# Should we stop using the term 'Viking'?



## Brian G Turner (Oct 22, 2015)

Mr LindyBeige lays out his argument:


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## Ray McCarthy (Oct 22, 2015)

I've heard people call them Wikings
You might as well insist the British Isles should be called "These Islands". It's pretty embedded.
Or that decimate means only killing 1 in 10 ten as a punishment.
Very hard to change language. What do the Scandinavians think about it? Assuming most have even thought about it at all!


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## thaddeus6th (Oct 22, 2015)

He makes a sound argument, except that we all know the word and are unlikely to forget it. And Viking sounds cool. 

Ray, I do sometimes correct those who misuse 'decimate'.


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## Ray McCarthy (Oct 22, 2015)

thaddeus6th said:


> I do sometimes correct those who misuse 'decimate'


Me too


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## anno (Oct 22, 2015)

I thought it was a verb anyway?


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## Ursa major (Oct 22, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> I've heard people call them Wikings


Surely that should be reserved for the future name of those of us who want to look things up but can't be bothered to go to the original sources, as:

the suffix, -ingas, is '(the sons or) people of' and is often shortened to 'ing' (as in Wok*ing* and Bas*ing*stoke)
Wikipedia is often shortened to Wiki (well, it is by me)
so Wikings, itself a shortened version of Wikiings, means 'people of Wikipedia' (who are, obviously, the spiritual descendants of the Mee Generation).


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## Ray McCarthy (Oct 22, 2015)

Wikings = Wikipedians = Wikifiddlers
Hmmm.


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## The Judge (Oct 22, 2015)

I recall this from a trip to Iceland donkeys years ago.  Our guide said that "Viking" most probably meant to go on a sea journey or derived from such a word, and that most men would go on one or two raids just to earn good money before returning to the important job of farming the land, which meant -- in Iceland anyway -- trying to wrest a living out of not-very-good soil and in the face of terrible winters (and not very pleasant summers, either, a lot of the time). As anno says (though I don't know if he was being serious or facetious) it was in effect a verb, as the men would go a-viking.

It's too well embedded now to be changed, so LB is rather spitting in the wind calling for an end to it.  And I think it is useful as a catch-all term, certainly for those who went a-viking whether they plundered and left immediately, or they came as  invaders and stayed, since they came from all the Scandinavian states, and it's a bit long-winded to say "men from possibly Norway or Sweden or Iceland or Denmark".  (OK, we could say "men from what is now Scandinavia" but if we're going to use an anachronistic term, it might as well be the one which sounds more exciting!)


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## anno (Oct 22, 2015)

I am never more than serious,check out my avator!!!


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## The Judge (Oct 22, 2015)

That's what I thought...


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## Ray McCarthy (Oct 22, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> Mee Generation


I have a fairly intact set that was my mother's when she was a girl, I think from just before 1939/1940.


> By the 1940s the binding is brown in colour, and displays a flaming torch on each book's spine


.
Certainly ours is brown with gold lines. I'd have to look and see if there was a torch.

I have an adult 1922 set which apologises for not updating the pre 1918 maps. It's currently thus the most accurate printed one for Europe as the atlases the kids had at school are now all wrong since the 1990s.


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## Ursa major (Oct 23, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> I have a fairly intact set that was my mother's when she was a girl, I think from just before 1939/1940.


My intact (I'm pleased to say) copy is one of the red-bound editions from the 50s (or early 60s). It still sits in the bookcase part of a bureau in my living room, the other occupant of the shelves being a 1955 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

I coined** the phrase, the Mee generation, when I discovered that many of the people with whom I communicated using the company's internal message boards (part of DEC's ALL-IN-1 system) who had quite wide ranging interests had also been brought up with access to The Children's Encyclopædia.


** -  Though I'm pretty sure I wasn't the first to do so.


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## Dave (Oct 23, 2015)

My first take was that he needs to drink less coffee!

My second thought was that he should stop taking what people say on the internet as fact of anything. 

I also went to Iceland earlier this year and they have a whole tourist industry built on the Vikings so I think they would disagree with stopping use of the word. Interesting for me was that many Icelandic people have fairly Anglo-Saxon (that is another word that is equally a bit vague) features and there is a lot of ginger hair. They put that down to the Vikings bringing wives and slaves home to Iceland with them, especially from the huge slave markets in Dublin, Ireland.

