The V-word

Runestone Sm 10 from Växjö Cathedral in Småland, Sweden, raised by a man calling himself Toki Víkingr, ‘Toki the viking’, the latter word carved on its own to the left of the serpent’s head. Photo: Berig, CC-BY-3.0.

The so-called Viking Age of northern Europe is almost unique among historians’ artificial divisions of the past in being named after a minority with whom hardly anyone of the time would have readily identified, or arguably even recognised. The etymology of Old Norse víkingr is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have meant something close to ‘pirate’, a perpetrator of maritime robbery with violence, though this is not quite the whole story. Never used as a name for a people, it was essentially a job description, not necessarily (or not always) pejorative, or even applied only to Scandinavians. It also clearly denoted an activity that could be taken up or left off at different times in a life, as well as an identity that could run in parallel with others. Most importantly, it would never have described the majority population, most of whom were farmers who never went anywhere or did much harm to anyone.

There is no clear, simple term for the ‘People Formerly Known As The Vikings’ which does not involve some measure of artificiality. We could use ‘early medieval Scandinavians’, for example, but that would involve a chronological label coined by historians of later centuries (and which also has its own problems) combined with a place-name and identity that were not current at the time. So, what should we call them?

At WIVA, we use the following terminologies:

Lowercase vikings refers to the actual raiders themselves, the real thing
Title case Viking is used for the time period, and when talking about the history of research
Norse is the term we favour for the majority population of Scandinavia, but even this is not without problems. It is primarily a linguistic concept and thus does not entirely function in the sense of a name for a people, and sometimes it also has Norwegian connotations, but it has potential. At the time, most of those they encountered referred to them using some version of ‘northerners’. This in itself does not work today, since it presents a Eurocentric viewpoint (who is a ‘northerner’ when viewed from southern Africa, for example?), but Norse will do as a useful approximation.