[Ansteorra] Who made the Vikings...

[Christie Ward]

Lorraine DeerSlayer's sig line:
>>>   The North Wind made the Vikings....

To which Gunnvor said:
>>Actually, butter made the Vikings.  Really, and I can tell you why at 
>>exhaustive length.

Then Deirdre said:
>umm - I'd be interested in hearing...

Just prior to the Viking Age, Scandinavia enjoyed about a century of really 
warm, temperate weather which benefited crops and thus the food supply.  
This had the secondary effect of causing the population to boom (better 
nutrition typically has this effect).

Then you have to look at the system of agriculture used at the start of the 
Viking Age, which was based around dairy as *the* high-status preferred 
food.  The Norse had a limited amount of useful farmland (Norway, for 
instance, rises kind of straight up out of the sea, limiting flat field 
area).  The winters required that food be prepared during the warm parts of 
the year that could be successfully stored over the winter to feed everyone 
until spring, and butter, cheese, and whey were integral to that 
preparation.  Butter was heavily salted and stored in whey, cheese of course 
can be stored, and whey itself (heavy in lactic acid) was used to pickle 
everything imaginable, including meat and fish.

Dairy farming was very important in northern Sweden, Finland, and Norway, 
with cows being the primary dairy animal, although goat's milk was also 
used. During the Middle Ages, bread and other cereal food types only slowly 
replaced milk products as the staple food of the general population, and in 
some parts of Scandinavia milk products have remained the most important 
foodstuff up through the nineteenth century. In Iceland, the diet included 
very little in the way of cereals but instead relied primarily on protein 
sources, including milk and butter, with, dairy food enjoying a higher 
prestige than meat.

Milk was not usually consumed, but rather used to create other dairy foods 
which could be stored for winter consumption, such as butter, buttermilk, 
whey, skyr, curds, and cheese (which was usually heavily salted to help 
preserve it). Fresh milk was seen primarily as a raw material that had to be 
treated, coagulated into skyr, which could be stored for months, or fresh 
cheese, and the whey produced as a by-product was used as a preservative for 
meat or butter. Salted butter could actually be kept for years:

"... large stores were accumulated, like gold, by wealthy landowners. By the 
time of the reformation the bishropic in Hólar possessed a mountain of 
butter [from tithes] calculated to weigh twenty-five tons" (Jenny M. 
Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995. 
p. 128). (That's about 225,000 sticks of butter for the sake of 
visualization).

Meat was not a high status food.  A man's wealth was his cattle - in Old 
Norse, the language of the Vikings, the word fé means both "cattle" and 
"wealth".  A farmer had to make the decision come fall about how much hay he 
had successfully cut and stored for winter fodder for his cattle, and 
therefore how many cows (and other livestock animals) he could successfully 
feed over the winter.  The weakest and least desirable individuals in the 
herds were slaughtered and preserved by drying, salting, pickling etc.  To 
put this into terms relevant to modern folks, this would be like having a 
really nice car, but the rent is due and you can't pay it, so you go out, 
chop up the car and sell it for parts.  Every cow killed was a kind of 
failure, every cow saved to produce milk the next year was an investment, a 
type of wealth that could increase.

The problem with this cycle of agriculture is that it took a lot of land - 
you had to have not only graze, but also hayfields, plus whatever fields 
were set aside for grain and other human-consumption crops.  Why this was a 
problem was that the Norse didn't use primogeniture as their inheritance 
pattern - the eldest son didn't get everything, but rather the inheritance 
was divided among all the sons.  After a very few generations, the inherited 
parcels aren't big enough to sustain a single family.

Combine that with the population boom, and you have a real incentive to go 
out into the world searching.  Some did search only for loot.  Some looked 
for land they could settle and establish the kinds of farms their ancestors 
had used.  And this is why I say that butter caused the Viking Age.

::GUNNVOR::