HI355 The Vikings
The Vikings announced their arrival in Western Europe with a series of debilitating raids on Britain, Ireland and the continent in the late eighth and ninth centuries. They struck terror into the hearts of Latin Christendom’s record-keepers, the monks, whose monasteries were so often the Vikings’ primary targets. To this day, the Vikings are remembered as pirates and marauders, as pillagers and plunderers, yet they were so much more than that. As explorers, merchants, colonizers and mercenaries, they represented a complex civilization whose impact can be detected from North America to Baghdad. In this course we will examine the Vikings’ home societies as well as their interactions with foreign peoples through trade and through warfare. We will seek to understand the impact of the Vikings on the regions to which they travelled and how contact with foreign societies changed the culture of the Vikings’ homelands, most especially through their conversion to Christianity. The course will be framed around a series of primary sources that will include the material culture of the Vikings, their sagas and a variety of other documents.