It was from the heathen North that, as the eighth century drew to a close, a new element entered into the political and social life of Western Europe with the beginning of the "Viking Age." When "the first ships of the Danish men" appeared off the coasts of England and Ireland, curiosity and astonishment mingled with the terror which they aroused. The West-Saxon "reeve" (gerefa) whose death at the hands of the Northern pirates the English Chronicle records "knew not what they were." A later version of the same story makes him take them for merchants. "Never," wrote Alcuin of the sacking of Lindisfarne by the Northmen in 793, "could such a voyage have been thought possible." The Irish called the invaders Gaill or strangers.
Some four generations later, when the "Viking Age" proper ended with the cession of Normandy to Rollo, the "pirate duke," the "strangers" had become a recognised and important branch of the western family of European nations. At the opening of the tenth century, kings and chiefs of Scandinavian race ruled over Russia and the greater part of England; Scandinavian colonists lined the shores of the Irish Sea and occupied the islands of the eastern Atlantic from the Hebrides to the Faroes; Scandinavian explorers had passed the Straits of Gibraltar in the South, and had attacked Iceland and discovered Greenland in the far North-West.
If from one point of view the viking expeditions recall the pirate raids of the Saracens in the Mediterranean, from another they seem to be a continuation or revival of the tribal migrations of an earlier age. As in the fourth and fifth centuries the dwellers by the North Sea, Angles and Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, went forth to conquer and settle on the coast of Gaul and in the distant province of Roman Britain, so, more than three hundred years later, the warships of Danes and Goths, Norwegians and Swedes, sailed out from the Baltic lands to plunder the kingdoms of the West.
What is really remarkable about the expansion of the Scandinavian peoples in the eighth and ninth centuries is not so much the novelty of the movement as its magnitude, its extent, and its persistence. These Northern adventurers passed down the English Channel, and through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Mediterranean, or struck across the ocean to Scotland and the Western Isles, and so by the Irish Sea to St. George's Channel, or rounded the North Cape and explored the White Sea and the haunts of Finn and Lapp, or followed the "East-way," to Russia or "Gardariki," and on to "Micklegarth," the "great city" of New Rome.
Scandinavia had, indeed, been the home of a seafaring race from the dawn of authentic history, "rich," as Tacitus noted, "in ships, in arms, and in men." The long line of broken, island-fringed coast, deeply indented with bays and fiords, the narrow straits and sounds, the dark pine-forests, vast lakes, and rugged mountains of the interior, had nourished a vigorous population of stalwart dalesmen and hunters, fishermen, sailors, and traders, a stout-hearted, independent people, full of vitality, practical sagacity, and shrewd homely mother-wit. This was the material out of which the perils and hazards of a life of piracy fashioned a type as characteristic as the Elizabethan "seadog," the "sea-king" who "ruled over men, but had no lands," who "never slept beneath sooty roof-beams, and never drank at the ingle-nook." These early buccaneers, like their sixteenth-century descendants, looked westward for their El Dorado, and from their exploits, and the daring ventures and stirring incidents of their roving life, sprang both the "fighting faith" of the "Walhalla" mythology, as distinct from the primitive beliefs of the Germanic races, and the later literature of Eddas and Sagas...
گزارش تخلف
دیدگاه کاربران