Violence, blood, swords, ships, battles … that of the Vikings is a history of brutality and cruelty. Wherever they traveled, the Scandinavian peoples left the imprint of their fierceness. But not all were equally savages. Even when talking about violence, there are always levels. His name comes from the ancient Nordic word Víkingr, which means pirate or assailant. And that was dedicated for centuries. The Danish Vikings arrived at England, the Swedes infiltrated the Baltic and the Norwegians reached as remote places as Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. Evidence of brutal deaths of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) on ancient skeletons that showed evidence of brutal deaths has revealed a hidden story of brutality, power and surprising differences between those neighboring societies of the North Sea. About 40% of the Vikings -examined remains showed evidence of a violent death. “There was a lot of savagery in the relatively few human remains that we could examine from Norway and Denmark,” says Lisa Strand osteologist. A warm with signs of wounds that were probably caused by a sharp weapon like a knife or a sword and possibly also for something that could be perforated deeply, such as a Lisa Mariann Strand / NTNU spear some had the skull crushed by a blunt object. Others had backs on the back or legs made with swords. Some still retained arrowheads embedded in the bones. “They were bones that not only came from unfortunate individuals, but were part of a pattern,” adds Strand. As stressed in an episode of the Podcast 63 Degrees North, the NTNU specialists discovered a striking track when they stopped focusing on whether the Vikings had died or not in a violent way and noticed how those people died exactly. Lee also what they needed, says Strand, was to discover what molded to Scandinavian societies and how those forces could have influenced how and why people died. Comparing the remains of northern Norway and the Oslo Fjord region with Danish evidence quickly noticed the differences. Almost all Danish Vikings had been executed, beheaded. “That is not something that is done in combat,” says the expert. “Cutting someone’s head requires a lot of time. You don’t take the time to decapitate someone in the middle of a battle. It’s quite bleak, but it’s true,” he admits. Examples of Viking Wikipedia vintage sword blinks This was a crucial detail, since it suggested that at that time there were strong leaders with sufficient power to order an execution. “The fact that in Denmark we see mainly executions points to the idea of a more centralized authority,” says David Jacobson, from the University of Southern Florida, a member of the research team. This data, by itself, did not allow clarifying which Viking group was most violent. So you had to be able to compare it. The archaeologist Jan Bill, conservative of the Viking Museum and an expert in the Gokstad ship, it occurred to him that the funeral trousseau would be a good tool to solve the enigma. Gokstad’s ship is a Viking vessel of the late ninth of the ninth found under a mound on the Gokstad farm in Sandefjord (Norway) Wikipedia both in Norway and in Denmark there are abundant tests. “We observed that in both places there were burials with weapons, but the proportions were very different. While in Norwegian soil it was very common, in Danish lands only war material was found in a small part of the graves,” he says. “I was surprised to see how extreme contrasts were. There are reasons to believe that there were about 50 times more weapons available among the Norwegians, if per capita is measured, so to speak, compared to Denmark,” says the specialist. Iron Availability A Factor that could have influenced this remarkable difference was iron availability. Bill states that Norway had much more iron available as a raw material than Denmark, so, to begin with, it was easier to make swords. However, there were still many more weapons in Norway. Hence the archaeologist found another explanation by looking at today’s society, where the amount of guns in a community correlates with the number of murders in that same group. “You could say that the sword is the weapon of the Viking era, because it could not be used for anything to kill other people or threaten them with death,” he explains in the podcast. The combination of both pieces of the puzzle turned the investigation into something bigger, more than a story about how people died, to become an example of how these societies worked, how justice was given and what kept the units or pushed them into the conflict.
