Stones shaped into the outline of ships mark out burial sites in the great necropolis of Lindholm Høje, Jutland, Denmark. The outlines represent the importance of ships in Viking society, not only in life but also in death.
Viking Origins
The sudden and violent Viking raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 CE struck Christian Britain like a thunderbolt. But desecrating the house of God and slaughtering unarmed monks meant little to the pagan warriors who believed in an afterlife of feasting and fighting in Odin’s great hall. Nor were the Vikings and their beliefs anything new. Instead they made up part of a centuries-old culture formed far from view in the cold lands of the north.
The story of the Vikings is one of the people’s relationship with the land and sea, and their isolation from the rest of Europe. From the time of Scandinavia’s prehistoric period through to the eighth century CE, generations of proto-Vikings laid the cultural foundations for the raiders, traders and settlers we know as the Vikings today. They did so unheeded and largely unseen by the civilizations that came and went on the European continent.
Early Inhabitants
The first people to inhabit the Viking homelands of Norway, Sweden and Denmark were hunters and gatherers who emerged at the end of the last Ice Age. As the ice sheets retreated north these prehistoric people followed, fanning out across southern Scandinavia and settling in fertile regions such as Skåne in Sweden. Their preferred mode of transport was simple wooden boats, made watertight with animal hides and rowed with oars. The sea has always been central to life in Scandinavia, and it is no surprise that its first inhabitants were great mariners and boat-builders. They were also proud of their seafaring accomplishments, and made pictorial records of their vessels in ancient rock carvings. The images connect these early people with another great Scandinavian tradition: fighting and raiding. Rock carvings dating from around 1100 BCE in Sweden and Norway depict boats with a similar shape to the Viking longships that would follow 2000 years later; aboard them are passengers carrying axes and bows and arrows.
Boats shaped like Viking longships are among the thousands of rock carvings discovered at Alta, Norway. Dating to between 5000 BCE and 200 BCE, the artworks were created by the first known inhabitants of Scandinavia.
Many of the Bronze Age rock carvings found at Tanum, Sweden, feature warriors aboard boats holding weapons. Many of the boats resemble the Hjortspring Boat, an early vessel used for war.
On land, Scandinavia’s technology followed a similar path to the rest of Europe: agriculture was practised from around 4000 BCE; the Bronze Age emerged in around 2000 BCE; and the Iron Age began around 500 BCE. Little is known about the Scandinavian people during this time, although evidence of a few small farming settlements has been found, as have the human victims of sacrifice, preserved through the ages in peat bogs
