Even when Vikings is portraying real-world events, it’ll often take the opportunity to shift them back and forth through time by a few decades or centuries. For example, when Ragnar and co. raided the Lindisfarne monastery back in season one and kidnapped Athelstan? That was 793.
Skip forward two seasons for the big Paris assault? That was 845 – half a century later. Alfred the Great took the throne in 871. And as we already said, Rollo was Duke of Normandy – from 911 to 927. This is like Gough Whitlam also being the driving force behind Federation, the Republic Referendum and the Postal Plebiscite.
What is most ironic is the argument that ‘Vikings‘ themselves are a fictious invention. As Alex Woolf suggests, “There was no such thing as a ‘Viking’ in the medieval period”.
The construct of the ‘Vikings’ conflates and blurs the distinction between eighth- and 12th-century pirates. Tenth-century kings based in Dublin and Christian rulers such as Cnut, all of whom lived in very different societies, had different belief systems and political and economic objectives. Each of these contexts needs to be dealt with on its own terms and not within a 19th-century construct that has more than a hint of racist essentialism to it. It is high time that historians, both academic and popular, ditched the Vikings as an outmoded and dangerous way of thinking. The Vikings never existed; it is time to put this unhealthy fantasy to bed.
It could be argued that this is really an issue with how we talk about the whole medieval period:
The thing about history, though, is that much of our understanding of the past isn’t settled fact. Clark no longer believes that his estimate of 150 days, made early in his career, is accurate. “There’s a reasonable controversy going on in medieval economic history,” Clark told me. He now thinks that English peasants in the late Middle Ages may have worked closer to 300 days a year. He reached that conclusion by inspecting the chemical composition of fossilized human remains, as well as through evidence of the kinds of goods that urban peasants in particular had access to. These factors suggest that they may have lived more materially luxurious lives—eaten much more meat and other animal products, specifically—than usually estimated, suggesting that they had higher incomes than would be possible at the era’s common daily pay rates if they didn’t work most days of the year.
The problem is that boxing things and putting labels can help provide a sense of understanding and control, no matter how false that might be.
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