, knife).

9. The Vikings were middlemen in the trade of silk from the east. Thousands of Islamic coins have been found in buried hoards all along the river-ways from Afghanistan to Russia, and in Scandinavia.

10. The Vikings were notorious slavers who sent many captives to Islamic lands (Spain, Egypt, Baghdad).

11. The Vikings arrived in the British Isles as pagans, but soon converted to Christianity. Interestingly some 10th century coins have Thor’s hammer on one side and St. Peter’s name on the other.

(Sources available upon request.)

Thanks, Mom!

Featured image: Oseberg ship, Kulturhistorisk museum (Viking Ship Museum), Oslo, Norway. Read about it here.