Vikings is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia present-day DenmarkNorway and Sweden[2] [3] [4] [5] who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and settled throughout parts of Europe. In their countries of origin, and some of the countries they raided and settled in, this period is popularly known as the Viking Ageand the term "Viking" also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a whole.
Expert sailors and navigators of their characteristic longshipsVikings established Norse settlements and governments in the British Islesthe Faroe IslandsIcelandGreenlandNormandyand the Baltic coastas well as along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes across modern-day Russia, Belarus[10] and Ukraine[11] where they were also known as Varangians.
At one point, a group of Rus Vikings went so far south that, after briefly being bodyguards for the Byzantine emperor, they attacked the Byzantine city of Constantinople. While spreading Norse culture to foreign lands, they simultaneously brought home slaves, concubines and foreign cultural influences to Scandinavia, influencing the genetic [15] and historical development of both.
During the Viking Age, the Norse homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The Vikings spoke Old Norse and made inscriptions in runes. For most of the period they followed the Old Norse religionbut later became Christians.
The Vikings had their own lawsart and architecture. Most Vikings were also farmers, fishermen, craftsmen and traders. Popular conceptions of the Vikings often strongly differ from the complex, advanced civilisation of the Norsemen that emerges from archaeology and historical sources.
A romanticised picture of Vikings as noble savages began to emerge in the 18th century; this developed and became widely propagated during the 19th-century Viking revival. Current popular representations of the Vikings are typically based on cultural clichés and stereotypes, complicating modern appreciation of the Viking legacy.
These representations are rarely accurate—for example, there is no evidence that they wore horned helmetsa costume element that first appeared in Wagnerian opera. The essential three elements of the word "Viking" are: the original meaning and derivation, or etymology, its Sverigefrågor usage, and its current modern day usage.
According to some authors these three elements are often confused in popular and scholarly discussion. Also, the etymology of the word has been much vikinga mål by academics, with many origin theories being proposed.
One theory suggests that the word's origin is from the Old English wicing and the Old Frisian wizing that are almost years older, and probably derive from wicrelated to the Latin vicus "village, habitation". It has been suggested that the word viking may be derived from the name of the historical Norwegian district of Víkinmeaning "a person from Víkin ", but people from the Viken area were called víkverir'Vík dwellers'not "Viking", in Old Norse manuscripts.
The explanation could explain only the masculine grammatical gender víkingr and not the feminine víking ; the masculine is more easily derived from the Sverigefrågor than the other way around. Another etymology that gained support in the early 21st century derives Viking from the vikinga mål root as Old Norse vikaf.
The Old Norse feminine víking as in the phrase fara í víking may originally have been a long-distance sea journey characterised by the shifting of rowers, and a víkingr masculine gender would originally have been a participant on such a sea journey.
In that case, the idea behind it seems to be that the tired rower moves aside on the thwart when he is relieved by the rested rower. This implies that the word Viking was not originally connected to Scandinavian seafarers, but assumed this meaning when the Scandinavians began to dominate the seas.
In the Middle Ages viking came to mean Scandinavian pirate or raider. The earliest reference to wicing in English sources is from the Épinal-Erfurt glossary which dates to around