Vikings?

The thing I think of when I hear 'Scandinavian' is the name of an MC in another novel, which I'm pretty certain is Scandinavian - Arvid.

But if I think Vikings I usually think of the Norse gods/heroic figures (Völundr the Smith especially, but only because he features in another novel idea of mine) or Beowulf. I'm not even sure in Beowulf was Viking, but I remember him being so.

I've also heard that vikings were red-haired, and somebody suggested this was my heritage (yeah, I'm ginger. POINT AND LAUGH), but I think that's a load of crap. I'm pretty sure the viking weren't red-headed, or at least no more so than could be expected from a race of people. None of this has been researched, so I may be talking rubbish when I say this.

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NaNo 06: Freedom Club (Sci-fi) - 23,245 words
NaNo 07: Hex (Sci-Fi) - 50, 700 words and growing!
NaNo 08: The Five Hands of Gert de Vries - Some sort of adventure . . .?

http://holliequ.livejournal.com/

Wasn't Eric the Red, well, red? But if they ALL were, then surely he wouldn't have got the name...

Forgot the smith ... good one.

Beowulf is an Old English story, Saxon? Something else? English anyway. But they had a lot of wandering characters in it. Been too long since I read it. Grettir ... what was he?

(Must research...)

I'm getting some name ideas from Behind the Name, and the root words are giving some ideas to me, but I've got a long way to go. I'm dismantling old National Geographics to try to nail down a physical look for my world, too.

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Well, when I was investigating Norse mythology on Wikipedia I found several good ideas for races. You should give that a try, maybe.

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NaNo 06: Freedom Club (Sci-fi) - 23,245 words
NaNo 07: Hex (Sci-Fi) - 50, 700 words and growing!
NaNo 08: The Five Hands of Gert de Vries - Some sort of adventure . . .?

http://holliequ.livejournal.com/

Horned helmets. Impractical for warfare. Mead halls, drinking from horns, and singing.

2008: The Yamato Cycle: Shadow of the Dead City - 0/50,000

If you need some stuff about the viking culture to add as influence, I recommend The Viking Answer Lady. http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/index.shtml

Ooh, that looks helpful! Thanks!

I also looked up the Smithsonian (Museum of Natural History), which has a nifty virtual exhibit right now. Sparked a couple ideas.

Proud Member of the Trebuchet Club!

The thing that always irks me as a Viking cliché is the helmet with the big horns on. Did not happen. DO NOT WANT.

~T~

Lots of norse mythology. Loki is cool. Norse=/=Vikings, right?
Also wasn't there something about them discovering America way back in the day? And they had those boats with all the oars, right? Or am I thinking of something else?

When I think Scandinavia... I tend to think of Eurovision. Sorry. They tend to win a lot; I think it's the umlauts. And Vikings always bring to mind the awesome film 'The Thirteenth Warrior', which I advise you rent immediately if only for visual inspiration. It's about Vikings and the heavily modified story of Beowolf, with the welcome addition of Antonia Banderas, Arabic Ninja. Has to be seen to be believed.

A scrap of advice: those little longboats with all the oars that you always see are coastal raiding ships. They are quite cramped, especially when piloted by enormous smelly armored Norsemen. Try not to have anyone stay at sea for longer than a few weeks in these or they're quite likely to kill each other just for the space. And they didn't go raiding all the time--remember these guys frequently had wives and farms back home.

"My God, it's full of stars!" --Arthur C. Clarke

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world." --Neal Stephenson

13th Warrior = Eaters of the Dead by Stephen King.

And yes, the settlement in Nova Scotia has been verified as predating the Columbus "discovery" (ugh) by near enough 500 years.

2008: The Yamato Cycle: Shadow of the Dead City - 0/50,000

I read Eaters of the Dead. I liked the movie better because the book version of Ibn came across as a long-winded, whiny bitch. Aslo, the cutting of the dwarf colony was a welcome change.

"My God, it's full of stars!" --Arthur C. Clarke

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world." --Neal Stephenson

Wow. Okay. I may have to look up the movie. (I can't read Stephen King, too creepy.)

No horned helmets, I promise. Unless it's a joke or something. They aren't going to be authentic Vikings, I'm just using it as my jumping-off inspiration point. Somehow in my browsing for images, all sorts of other Arctic and northern peoples are creeping in.

