The Nationalist Myth of Vikings 

The myth horns is a funny one. I think that when I was a kid, on the 2000's, everyone thought of that myth as truth, and then some people started saying it was not. And by the 2010's, everyone knew already that that was a myth. Is like with the Hulk. Did you know the Hulk in his first appereance had grey skin instead of green? Nowadays, everyone seems to know that. Back in the 2000's, no one did. It's funny to see the process of some myths dispersing.

I've heard its Wagnerian. Horned helmets existed in the Bronze Age but not among Vikings.

Look that up on wikipedia? Thought so.

You don't know what you're talking about. Haven't you read Hägar the Horrible? He obviously has horns! :D en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4gar_the_Horrible

@@verihimthered2418 Nope.

10th century, somewhere in western Europe. Gang of Scandis rock up. Locals are armed. "Hello friends! We are here to (what was that word again Thorfinn?)...trade, yes, trade and nothing else."

Britain is indeed a trading nation since quite some time.

We just made a trade. Everything they owned in their village for their life.

. . . as it does now, just with subtlety.

"They loved your Trinkets honey, look at all this gold we got for them"

I also don’t like how this «debunking» is attempting to connect the contemporary understanding of vikings with nazism. Yes, the nazis used norse symbolism, and the norwegian nazi-movement was heavily inspired by norse terms and symbolism. This video glosses over the nazi-aspect, and doesn’t try to distance a contemporary understanding with nazism, nor offer an explanation of what differed between modern theories and nazi-propaganda. All in all, i think this «debunking» video about vikings didn’t rhit where it aimed, even though you claim «there’s nothing to shine a light on.» (which is wildly untrue)

❤✌👍

Yes I’ve found its easier to think of Swedes at the end of the 1st Millennium CE as those who went East, Norwegians as going West and Danes, Angles & Saxons as going South-West. They’re almost as defined by where they went as much as where they started. In my mind they were mostly on the move to avoid fighting each other over marginal resources, far better to fight strangers and increase the common wealth, although I’m more knowledgable about Scandinavian interaction within the British Isles than in the Sagas. However, I know the flow of the Sagas do intersect with other recorded histories and should not be dismissed as “stories” any more than any “historical” account commissioned by a victorious king with a new country to shape.

didn't you know the vikingr had confuscian blacks and buddhist asians? Jeez bro, I don't understand why you won't recognize the multi-ethnic multi-religious diverse identity of the vikings. Scandinavia was a melting pot of beautifully diverse tribes who would later get cleansed by nazis. /sarcasm

Except that Vikingr is only mentioned on a dozen or so rune stones at the time, and we know of the word being used less than twenty times in contemporary English and Latin texts (together). We didn’t get into the etymology because it’s just not known - there are about six or seven competing theories, none proven. As for explaining the Sagas?! As we said. Modern historians don’t bother to use them as a contemporary source. We only use them to study the time _after_ this epoch, when they were written. Historians also refer back to them as literary tradition of things we discover about the times, but time and time again that proves more confusing than helpful. A recent example is the new findings of European segments in “Vinland” where the sagas add more confusion, because that narrative is clearly not in sync with what has recently been found in Newfoundland. So in essence, I could just as well go ahead and explain the Bible in a video about the Middle East in antiquity- here’s the funny thing though… if I did that, you’d ask me if I’d lost total track of my professionalism and gone all religious nut on you.

They were just peaceful travellers, coming to help separate the monks from the temptations of worldly possessions (and separate their heads from their shoulders), lmao

Nah, the point is said pretty early on in the video, which is that despite nowadays there's a lot of "knowledge" on the vikings the fact of the matter is, that it's not based on lot's of evidence. In fact there's a whole lot less evidence on the vikings than most would assume. The video doesn't claim they didn't exist, but it calls into question the real nature of these nordic people. Were they what's thought in popular culture for example, or were they something perhaps a lot less exiting?

@@FINNSTIGAT0R What evidence do they expected to find about vikings, that isn't there? What's the point?

@@willek1335 The point is to say that we don't know a whole lot about the Vikings even though there's lots and lots about them in popular media for example.

