The term “Vikings“, which is often used to refer to the populations of Early medieval Scandinaviahas assumed over time a ethnic connotation. Especially in recent years, thanks to revival of theancient Scandinavian culture due to films, TV series, novels and video games, we tend to say “Viking populations”, “Viking culture” or “Vikings” to designate an entire people. It actually is wrong. The term “Viking” indicated only one professionthat of pirate or more generally of navigator. From a historical point of view, the populations that inhabited Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the early medieval period should be called “Norsemen“.
What does the term “Viking” mean?
The Italian word “Viking”, like the English one “viking“, derives fromOld Norse vikingr. The etymology of this term is still very relevant today debated and over time linguists and historians have proposed different theories. One of the best known, considered valid for a long time but now no longer taken into considerationhe considered vikingr as an adjective of the term vik significant “bay” or “inlet“. According to this theory, the Vikings would therefore have been “those who come from the bay“, referring to the villages within the fjords where the Norse lived.
Since the term indicated a profession and not a geographical origin, the theory that is popular among fellow scholars today vikingr to the word vikawhich in Old Norse indicated the distance covered by a boat in the time of one shift of rowersbefore this was replaced by the next. In turn, this term finds comparisons with the ancient nautical term Icelandic (among modern languages, Icelandic is the closest to ancient Norse) víkjawhich means “turn“, deriving from the Proto-Germanic root (il proto-Germanic it’s there reconstructed language from which all the Germanic languages spoken today derive, such as English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic) *wîkanwhich indicated the movement of going backwards with the oar.
In early medieval sourcesthe term “Viking” is used to refer to pirates and raiders from the Scandinavian peninsula. There first written attestation of the term appears on a glossary of the ancient Anglo-Saxon language (the ancestor language of current English) dating back to end of the 7th and beginning of the 8th century. In the glossary, the Old Norse term vikingr is rendered in the Anglo-Saxon form wicingwhich in the Latin translation is piracum“pirate“. It is no coincidence that the first reference to Scandinavian pirates appears in British Isles: The first known Viking raids in Western Europe occurred in Englandalthough almost a century after the creation of the glossary. To give a connotation ethnic to northern pirates, medieval authors preferred to use terms like “northern men” (hence Northmen, Normans) or simply “Danes” (because the first Vikings who came into contact with Christian Europe came from Denmark).
Starting from 19th centurythe imaginary romantic he reevaluated the figure of the ancient pirates of early medieval Scandinavia. Precisely because of the impact that these populations had on the history of medieval Europe, the term “Viking”, partly for convenience and partly for evocative powerwent to indicate an entire population, with its language, its culture and its religion.