The premise of my universe is that a bunch of lost (secret) colonies get rediscovered. I'm trying to give each one a unique flavor. The time frame for this particular story is quite a bit after the rediscovery, but I think I can have some fun culture clashes anyway. Anyway, this planet has always been in my head as a really cold, possibly Ice Age, setting... so I wanted some sort of far nothern hemisphere culture to have settled it, and when things got tough (read: computers broke down) they had some useful history and tradition to draw on and keep their settlement alive.

Thank you all for the ideas! I might even begin to get a plot soon...

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Oh, hurray!

My story this year is mostly accurate (but not 100%) historical fiction about the Vikings living around the time of Egil's Saga.

Cliches to avoid: The classic horned helmet. Falling-down-drunkenness. I can't think of a lot of drunkenness in the Sagas, especially that ends well.

Someone already mentioned the Viking Answer lady ... she's an excellent resource.

It sounds almost like you're writing a cool educational story. Student from the Future zooms back in time to see the Vikings, and learns that the hat thing is all wrong, that they aren't just brutish raiders (though that did happen), etc. Sounds neat.

Heh, that's totally not my idea, but I like it... no, no, no, mustn't get distracted! Noooooo!

LOL.

They're all in the future ... my made-up culture and my exchange student and his buddies. The backstory of the colony, though, was that it was settled, lost (hidden, rather), and then much later rediscovered. My story occurs some, hmm, forty? fifty? years after the rediscovery. (Gee, I'll need to look that up on my timeline, that's bound to be important.) My main character will be from Earth, probably, lots of tech, going to this world that's still figuring out what it wants to do now that it's been found. They were (at least in the current draft of that Nano) quite hostile at being rediscovered. I'm hoping to find they've calmed down a bit... Anyway, up till this year they were only backstory and I never needed their details ... now I'm trying to work it all out.

No drunkenness. I write G-rated. :)

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I believe that Eric the Red was named for the blood on his hands, like Erik Bloodaxe, who stove in a friend's head with an axe at an early age, thus showing himself to be a Viking of promise.

Beowulf was a Geat, from Sweden.

So, Vikings. Well, like many historical periods think vary cruel, from our perspective at least. Charity carried a much higher premium in a subsistence economy and the culture was a bloody one (c.f. Erik Bloodaxe). They weren't the mindless pillagers which often get presented, however, but highly cultured traders, fine craftsmen and superb woodworkers and sailors, who just happened to supplement their sparse farming through the winter months with pillaging, raiding and trading overseas. They would have combined a cosy, communal lifestyle with the harshness which their environment and lifestyle demanded; aside from anything else, remember that they were a slave-owning society.

They valued strength, because in their economic set-up everyone had to work, and work hard. Most of the men would be part warrior and part farmer or fisherman or craftsmen, working the land in the summer, smoking and salting fish and meat and storing the little grain and veg they could grow against the winter. Then they'd head out to raid to supplement their stores, and sometimes to settle of course; they were great settlers. Only a handful of specialist craftsmen wouldn't have worked the land - blacksmiths, maybe bakers. One or more of the most important villagers would act as the priests for the village. The women would have been household managers as well as sharing the domestic chores with the men who were around, and would also have been trained to fight, not as full warriors, but at least in protection of the village in case of attack when the men were away. In a scifi setting you'd probably want to drop the gender difference, but have the same blend of multitasked individuals.

They didn't wear helmets with horns on, nor wings, although some of the fancier helms had some pretty styling eyepieces. The horned helm is taken from a single figure on the Oseburg tapestry who is almost certainly a god or at least a priest.

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"I'm Jane Austen." She cocked the pistol and aimed it unwaveringly between his eyes. "Who the hell are you?"
- My unwritten 18th Century espionage novel.

I don't know if you'd have time to read it through by "Winterbirth" and the sequel "Bloodheir" by Brian Ruckley have a distinct scandanavian feel to them. I just got through Winterbirth and I really enjoyed it, but it'd be a pretty lengthy read for the purpose of research since it clocks in around 550 pages.

That's alright; it's by Michael Crichton; apart from the early sections which are pretty much cribbed direct from Ahmad ibn Fadlan. You can spot the transition; it's where people start talking in direct speech instead of reported.