@@FINNSTIGAT0RWe don't have a lot of Christian weapons from this period, like we find in viking graves. We also don't have a complete set of medieval plate armour from 14-15th century England. I guess these two concepts are just mythological now. Reason and logic be damned. 🤷 We should just "eliminate and destroy" those concepts, as the logic and words of this frivolous video. This video boils down to click bait. 👏 "We the historians don't use the sagas." Why are these youtubers lying about actual historians?

@@willek1335 Don't be mad at me, I'm just saying what their premise was 🤷 Personally I don't have a dog in this fight.

Interesting....

Now that sounds as chaotic as the room.

Malaysian mythology? They're not the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or the Norse. Westerners haven't done jack about Malaysian mythology but nice try.

the Danish alps lmao

N the filmaker have the audacity to feud with a real life Nordic history professor regarding the accuracy of their movie.

Actually some leftists and also Indian nationalists are calling the Indo-European migration a myth as well.

I too am kind of confused by this video.

Just like we know there was a Roman Empire, eventhough the Nazis used 90% of everything roman

It's not that it didn't happen but rather that "Vikings" are not one defined people/tribe like the Gauls or Celts. They were just a term used broadly to refer to seamen that got turned into the myth of what we know today as the pillaging, horned helmet donning barbarians.

@@luisurdiales3091 Still, they were seamen from Scandinavia attacking Europe and other regions. Seems enough for me to consider vikings real. Meanwhile in this video they lumped North African Muslim pirates with them even though they had no connection.

Except it isn’t “good shorthand” for that period. Migration into Britain by Germanic tribes erroneously referred to as Vikings begin in the 7th century. The “Viking Story” forces the date in British historiography for a beginning of that era to 793 and the raid on Lindisfarne - 150 years off the mark!

Yes, invasions happened, but your so called Vikings were just the second or third or fourth wave from the same source people. They weren’t racially or ethnically distinct, they were at best temporally distinct (maybe).

This really is form of "junk-food" history, isn't it?

Well, in a large portion of the world, until the 1800s, nationality didn´t really exist. Most people saw themselves as members of a tribe or subjects of some particular ruler, or as followers of a particular religion. Sure, people who were culturally closer to one another were more likely to cooperate, but it wasn´t always that way. The main issue with the term "Viking" is that the term itself, as it is colloquially used, is a modern revision of history.

@@yuothineyesasian you have that inclination as well? The inbreeding comment and the association with Nazis seem to highlight that. It also surprises me that they ignore the transition of an oral tradition into a written tradition. The Sagas that were eventually written down really are supposed to be emblematic of the key stories from the oral tradition of the Norse peoples. We have few written sources from the Norse people at that time because they didn’t write as we do or later peoples did. This shouldn’t restrict our investigations into them, it simply alters how we see them and how we can investigate them.

@@mattehcat norse people wrote runes. There are numerous written sources in runes.

@3:25 That point isn't being used to argue that Vikings didn't exist, it is used to illustrate how histography can be wrong. The point is that tales of civilized 'other' Europeans vs Vikings, which have influenced our general knowledge of Vikings, is incorrect.

@@gustavth1 runes are no mere orthographic analog for phonemes nor a building block for words to structure sentences. Anyone who has thoroughly studied runes can tell you that. Runes would not have been used to record history in that way.

@@mattehcat I have studied runes. And while no runic encyclopedica britannica exists, they still exist as written sources. I understood your comment as "no written records from norse people exist."

Actually the Iliad ( the Trojan cycle to be more precise ) is a great example Just because it was our only primary source doesn't means that is an accurate one since it was written centuries after the Trojan war , unless we want to believe that Gods and humans was fighting eachother over an adultery dispute 😏 As a matter of fact you can get even more parallels for example many historians tend to call the period after the bronze age collapse as the " greek dark ages " 😉

Spartacus Olsson doesn't have a degree in history and Indy Neidell a bacehlor degree in history. Though I doubt neither are specialists in the viking age. They are TV producers. Historians is generous.

