The Vikings colonized Britain, and a lot of our modern day towns are named after Viking names that settled these big towns.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I felt that a lot of Viking culture had been caricatured and misconstrued. After all, they were far more democratic than the Saxons and the Francs, who were exercising really hierarchical social structures at that time. The Vikings had popular meetings where everything could be discussed.
Viking women, if they were left behind, were ruling their town. They were earls in their own right; they owned land in their own right. They could divorce their husbands if they wanted to. All of those wonderful allowances that were made for women in the Viking culture weren't really part of the Christian culture at the time.
Vikings were pretty brutal, but also very educated people. They were salesmen, businessmen who started raiding when business wasn't good. That's why they had such great boats.
The Norse way of speaking, no one really knew what the Vikings sounded liked, they were Norsemen. The accent is really a combination of a Scandinavian accent, maybe with a Swedish accent and an old way of speaking.
I think Vikings have always been popular, haven't they? I remember being a kid and being in second grade reading a book about this Viking warrior.
What is interesting to me about Vikings is that they were failed farmers.
We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too... When my father's brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather's name as surname. Wainaina.
Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.
It seems strange that almost no other traces of the strong vikings are found in America.
The original settlers in Iceland were the nobles of Norway who left their native land to avoid the tyranny of Harold Fairhair, who tried to crush their power so as to make himself a despotic king in the land.
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