How Did The Vikings Impact On Society

The Vikings were a group of people who conquered and pillaged much of eastern Europe in ancient times. They had a very interesting mythological religion that could be compared to other polytheistic religions of the past such as ancient Greek. As time went on, the Nordic religion changed and slowly began to fade into a memory of the past. The impacts foreign peoples had on the Viking religion and culture directly impacted Viking society. The long journeys of Viking ships to their neighboring nations and beyond is documented, and there is proof such events impacted their own society back in the Scandinavian region. They ventured into regions such as Ireland, Russia and beyond. They began to gain knowledge of Christianity from the Irish, which

They had a substantial amount of wealth from their raids, and this wealth allowed them to build infrastructure such as buildings and ports in their towns and maintain strong and well-armed raiders. They had arguably the best navy in the world with very sophisticated ship designs that were able to make long voyages. The Viking ships were faster, stronger and more effective than those of other parts of the world and had two different types of ships which were used. They had “Langskip”, which were used primarily for war and battle, and “Knörr”, which emphasized a large cargo for carrying goods to be sold and traded. With profits from the raids, they were able to trade with neighboring countries, and even those faraway. Places such as Arabia, Spain and Russia engaged in trading and many other forms of interaction with the Vikings in result of their conquests, voyages and expeditions. These engagements were sometimes peaceful, but most of the time the warrior mentality of the Vikings would take over. Many Viking settlements began to pop up all around eastern Europe around Russia (Abram), due to a group of Swedes who were on a journey eastward and got forced to settle in the mid-European woods on their way, the group of people were called the Rus. These peoples mixed their ideologies and abilities with the native people to their regions, and brought them back to

While the Viking religion was very ancient and untouched for a long period of time (BBC), once the Vikings began their expeditions and encountered other theologies, they began to copy and morph their own religion. One example of this is when the Vikings liked the idea of crucifixion and resurrection in their religion from Christianity and decided to add it into their own. The Vikings morphed the symbol of the wooden cross into a tree and decided that was the way that one of their gods, Odin, had died, yet as in Christianity, he rose again promptly (BBC). These traditions made their way into Viking religion due to contact with Catholic settlements and villages in Ireland during their raids and expeditions. Not only did it take away some of the originality of the religion, it also took away members from the Viking faith. Many of the Viking raiders converted to Christianity during their time in the nation. Many of these converts decided to bring the ideology back to Scandinavia, and in doing so stripped the religion of even more of its believers. This led to the slow decline of the old Viking religion, and the number of Vikings who followed the old tradition to be less than those who decided other ways of life in different religions, mostly Christianity. These religious changes helped the Viking society become much more compatible with the rest of Europe, mainly because Christians were much more welcome in the