@@Khasidon they are amazing storytellers but not serious historians

Vikings as a word for a tribe or other group of people doesn't exist - Viking was something you did - participated in, and the people who participated never called themselves "Vikings"

@@nielsmosbak1051 Vikings as a description of a group of people very much exists. But it's not a description that Vikings used about themselves, most likely not. Viking (the act) is mentioned on runestones in an extraordinary fashion. A feat to be remarked. But it didn't define the person. Neanderthals existed but they probably didn't call themselves Neanderthals.

1. “Viking”was an occupation, not a people. 2. Those pursuing that occupation (piracy) weren’t just Scandinavian 3. There’s no culture that we know of and understand to be distinct that sets the Scandinavians of this time apart from any other people along the coastline of the Baltic and North Atlantic. Put it this way: the term Scandinavian or Norse is about as useless as Viking for the time we’re talking about. It simply doesn’t mean anything distinct. There is a distinct North European culture of the time, as indicated by archeology and DNA- it stretches from coastlines of Iceland to Northern France, and from Ireland to the eastern Baltic.

@@spartacus-olsson it was occupation by a certain people, at a certain time of history. It's not just piracy

Although the longship was first developed in Scandinavia, it did not take other North Sea and Baltic peoples long to adopt and copy it..

@@spartacus-olsson You are mistaken in regards to what sets apart scandinavians to others at this point; Ship-building technology This is what enabled norsemen to do their «piracy» or viking. What other cultures at the time, from central europe or north africa, were capable of travelling vast distances and raid all over europe?

@@spartacus-olsson Also; How can it exist a «distinct culture» located literally around the perimeter of scandinavia, but it isn’t accurate to call that culture ‘scandinavian’ or ‘norse’?

I mean, it is a short... I think the main purpose is to emphasize that we don't actually know what went on there. To a serious student of history, I don't think much is new, but to someone just getting into it there is a lot of stuff.

There were people who did all those things, but lumping them together and slapping a name tag on them is arbitrary and pretty much pointless. They didn't have much in common besides general culture and some activities, and nothing like the modern usage of "viking" would imply. The only real use "viking" has is to make up a fake history for amusement or to push some political goal.

@@DawidKov I think that's a lot more elucidating. This video tries to go off of the legendary concept of "Vikings" and finds nothing that adequately fits the bill, but it might be more insightful to work bottom-up, ask "what was there?" and see how this may or may not relate to Viking stories that we are familiar with. That way we wouldn't be set to "debunk Vikings" but rather enrich the history, while at the same time rejecting naive radical-nationalistic narratives.

Vikings as a word for a tribe or other group of people doesn't exist - Viking was something you did - participated in, and the people who participated never called themselves "Vikings"

@@DawidKov the Varangian guard also included some " Rus "and people from modern day England 😉

Because assumptions is all we have left to go on when we know very little?

I think they are refering to a highly disputed study from a genologist from univeristy of Copenhagen. Their main viking history consultant left the project and did not want his name on the paper. Basiclly their sample size was very small.

@@Khasidon Oh, thank you!

Yup

They were probably as diverse as Swedes, Norwegians and Danes before the 3rd world immigration slowly started in the 1960's, i.e. not that diverse, although that's not politically correct to mention.

You can be well assured moste of the promoted, high production, well funded or popular series on RU-vid are ideological rather than historical. There's a very weird and malicious movement to revise history, delete what isn't amiable to globalism and the oligarchy will promote noise and falsehoods to confuse people. And the people who do this don't love history. They hate people, they hate the past and they want to change it to suit their modern sensibilities.

@@danceswithmetroids162 So you're saying don't trust anyone with good production values? That's basically the RU-vid equivalent of saying "Don't trust anything from a university press; only trust self-published authors." What do the Vikings or Normans have to do with globalism? And since when were anti-globalists free of oligarchy?

