[Sca-cooks] OT Vikings in Minnesota

otsisto otsisto at socket.net
Mon Sep 22 07:18:31 PDT 2008


But "Vikings" are a select group of people and not all Danes, nor all Norse.
You can find references in Denmark's honour stones of people who died
protecting a town from Vikings.  I guess it is semantic(?). The Vikings did
not become extinct, they declined in power, i.e. was not a force to be
reckoned with anymore. "Extinct" implies the total elimination of said
folks.
You are most fortunate in location. :) Understand that you are seeing a
Swedish perspective. There may be subtle to large diffences in the other
Scandinavian countries.

De

-----Original Message-----
In my Swedish sources (I live in Sweden and the history here is told that
way), the Rus were Scandinavian merchants, (the name Rootsi is still today
the Finnish name for Sweden), the Svea were settlers in Svealand, Gotland
and West Gotland, they were related to the Visigoths which plundered Rome
and settled down in today's Spain, then a Rome province. The source for the
period is the Nestor chronicle, written by the Russian munk Nestor in 1113.
The Vikings were definitely Norses and Danes, the Svea were merchants and
they went behind their neighboors Vikings and grounded merchant cities, as
Kiev, Moskva and Novgorod. At that time the administrative center of the
land was in Birka, near Uppsala and Visby was the merchant capital, a part
of the Hansa league.
In Sweden  the Viking time spans between 800 and 1050. (In 1066 the
Normands, Vikings settled down in France, invade England and colonize the
country.) Nobody in Scandinavia speaks about "Vikings" after the 11th
century.
Ana

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 5:23 AM, otsisto <otsisto at socket.net> wrote:

> 1. The "Vikings" did not become extinct in the 11th cent.
> 2. The label "Viking" is more a profession title then a people.
> 3. It was the Rus that settled in Kiev and Moscow and probably Novgorod.
> You
> have the Svea, Norwegians (or Norse)Danes..etc.
> 4. Ever since the 1800s anything of Ancient Nordic became labeled
"Viking",
> perhaps for sensationalism and it has stuck ever since.





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