If you lived on the Northumberland or Yorkshire coast, then your only contact with Vikings would probably have been as raiders. However, I thought it was obvious to everyone that they did settle here just from the language and place names they left behind, if nothing else. And I thought everyone knew they had farms at home to go back to in Scandinavia, when it was harvest time and sowing time.

I find the ambiguity in the fact they never stole from each other, but found raiding foreigners quite acceptable. Obviously, they just had a very low regard of foreigners. In their culture the first son inherited everything, so for the second son to start his own family he had no choice but to seek his fortune elsewhere. While closer to Scandinavia, the better farming land of Northumberland and Yorkshire was also probably better defended. I expect that is the only reason why more settled in western Scotland, Cumbria and Ireland. 

We were all a little rougher back then. The Clan chiefs in Ireland and Scotland were probably more bloodthirsty than the best Vikings.


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## BAYLOR (Nov 1, 2015)

Don't people realize that there is no historical proof that viking wore horned helmets?


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## Danny McG (Jul 18, 2020)

BAYLOR said:


> Don't people realize that there is no historical proof that viking wore horned helmets?


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## Toby Frost (Jul 18, 2020)

thaddeus6th said:


> Ray, I do sometimes correct those who misuse 'decimate'.



90% of the time, I let them get away with it...


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## Astro Pen (Jul 18, 2020)

Led Zeppelin were ahead of the curve, keeping it conceptual 

From those wonderful folks who came "from the land of the ice and snow From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow" 
da dada dada, da dada dada, etc'


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## .matthew. (Jul 18, 2020)

I think we should encourage Scandinavian armies to adopt the 'Viking' helmet, then we would have proof


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## TheEndIsNigh (Jul 18, 2020)

The Judge said:


> I recall this from a trip to Iceland donkeys years ago.  Our guide said that "Viking" most probably meant to go on a sea journey or derived from such a word, and that most men would go on one or two raids just to earn good money before returning to the important job of farming the land, which meant -- in Iceland anyway -- trying to wrest a living out of not-very-good soil and in the face of terrible winters (and not very pleasant summers, either, a lot of the time). As anno says (though I don't know if he was being serious or facetious) it was in effect a verb, as the men would go a-viking.
> 
> It's too well embedded now to be changed, so LB is rather spitting in the wind calling for an end to it.  And I think it is useful as a catch-all term, certainly for those who went a-viking whether they plundered and left immediately, or they came as  invaders and stayed, since they came from all the Scandinavian states, and it's a bit long-winded to say "men from possibly Norway or Sweden or Iceland or Denmark".  (OK, we could say "men from what is now Scandinavia" but if we're going to use an anachronistic term, it might as well be the one which sounds more exciting!)



J - Is this not perhaps a bit sexist. I thought the folk of which we speak were one of the early enlightened peoples, that gave equal stastus to both women and men. To the extent that their womenfolk joined in the annual jolly across the North Sea to join in the fun.

Not withstanding :-

A hods as good as a sink to a blind Norse.


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## .matthew. (Jul 18, 2020)

TheEndIsNigh said:


> J - Is this not perhaps a bit sexist. I thought the folk of which we speak were one of the early enlightened peoples, that gave equal stastus to both women and men. To the extent that their womenfolk joined in the annual jolly across the North Sea to join in the fun.



It's always been my belief that men started going to war as a chance to get away from their women for a bit


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## Temperance (Jul 18, 2020)

Ray McCarthy said:


> I've heard people call them Wikings
> You might as well insist the British Isles should be called "These Islands". It's pretty embedded.
> *Or that decimate means only killing 1 in 10 ten as a punishment.*
> Very hard to change language. What do the Scandinavians think about it? Assuming most have even thought about it at all!



Although oddly it might be 1 in 6.
The unlucky soldier was meant to be killed by his tent mates and Livy refer to it being 1 in 10.
But at the time the legions had six man tents,
And there are plenty of other words that seem to us obviously linked to decimel numbers but are purely co-incidental
 So...


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## sknox (Jul 18, 2020)

>But at the time the legions had six man tents, 
The time being when Livy wrote? What's the source for knowing how many men were in a tent at that time? I'm curious.

Also curious about other words that seem obviously linked to decimal numbers but are not. Can you offer some examples?


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## The Ace (Jul 18, 2020)

It's a bit like, "The Dark Ages/Early Medieval," argument.

While more and more history is being recovered from this period (roughly from the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest) in Europe, its lack of written records means that we've barely struck a match.  In certain quarters, though, mention of, "The Dark Ages," will get you a very pointed look


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## -K2- (Jul 18, 2020)

Brian G Turner said:


> Should we stop using the term 'Viking'?