We've already answered your previous question

Our sources are in the description

The word does not litterally means pirate, viking refers to sailing in to a "vik", and says nothing about your actions once you've landed. The later English version means pirate, not the original use of the norse words as far as I'm aware. Drengr just means boy. The word is still used in Iceland. In Norway we still say båtsdreng (boat-boy) (though that is dying with the stupifications of our language as a result of losing the dialects, anglofication and more). I find it unlikely they would have called themslves boys

@@IpostedaCoDvideoonce Young men not householders are called Drengs, while they are acquiring wealth and glory: sea-faring Drengs are they who voyage from land to land; King's Drengs are they who serve rulers. They also are Drengs who serve wealthy men or franklins; valiant and ambitious men are called Drengs. - Snorri Sturluson skaldskaparmal

The problem with the Sagas isn't that they're inherently fantasy, it's that they're a written down version of an oral tradition from a culture that didn't have the strict storyteller tradition that some cultures have. (There's a native band up in Alaska whose stories tell of the Ice Age, and there's a group in Australia whose stories describe a major flooding of the land around the Great Barrier Reef that was relatively recently discovered by researchers. The stories don't demonstrate a detailed scientific understanding of these phenomena, of course, but they describe events that are quite close what scientists predict people would have experienced.) The general course of at least some of the Sagas is accurate, but when you've got things like undead shepherds cursing people to a life of ill fortune (The Grettis saga) that are obviously fantastic additions to the story, it's hard to tell what's real and what's just a more plausible addition. It's similar to using the Iliad or the Aeneid as a historical basis for your understanding of the war between the Greeks and Troy. There is evidence for a fortress that seems awfully similar to Troy around the place where Troy is supposed to be, and evidence of not one but several major attempts to conquer the city, but can't trust Homer's account because it has the Greek Gods straight up puppeting soldiers on the battlefield and describes the invasion fleet as being so large that you could walk across the Agean Sea by stepping from ship to ship. Sure there's probably some stuff there, but there's also probably some more plausible exaggerations in there, and you can't tell which is which. The Aeneid is even worse - written centuries later, it weaves what seems to have been Virgil forging a handful of disconnected stories about a Trojan called Aeneas who crops up in a few random legends but is primarily in the Iliad into a connected narrative about how the Romans are definitely descended from a group of Trojans who escaped Troy, led by Aeneas. These days, there's a whole genre of this kind of writing: Historical fiction. Stories that start out with a historical event and remain roughly true to them, but add in fictional people to react to these events and generally have a plot that's not well known to any historians reading it. Some of it's very plausible, some of it's clearly fiction. None of it should be mistaken for actual history sources. And since it's relatively recent and was published by a publishing industry that has relatively strict standards about what counts as fiction vs non fiction, it's not. The Sagas, however, don't have that kind of provenance to explain what they are, and unlike the Greeks and Romans, there's not exactly a wealth of writings from the Norse to provide context. We can tell the Iliad isn't a great source on Troy because we can look at other Greek writers like Herodotus and Polybius and so on showing us what an Ancient Greek person trying to write accurate history looks like, and the Iliad is *definitely not that.* The Sagas don't have much to compare them against.

@@rashkavar Well, yes. Any good historian is going to take the literature from the era (grain of salt if the texts are from after the period described) as a way of understanding the people whom the archaeologists discover.

@@rashkavar and your point is? the sagas are the only writtent texts that are left beheind of the norsemen, so we should throw those sagas out? try tell that to the scandinavians

@@weybye91 I'm not saying throw them out. I'm saying treat them the way you treat the Iliad and the Aeneid, not the way you treat Herodotus's Historia. They're useful texts and interesting literature, but not to be considered a particularly reliable historical document.

@@rashkavar it's the only written text we have, cause most rune stones are newer than the sagas, which is history delivered mouth to mouth, until it was written down

Horned helmets weren't just limited to early nordic people's of the bronze age. Egyptian new kingdom art depics some of the "sea peoples" as having horned helmets. The sea people's were most likely multiethnic, probably a mix of Greek and early italic speaking people's. Also the nordic bronze started and ended much later than the eastern Mediterranean bronze age. Bronze technology first started Mesopotamia and spread from there with China and maybe India developing it independently. The nordic bronze age ended in 500bc. This was over five centuries after the eastern Mediterranean bronze age collapse and about 2 centuries since the return of literacy in Greece

There exists no evidence inbreeding have been more present in Nothern Europe than any other place ((I'll write this just to be sure:) with similar population sizes relative to area). Putting emphasis on it is weird and it comes out as an halfass attempt to be funny I guess.

With all due respect, we’re doing the opposite of subscribing to fictional narratives. We’re attacking fictional narratives, but yes we are using shorthand to do so. See it as an opener for future more in depth coverage of a variety of themes.

