Viking city: excavation reveals urban pioneers not violent raiders

[Elderberry]

The Guardian 11/20/2018

Excavations in Ribe, Denmark show that Viking culture was based on sophisticated production and trade. Is their brutal reputation unfair?

n an extraordinary moment captured on film this summer, the tuning pegs and neck of a lyre, a harplike stringed instrument, were carefully prised out of the soil of Ribe, a picturesque town on Denmark’s south-west coast. Dated to around AD720, the find was the earliest evidence not just of Viking music, but of a culture that supported instrument-makers and musicians.

The same excavation also found the remains of wooden homes; moulds for fashioning ornaments from gold, silver and brass; intricate combs made from reindeer antlers (the Viking equivalent of ivory); and amber jewellery dating to the early 700s.

Even more extraordinary, however, was the discovery that these artefacts were not for home consumption by farmers, let alone itinerant raiders. Instead, the Vikings who made them lived in a settled, urban community of craftsmen, seafarers, tradesmen and, it seems, musicians.

“Ribe confounds history,” says Richard Hodges, a British archaeologist and the president of the American University of Rome. “What we have here defies the opinion that all the Vikings did was to raid and to rape.”

The discoveries at Ribe suggest mass production, high levels of specialisation and a division of labour – all characteristics of a settled urban society rather than a nomadic one based on pillaging.

“We can see in Ribe that Viking society was based on sophisticated production and trade,” Hodges says. “It is a paradox: they made these beautiful things, they had gorgeous cloth, wonderful artefacts, but at the same time they are known to history for their brutality.”

European history has been written from the perspective of Christian chroniclers who wanted to tell us that Vikings were barbarians, Hodges notes.

The evidence suggests that, over the decades before launching their infamous raids on Britain with the attack on Lindisfarne in AD793, the Vikings created one of the first post-Roman Scandinavian urban bases for world trade and exploration. The culture was based on craftsmanship and trade and helped create the basis for sweeping changes in economic life over the ensuing millennium.

More: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/20/artefacts-reveal-vikings-were-more-urban-pioneers-than-violent-raiders-ribe

[Sanguine]

They were both.  What they weren't was stupid.  When it made sense to do it the peaceful way they did, when it didn't they didn't.

[To-Whose-Benefit?]

Brutal?

Everyone in that world was 'Brutal' by our standards today.

The Celts, Saxons and others weren't the Kum Bye Ahh crowd.

Vikings were just more successful at it, sometimes.

And their histories were written down 800 years later in Iceland in a very matter of fact way, so there are more, and more vivid accounts of said 'Brutal' for arm chair historians to pick through.