I like the idea of the oral tradition picking up when the computers break down and all the myth and ancient history getting scrambled in with the colonial chronicle. Since it's unlikely that the original settlers were actual authentic Vikings, perhaps one of them was a book enthusiast with a collection of Norse mythology, which survived the crash because of the owner's archaic taste for paper storage.

There's a lot of potential for Viking-inspired physical culture as well, since most of their art was applied: Rune stones, highly ornamented space suits with eye guards on the helmets, belts full of magical talismans to protect against everything from evil spirits to radiation to hard vacuum. In an isolated colony, space ships would be a major, communal undertaking - as in Viking culture - and if the world they settled was imperfect and relaint on external supplies, they might well be raiding other worlds in the same/nearby systems, using a patchy, near-mystical understanding of the navigation and drive technologies involved.

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"I'm Jane Austen." She cocked the pistol and aimed it unwaveringly between his eyes. "Who the hell are you?"
- My unwritten 18th Century espionage novel.

No, they definitely weren't authentic Vikings .. they may have found America but they sure didn't find other planets. :)

The way I sort of picture it ... if *I* was stranded on a new world, and had to build from scratch, I'd be drawing from what I remember about pioneers and Native Americans. So, if I want a vaguely Viking culture, the original settlers must have come from the part of Earth where *those* stories would be the prominent historical and cultural references. The scholar with his Norse books would be a good candidate for this one, yes.

They don't have space travel till they get rediscovered ... or, at least, they aren't supposed to ... I suppose that could be an interesting twist. Hm. They have ships now, but who's to say they didn't set aside the old colony ship and preserve it somewhere? ...not where I want to go with this story, but it's got some interesting possibilities... changes my backstory though...

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No, haven't read them ... might add them to my December list though. (I never get to read in November.)

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Hey.

I had absolutely NO interest in Vikings or their exploits until I went to L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

And WOW was it ever cool. They've gone and recreated a **NORSE** [I'll explain at the end of the post :P] settlement (using real materials as they would have been made, save for the gas fireplace) literally less than 100ft from the relics of the original settlement.

Turns out, Erik the Red's son, Leif Eriksson (get it?) lost his way travelling to Greenland and ended up on the Northernmost tip of Newfoundland (not so new when we found it, eh?). They created a settlement here, but because if harsh climate, lack of communication with the mainland, and battles with Natives, they eventually died out and left. The relics left behind were preserved extremely well, since most of their settlement was built on a bog. They're also recreating an ancient boat out of natural materials to the area, much like one would have been made in the past. They're even using wooden bolts and weaving a canvas sail in the traditional form! So cool.

If you want information on the Norsemen, definately have a look about their website. They have these really neat actor people who walk around the settlement recreation and show you things -- I got to know them pretty well. They know their stuff!
**about the NORSE thing...I can't remember why -- it will come to me later -- but the actors kept telling me that the correct term was "Norse", not "Viking". You might want to have a look into that....?

Hope that helps? Doubt it, I just kind of gushed about L'Anse Aux Meadows for a few sentences there, but you get the idea...

Hope your novel turns out splendidly! (I'm so tired I didn't bother to proofread, so my apologies for this nonsensical mess...)

Wow. There are a lot of brackets in here

Anyway. Bye! Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

...ps...you should totally have one of your characters fall for a blacksmith...they're always the best...after all, you kill the blacksmith, you can't build a boat to go back home - they're fed the best, paid the most, and bothered the least. Best guys in the settlement! ; )

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Strictly speaking that was some other guy. He came back to Greenland and Leif decided to mount an expedition, hiring the guy because he knew where to go, and buying his boat because it knew where to go as well.

Norse is a more general term. Viking is used colloquially - and, I'll admit it - rather lazily to refer to the culture, but in fact the word viking is a verb, referring to the practice of sailing out to raid and trade. So, if you're in a longship setting forth to get mad loot, you're a Viking (or a-viking, even), but otherwise you're Norse or Rus or Danish or what have you.

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"I'm Jane Austen." She cocked the pistol and aimed it unwaveringly between his eyes. "Who the hell are you?"
- My unwritten 18th Century espionage novel.

That makes sense. And I'll say that I used 'Viking' for this thread since it's the Adventure forum and I figured it would generate more adventurous responses. :) Not all Norsemen were Vikings, right? And I'm really looking more Norse, I guess.