@@TimeGhost I completely agree and it's a new format, I have full faith that it will become better with time, after all, we remember the time when Indy spoke quicker than the Empire State Express *cough * 1914 *cough*. I do not for a second doubt the intent, it just hasn't been translating as well. Apologies if my words were overly harsh, I shall moderate them appropriately in the future.

@@TimeGhost If you had said "The Vikings are being misportrayed", that would be great, and would clear up a lot of confusion. "Debunking myths about Viking raids" would be awesome too. Saying the Vikings were not real sends the wrong message. They were real, they were just different from what many people were taught.

@@TimeGhost which narrative? vikings were germanic people what is your point? 2 old white fucks trying to change history again and try to stop people from connecting to their history.

​@@TimeGhost Ah yes. The partly middle eastern and north african viking parites that either raided, plundered, traded, colonized or otherwise setteled on the british isles, Greenland, Vinland, Iceland, Estonia, Finland, Russia and partook in the founding of Kiev! How you absolutely clarified everything and debunked the fictional narratives! You need practise in making "shorts" in a way that is more simplified debunking than oversimplified falsehoods.

Yeah too bad those towers did not work as 20% of my ancestors were supposed to be protected by them but I'm an Icelander so you can put that together.

Norsemen meant "northmen" Which North exactly? No-one said that the British Isle weren't raided. Before the Norse, there were the Angles and the Saxons, but have you asked yourself if they came over and settled, didn't they do the same as the Norse. To say they were a unified people is not supported by other sources. We don't know where those raiders came from exactly. It's like the Hyskos peoples who invaded Egypt that managed to stay for about a century until they were kicked out. And the Invasion of the "Sea Peoples" that wrecked Byzantium. Like it or not, we don't know not a lot about them. Most of what we do know is not concrete because the archeology is scare, and written accounts were rare in the Viking Age. That why TV shows like Vikings are historically unreliable. History isn't there to cater to our needs; it's there to tell the truth. And Viking is what a group of tribes did from Scandinavia, but it wasn't the only thing Scandinavians did. There were probably much more people farming than going viking.

How is it revisionist? What is being revised, the understanding of Vikings circa 1700?

@@thenoblepoptart They try to lump Norse raiders with Muslim Arab and Berber pirates who were attacking southern Europe in the same time or at least this is what I heard. Scandinavian raiders did exist in that period and were separate from Muslim raiders of southern Europe.

@@Ali-bu6lo but Scandinavians have been settling in and raiding from Africa for a really long time. Remember the kingdom of the Vandals, which moved all the way from Central Europe to establish an entire realm in North Africa?

@@thenoblepoptart I love how you use the only example of this happening as a proof that this happened all the time. First of all, Vandals had nothing to do with Scandinavians, Scandinavians were north Germanic people while Vandals were east Germanic. These two branched out from proto-Germanic centuries before 400 AD. Also they only could pull that off because the western Rome was in free fall and there was no authority in Mediterranean to stop them. This wasn't the case in the 9th and 10th and early 11th century. Muslims were firmly in charge of all large islands of the region while their navy ruled over Mediterranean, conducting raids in southern Europe even sacking Rome a few times. So Vikings establishing permanent bases in North Africa to the point that they would mix with the local pirates does not sound realistic to me, unless you provide some evidence.

@@Ali-bu6lo vandals came from Scandinavia, from modern day Gotland in Sweden

I totally agree. There seems to be enough historical evidence from multiple sources to say exactly what you said: raids happened, although they were somewhat exaggerated. How did the Danes and Danelaw come to England if there were no Scandinavian raids to foreign lands? Did they sprout up from the ground, or did they get in a ship and sail to England? And all of the fights between the English and the Danes? All made up? All of the Danish culture to be found in England? And Alfred the Great didn't kick the Danes out? He did, so how did they get there, and it doesn't sound too peaceful. They were raids, in other words. Brian Boru in Ireland? Was he fighting imaginary warriors? It's safe to say that there was a violent viking expansion. Its characteristics can be debated and so can the degree to which it is misunderstood, but the idea that Scandinavians got in their boats and killed people in foreign lands and/or traded with them can't really be disputed. Not sure what Spartacus's comment on how trading could actually be raping is supposed to be taken.

