Week 8 Blog: Vikings

Reading about the vikings was interesting to me becuase I had never really given them much thought. The only thing that I new about the vikings was basically how they are portrayed in cartoons and film--none of which is even hardly accurate as it turns out. The vikings were much like pirates, only they pillaged the land rather than ships--though they probably did this too. I wonder how they thought this was ethical. Maybe they didn't really think about ethics, or maybe in some way they felt justified. I'll be researching this more as I have chosen to write up my Wikipedia analysis on the subject. It seemed like an entire culture based on thievery. I can understand why many people didn't really fight them back, they couldn't. But it was bizarre to think that, in some situations at least, they vikings actually stayed and lived in the villages with the people they had just pillaged. That would be hard for me to tolerate--even if there was nothing I could do. How maniacal they were to so methodologically terrorize the countries. They optimized how to squeeze every penny from the towns, for example they didn't kill or destroy villages completely--that way they could come back later and do it again. This was especially true with monasteries. One last thing that was hard for me to wrap my mind around was the small ships that they sailed on. How uncomfortable it must have been to bare the sea in such a cramped, uncovered space.