I like in the Stargate episode, where they first go to Cimmeria and meet a Norse culture, and the woman says her husband has gone a-viking. Daniel does a quick aside to explain to the team that he's off pillaging and plundering, and she corrects him to say that 'these days' they've gone off to the cities to look for work.

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Ha! I was going to add that, but felt that alternative SF Vikings might not be what you were after. That moment was pure class; I missed that Daniel - and the whole sensibility - in the later seasons.

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"I'm Jane Austen." She cocked the pistol and aimed it unwaveringly between his eyes. "Who the hell are you?"
- My unwritten 18th Century espionage novel.

If you're going to write something involving Vikings or people based off of Vikings, I heartily reccomend reading Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead (also published as The 13th Warrior)

Oh, I have Vikings in my novel. Of a sort. They're from a Norse-themed colony on a planet called Midgard, and are really just space pirates who play upon exaggerated stereotypes of Vikings. They're probably going to get impaled on their own ridiculous horned helmets, right after my MCs point out that the Vikings didn't generally wear them.

Title: Breaking Light
Goal: Finishing this novel. (Probably be 100k-120k at this rate.)
Sanity level: Do you even need to ask?

Oh, that sounds fun!

Kind of like in The Incredibles, when they comment on how deadly capes are...

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First I'll point out that, Although my name is Norsehound, I'm not some doctor on Norse culture :)

Are we talking space faring Vikings here? One source of inspiration you might find is in the Vaygr from Homeworld. Their name is, yes, a play on 'Viking'. In Homeworld, the Vaygr are space faring nomads and raiders who strip-mine worlds. There's been no mention of them ever settling on one, but it seems you wish to describe them as being on a planet, so I'm not sure that would work.

The Vikings were well known as raiders, from what I can recall, before they began to invade England and settle there. If your space vikings continue this mentality, then they'll be a raiding culture at first- going to far distances to burn and pillage, and return home with the goods (Gold, prisoners, trinkets). They do not value other religions as highly, as one of their first targets pillaged was a church. "Godless Heathens" is apt when being described by the clergymen :)

The vikings also buried their dead with ceremony- usually cremation in a ship filled with their possessions. They also did this in normal burials, using 'stone ships' instead... stones laid out in an oval pattern and filled with relics of the deceased.

There were many tales of great kings and larger-than-life heroes... though it seems that what we know of Norse mythology was written after the Christians got there. However, most of Norse/Scandinavian mythology was passed down orally, as evidenced by the repetition in some of their tales. It might be worth considering, then, the ramifications of a purely oral culture.

This is all picking from my brain of course, feel free to research independently if you're skeptical about what I say here. Nevertheless, something for you to consider, and I hope you find it useful :)

My favourite Viking 'fact' is about the warriors called 'beserkers' - where we derive the term 'going berserk'. The beserkers were a formidible fighting force who would lead the charge to battle, their seemingly insane behaviour being a catlayst to the other warriors. It is suggested that to get into the mindset of being a berserker, they would take a hallucinogenic compound - possibly from fly agaric (the white-spotted red toadstool). This was used by shamen in many northern indiginous populations to make contact with spirits, even in modern times. The name 'berserker' may be derived from 'bear-sark' - a coat or vest made from bearskin. They may have work somthing like this to make them seem fearsome during battle, increase their stature, or also because the bear was a sacred animal. Look for links about the Lewis chessmen, a set of Viking chessmen found on a beach in the western isles. The berserker figure has wild-wide eves, and is biting onto the top of his shield to control himself.

When a warlord was killed (or died of natural causes) his body was put into his ship along with artefacts from his life, even a slave or two, and the whole lot was set on fire and set out to sea. Have a look for information on Up-Helly-Aa, a recreation of this event held in Shetland every January to get an idea of what it may have looked like.

Skip the horned helmets, please. Any other headgear will do: non-horned helmets, Russian hats, Mongol Hats, knitted hats, baseball caps...

It is also important to name one's weapon. Like name the sword "Elvis" and the spear "Fido," or something. Throw in plenty of mead, and poetry, ideally recited when drunk after having killed someone.

Vikings also liked their bling and their fancy boats. And rape some nuns and steal their stuff.

Eventually the vikings ended up in constantinopel as mercenaries.

Cars wrecked: 30+
Bodycount: depends on the definition of "alive."