Normandy, have the name since Norman/ Norseman and the Normans were norsemen aka vikings, that got that pice of the land by the king of france, so Paris werent sacked like the old Rome

@@weybye91 Exactly!

Well, no one wore horned helmets in that time. Barbarians did wear non-horned helmets. But people didn't think "Oh no, here come the Vikings!" on seeing them.

Because horned helmets are an inherently stupid idea. You're giving the enemy a handle to grab onto.

@@GeraltofRivia22 And yet the Pickelhaube was still a thing well into the 20th Century.

The horns were on the inside . . .

@@GeraltofRivia22 You do know the samurai had horned helmets right?

My thoughts exactly

Should've done it back in 2018 with the Minneapolis miracle

I was thniking the same thing. Lumping Scandanavian Pirates in with Middle Eastern Pirates and North African Pirates? Soon they will be saying White Eurpoeans didn't really exist Europe was really all Middle Eastern and Sub Saharan African People.

@@politicalsheepdog Well, technically, it was all people from sub-Saharan Africa, if you go back far enough..

My last understanding was that "viking" meant raiding for the Norse peoples. "Viking" was something some Norsemen did, sometimes.

@@mjbull5156 Yup, and because they were not a single unified group, we often call these guys "Vikings" for convenience, even though they did more than just raiding.

@@goldenageofdinosaurs7192 WRONG... since there are already evidence that europeans didt from africa as we have been beliving for god knows how long

If you want to check more about the subject you can check our sources from: viking.archeurope.com/

They need to install horns on their helmets, at least the running back so he can butt his way through the defensive line.

I guess the purple people eaters are ancient histo.... uh mythology?

@@kevind814 no man, they're making a comeback.

They lost to my Bengals!

Nah the loss to San Francisco might have just dashed their playoff hopes althought you still have two games against my bears which should be wins for you guys lol

Could you please elaborate?

I'm sure you're very dissappointed and will be taking your viewership elsewhere.

It's about being "woke" unfortunely. Hopefully they delete the thing or make some revision of it.

Its hardly "woke", i think. I mean i did find The Joke of all scandivians inbreeding quite offensive tbh. I just dont get offended by those Jokes. But after all It was racist remark

To go a viking was to sail out to trade or battle.

As they said, the sagas that mention these dudes weren't written at the time they allegedly lived.

@@whydoineedaname11 Right, but they still existed. The people we call "Vikings" were Medieval Norsemen who went exploring and raiding.

@@stevenwhite7763 Right, which is why I think they've oversimplified things quite a bit here.

@@astrobullivant5908 Except the medieval Norsemen weren't always Norsemen, and not all people who set out on boats from Northwest Europe were "vikings". Erik the Red wasn't the first to settle Greenland, just the first to not have the settlement fail the first winter. Much of what is written in the sagas was BS.

Many claim, especially in Scandinavia, that they made up a nation, or three nations to be exact: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and the Norway had a colony on Iceland, while Denmark had a colony in England. This is by all available evidence false, although there was definitely as very powerful ruling dynasty who fancied themselves Kings of the Danes - but that neither a country as we understand them makes, nor an ethnic people constitutes.

@@spartacus-olsson That simply isn't true that "many claim" that. Nation states as a concept doesn't start to come into use before the 18th and 19th century. You seem to be conflating different concepts and putting them together as you please. Then putting up a false strawman to then tear down again. As you rightly point out, there was a Danish king who ruled a Danish realm where a large part is today Denmark. Of course they aren't the same as 1000 years have passed but there is a direct historic line from one to the other.

@@Khasidon with all due respect. You’re the one setting up a straw man by stating that no one claims that Scandinavians of the time had achieved nationhood. All you have to do to verify that you are mistaken is to browse this comment section… you’ll find numerous posters protesting the video because it doesn’t fit with their perception of Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian history.

Wikipedia points to criticism of the term of "Reconquista", because apparently the fact that the Spaniards who reclaimed lands from the Moors didn't consider themselves Visigoths, and in the 800-year long struggle there was Christian infighting as well as occasional Christian-Muslim alliances. All of that is supposed to refute the idea that Christians had a vision of retaking the once-Christian peninsula. It's as if it's trying to be a deliberate anti-narrative to the glorified legends that radical nationalists would have us believe.

