Vikings = "illiterate pagans"?

I could give you lots of not very scholarly answers and opinions here - but if you have time I'd recommend this site http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ which will probably more than answer all your questions and is well referenced.

Excellent suggestion. And did you know that the Viking Answer Lady is on LJ, under gunnora. When I posted this same question on viking_research, she answered in great depth! :)

No, I didn't. Thanks for that. :)

If I recall correctly, writing was not such a big deal pre-conversion.

The runes were used as a writing tool way before they became the divinatory tool of today. Depending upon where you lived that determined how many runes were used to make up that language. The Poetic Eddas are an example of Viking culture, religion and writing, as is the Havalmal. As stated before the Viking answer lady is a great website for answers.

Quibbles among different scholars aside, I think it's safe to say as a generality that the Norse in viking times lived in a culture that celebrated war, while in Christian Europe the church had made substantial inroads toward creating an otherwordly culture. So, I don't doubt that the vikings were more ruthless than the English, while at the same time both sides were scandalously bloodthirsty by today's standards.

Viking

From my understanding the viking of prechritian times was pretty savoy for their day.
They can remembre lagre bodys of poetic works
Ofcourse there ship constuction was great, there ships can
Take on high seas and small water ways and carry the boats
over land.
They are also good when it come to Communacation withother
people from diffent porcitys in the Known world. trade was
just as important too them.
But what was also important too the viking age men was that
they will be remembred in song that they have done great deeds.
These deeds don't have to be feeding the hungery but that would work too.
But for those days it is more like who can get more men to go out and die for you.
If your a king or a jarl, even kings and jarls was not afaid
of a bloody battle.
and ofcoures finding your end in one of those bloody battles will get you a one way ticket to valhalla and become one of the Einherjar.....HAIL THE EINHERJAR

You're right--the runes were used for inscriptions (and magic, though we must have lost a lot of wooden magical runic inscriptions so we can't guess at the balance between the two uses). Inscriptions were mainly memorials. Lore was memorized. The "vikings" as such were not too involved in high culture--but a man was not much respected unless he could spin a skaldic verse, and those are hard verse forms, and they extemporized, they did not mull over their poems for months.

Alfred was personally invested in teaching the English to read so that they could read the Bible in their own tongue. The resulting "10th-century renaissance" in the English church as deeply threatening to Rome and became the main reason the Pope later sponsored Bill the Bastard's invasion on a trumped-up, religious-based charge. It is in fact a remarkable precursor of protestantism--not to mention the late eighteenth-century opening of the schools to every English boy and girl regardless of status.

So Alfred with his mania for literacy and the Norsemen with their use of runes only for specific uses and their assumption that verbal arts must be oral were on a collision course--the ultimate cause was the reverence for the written Word of God in Xianity, but Alfred, and the English, were extreme in that respect. They took to taht aspect of Xianity like no other people until . . . the Icelanders, after they too were converted. Interesting pattern, hmm?

M

by strange coincidence

Last night we listened to part 2 of the Viking Way

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/viking_way/index.shtml

and the general concensus was that the emphasis on the Vikings burning churches wasn't made until much later in the 11th Century, the contemporary accounts, don't pay much heed to them. This isn't to say it didn't happen, just that it was waaay down the list of "what's wrong with the vikings".

The emphasis on the ability to write only came with the conversion. I think that pretty much goes with the idea of those who could read and write having power through it (I know the word of God and you don't). Even post conversion, there were members of the Aristocracy who couldn't read.

The point was also made that "good Christian" Charlemagne had 5,000 people killed in one day because they wouldn't convert to Christianity!

Re: by strange coincidence

Thank you, Karen. This is very valuable information.