Viking Age Myths: Polygyny, Varangian Guard Pay and the Thrall Trade

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The horned helmet was a 19th century costume invention for a Wagner opera, and the skull drinking cup came from a mistranslated Old Norse phrase about drinking horns. Viking was never a nationality but a job: to go a-viking was a maritime activity, and one theory traces the word to vika, the distance a crew could row before a fresh shift took over. One explanation for the explosion of raiding from the late 700s is polygyny, as elite Scandinavian men took several wives and concubines and left a surplus of young, landless men who had to win wealth abroad before they could marry and buy land.

Shallow draft, clinker-built longships sitting about three feet deep carried those men up the Volga and the Dnieper, to Newfoundland, North Africa and the markets of Baghdad. Scandinavians served as the Varangian Guard in Constantinople, founded the Rurik dynasty in Russia and took on French language and feudalism in Normandy. The wealth rested on thralls, perhaps a quarter of the population, captured abroad and sold to the Abbasid Caliphate for silver dirhams and silk. When Christendom forbade Christians from owning fellow Christians, the slave market dried up and with it the motive for raiding, while Norse settlers in the Danelaw left a lasting mark on English grammar.

• A medieval law in Västergötland barred anyone from inheriting property at home while serving down in Greece, the Norse term for Byzantium.
• Strontium isotope analysis of a 10th century Danish grave long read as a shieldmaiden's showed the armed woman likely grew up in present-day Poland.
• The Eddic poem about the god Rig describes the creation of three classes: jarls, karls and thralls.
• Household thralls were sometimes killed and buried alongside their dead masters in elite graves.
• Contact in the Danelaw helped strip Old English of grammatical gender and left English the habit of ending sentences with a preposition.