@@orktv4673 And there was no Spain back then as well. Only after the Reconquista the kingdoms of Castilia, Leon and Aragon united. :D But to be honest certain level of simplification is necessary to present the history to wider audience. It's impossible to tell everyone all the details.

@@orktv4673 That's a bit hard to do with the reconquista as there are plenty Muslim and Christian sources from the time

We are not the ones who made that association

@@TimeGhost You are giving the association credit. I feel like you're saying something like "romantisizing viking history/myth = supporting nazi symbols". Which I find repulsive. I assume you guys spend a lot of your time thinking about the time period from 1914 to 1945, but don't give stuff same inflence and meaning now as it had for some back then. The very title of this video is clickbait more than anything. There were vikings, that's not a myth, you don't have to be a nationalist to like thinking back to the age of vikings with fasination and pride. No more than to like thinking back to our grandparents and their parents makes us allies or facists.

Our sources are in the description

What on earth are you talking about? We say identitarian about _modern_ interpretations of this time - exactly what you are absurdly accusing us of is what we’re criticizing. Ironically, based on your last line I suspect that your motivations for this comment fall into the very area we’re attacking.

The hysteria of this response further tips your hand.

@@seandilallo8718your political diatribe tips yours. Whatever hand you think we’re using, it will never be up to anything as nefarious as yours.

@@spartacus-olsson Let me just take a moment to give a long, evil cackle. In all seriousness though, this is what you said: “When the Middle Ages are rediscovered in the 18th century, the word [Viking] is taken out of context and gradually comes to mean, 'someone from the north.' The historiographers of the 18th and 19th century then shoehorn all of this into their own understanding of the world. So it becomes stories of defending one’s nation against invaders. In the regions where the Vikings are supposedly from, it becomes a proud national origins story, which might seem cool until you look at how much of this identitarian myth of a Germanic warrior culture is adopted by the Nazis as they reinvent German history.” So, you start talking about 18th and 19th century nationalism, which was largely a liberal democratic movement to create what we used to call modern nation states out of the old aristocratic empires. Then you talk about Identitarianism, which is a modern 21st century word denoting the growing movement of resistance to the so-called Great Replacement, e.g. the reduction of the European peoples to minority populations in their ancestral homelands by mass third world migration (watch the current French election). Then you talk about the Nazis adopting identitarianism, which is obviously false as that would have happened about 100 years ago, long before it was conceived. If you want to have credibility discussing this topic, you should refer to the movements that were popular at that time, not ours: Folkish, Nordicist, Ariosophist etc. Otherwise, you will just be viewed as another opportunist reinventor of history, as you say.

@@seandilallo8718 well I I’m glad you at least have a serious reply, which wasn’t as terrible as I had feared. You’re confusing two things: the Identitarian Movement and the adjective identitarian. The former is the modern European political streaming that you describe. The later is simply a term in sociology to describe any political movement or idea based on identity. All of the examples you mention from the 19th century are by definition identitarian, full stop.

@VanquisherOfTroons it truly is sad because their documentations of battles were pretty good in the old days, but i just was afraid theyd make up some tranny or jew super batalion out of the blue

Nope - just because you think you know something doesn’t mean you’re right. Every claim we make here is backed up by solid facts.

@@spartacus-olsson I suppose I worded that far too strongly - it was crass. I'm mostly just rather skeptical of a few of the early claims about source material and thus was rather too hotheaded, apologies. For instance the claim from 1:14-1:19 that "there isnt much to shine a light on" and it's based on a lot of "conjecture" I find glosses over a relatively decent corpus of primary accounts from the 9th-11th century a bit quickly. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for instance, paired Alfred's Treaty creating the Danelaw; these are pretty firmly primary (rather than second-hand/third hand) documents that, while not perfectly, reliable, help round out other finds and texts in the period, just from areas I spent a lot of time studying and writing about in my university days. The archaeological findings are also pretty firm and if anything, have served to add credibility both to those earlier texts, and to later Saga tales (of course those are much later than the time period, as you note, and have their own set of problems). I appreciate and am on board with the larger claim that the so-called-today Vikings were not an ethnic group and were quite diverse peoples, but I think some of the earlier portions of the video just are a bit hasty. Hopefully that is a more fair reply and critique, eh?

