Melheim et al./Comparative Perspectives, 8. Pirates of the North Sea: The Viking Ship as Political Space

From the 1980s onwards the Viking Age has been seen by researchers largely through the lens of the Scandinavians’ more peaceable pursuits, resulting in the devel- opment of a new image: the Viking as trader, craftsworker, poet, explorer and increas- ingly urbanised citizen of an emerging new Europe. In this way the ‘real’ Viking Age has been reclaimed from its reworking during the Age of Empire, and the stereotypi- cally violent marauder has been submerged beneath the wide range of social roles that the Scandinavians actually played. This has largely been a cathartic process of revisionism for Viking studies, leading to a massive range of advances in the field and laboratory, and enabling the emergence of a broader vision of the period than ever before (see Brink and Price 2008 for a recent overview; Price 2015). However, as part of this process, the genuinely warlike elements of Viking culture and historical action ironically now risk falling into neglect. While far from forgotten, they tend to be seen as an extreme rather than a core constituent of early medieval Scandinavian identity. Many fundamental questions remain, one of which goes right back to the earliest perceptions of the Vikings as noted above: who really were the first raiders, why did they do what they did, and how did this change over the critical first decades of the ninth century?