Gentility Impaired, perhaps?

K2


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## Danny McG (Jul 23, 2020)




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## JimC (Jul 23, 2020)

One of my friends was involved in the archeology of the Norse settlement in Newfoundland since near its discovery in 1961.  She was later responsible for Parks Canada inviting me up to do field work on the L'Anse aux Meadows Site as their guest.  I never once heard her refer to them as Vikings.  But she also didn't bother to go ballistic when others did.


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## svalbard (Jul 24, 2020)

I always liked Ostmen as they became known in Ireland from the 12th Century on. Basically means Eastmen.

The Gaelic word for them is Lochlannach which probably means People of the Lakes as Lochlann is the Gaelic for Scandinavia and for some reason means Land of the Lakes.

There were the Dubh-Lochlannach who were the the Danes and the Fionn-Lochlannach who were from Norway.


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## Ursa major (Jul 24, 2020)

dannymcg said:


> View attachment 67178


Presumably that's the symbol for telling people that they can cut across the traffic (but only if they've converted from the "old religion"...).


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## Danny McG (Sep 30, 2020)




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## AE35Unit (Sep 30, 2020)

Ray McCarthy said:


> I've heard people call them Wikings
> You might as well insist the British Isles should be called "These Islands". It's pretty embedded.
> Or that decimate means only killing 1 in 10 ten as a punishment.
> Very hard to change language. What do the Scandinavians think about it? Assuming most have even thought about it at all!


Decimate does mean reduce by a tenth. So killing 1 in 10 is correct


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## .matthew. (Nov 10, 2020)

The Difference between Swedish/Danish/Norwegian Vikings


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## Danny McG (Dec 14, 2020)




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## AE35Unit (Dec 14, 2020)

No but people should stop using the word Valhalla. That would be plural for Valhal


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## alexvss (Dec 14, 2020)

It's better than calling them all "danes". Denmark has a very good soil, so they didn't need to rely on piracy that often. Most of them were from the other nordic countries.


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## Thiswriterinme (Dec 14, 2020)

I would first like to point out that there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest some Scandinavian women did fight and go on raids with the men. I remember learning about it in many different history classes throughout my education. They might not have been as numerous, but women warriors did exist, so I can't get behind his claim that "Viking" women didn't exist if it is being used in the context of raiders and warriors.

I guess, rather than stopping the use of the term "Viking," wouldn't it make more sense to reeducate the masses on what the term actually means?

Now, I might not have all the facts on this, but there has been some historical evidence to support the fact that Scandanavian raiders left their homes to, yes raid, but also to assimilate into other cultures when their homes became too crowded or strained for resources. Rather than conquering a settlement, they would become a part of it. Again, I don't have all the facts on that tidbit. However, it does call into question the notion of all "Vikings" being raging warriors.

The dictionary definition of Viking is - any of the Scandanavian seafaring pirates and traders who raided and settled in many parts of northwestern Europe in the 8th-11th centuries. That definitely supports both the raiding and assimilating concepts. Although, the definition doesn't claim Vikings can only be men like our video ranter did. Again, I'd say this comes down to a culturally reinterpreted meaning of the word in an effort to support popular knowledge and imagery.

I went to the Viking Museum in Dublin Ireland several years ago, and it was very much based on Scandanavian lifestyle, not the raiding and seafaring adventures of Vikings. But, if the museum referred to itself as The Museum of Scandanavian Life in the 8th and 11th Centuries, it probably wouldn't' have gotten as much business.

To answer the video's initial question of "did the Vikings exist?" Well, by dictionary definition, yes they did. Were they a much narrower group than the general masses lump all of the Scandanavian cultures in that timeframe under, yes, absolutely.


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## alexvss (Dec 15, 2020)

Thiswriterinme said:


> I would first like to point out that there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest some Scandinavian women did fight and go on raids with the men. I remember learning about it in many different history classes throughout my education. They might not have been as numerous, but women warriors did exist, so I can't get behind his claim that "Viking" women didn't exist if it is being used in the context of raiders and warriors.


Yes, but it wasn't that common for women to go on raids. An evidence of that is the old nordic fairy tales: a lot of them were written by women. That happened because they stayed home while their husbands went raiding. When the men came back, they came back boasting, full of themselves. This served as inspiration for women to wrote their stories down.


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