@@Sean.Cordes that is a fair reply. But I have to point out that while we do have more texts and sources about the time from the British Isles and the Continent, we have almost zero sources from the actual places these people are purportedly from. Moreover, the texts that do exist were highly politicized already at the time, and force a lot of conjecture between scholars about what _actually_ happened. Most importantly we have very, very few original sources as in documents, records, letters and so on - so to verify and better understand the politically motivated histories, we quickly run into a dead end. Last but not least, when you say that we have large amounts of archeological records, I’d say that’s a relative statement. What we have still leaves much unanswered, and forces us to use conjecture to work out its meaning. That situation is however in constant improvement. Thank you for taking the time to explain your initial comment better. Much appreciated.

Sure, as far as we can see, it very much happened… but not by an ethnic group that was distinctly different.

There are only about a dozen uses of the word on rune stones, and in all cases the wording is so ambiguous that we can’t even agree on what it means. In contemporary non-Norse language texts (old English and Latin) it is only used about twenty times in preserved literature, and in all cases it refers to pirates/raiders. We have no clear idea what it meant, although it seems right it indicated either the occupation of being a trading/pillaging seafarer, or the act of going on a “trade” journey.

@@TimeGhost Here is a link to an article on the runestone: sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brostenen It contains a transliteration of the runes, Runic Swedish and Swedish. "Ginnlög, Holmgers dotter, syster till Sygröd och till Göt, hon lät göra denna bro och resa denna sten efter Assur, sin man, son till Håkon jarl. Han var landvärnare mot vikingar med Geter. Gud hjälpe nu hans ande och själ."

Thank you, that is helpful.

You could have shortened you comment by not repeating things three or four times. You are right though.

It depends on place, some very old religions prohibit even distant cousin marriage and some isolated places too executed people over it

The most common marriages through human history are to second cousins... so yeah... we're all a little inbred :p

@@nmcgunagle Lol I guess so. I have the habit of making my comments longer then most people will read. But I have found making your initial comment longer on RU-vid stops a lot of people replying with really dumb comments.

@@c3cxla Interesting. I was not aware of religions that prohibited marriages to cousins. I guess those are smaller religions? Because to my knowledge the 3 major Abrahamic religions all have allowed marriages to cousins and even to brother and sister at points in history. And to be fair to them back then the limited options people had for marriage does mean it makes since that marriages to cousins would be allowed back then. Especially since it was not known the issues that inbreeding could cause to children of people who have children through inbreeding generation after generation.

@ger du but that's not how the period got it's name Something similar happen with ancient Greek historiography , the period right after the bronze age collapse is also known as " the Greek dark ages " for similar reasons , again it's the little evidence that was left behind for example we know from archeological artefacts that after the eruption of thira the Minoan civilisation collapsed and people was even reduced to ritualistic cannibalism , but unless we going to rely upon sources written generations after the event we don't have the exact events "we are in the dark "

Glad you like it!! 👍

I grew up in Denmark and the term "viking" never meant a raider solely but could also be a trader or farmer or something else and sometimes there was raids. This video seems to take the original meaning of the word litteral. Which is stupid. Like no one would think that. No culture have ever been just "raiders".

Treating "Viking" as an occupational term is akin to saying "soldiers colonized India." That is separating the raiding parties from the chieftains/petty kings that sponsored such raiding parties, as though the raiding, pillaging, and enslaving was not done with the knowledge, support, and coordination of chieftains in Scandinavia. While it is technically incorrect to speak of "Vikings" as a culture, it is merely using the wrong term for a very realm Old Norse culture.

@@blkgardner What I ment is that viking is a term similar to pirate or raider, which is the way it was used in context. Vikings had a culture in the same sense carribean or wokou pirates did, but that does not mean all of those pirates were of the same ethnic group. Also according to the sources vikings didn't concour England, the Danes did, so it is infact incorrect call them all vikings.