



Much of the explanation, he says, is an "ethos that is unlike anything else in Europe," one that included reverence for the warrior ideal and a gallows-humor, "who cares?" attitude toward death. But why, Shippey asks, slightly exaggerating, did the Vikings always win? "Other Europeans were perfectly horrible as well," agrees Tom Shippey, an emeritus professor of English at Saint Louis University, who writes often about the Vikings. In fact, some believe the trend Winroth represents-de-emphasizing Vikings' violence and stressing their similarities with other Europeans-goes too far.

Viking atrocities were "the equivalent of those carried out by SS divisions invading Poland 75 years ago," Cockburn wrote.įew scholars today hold Cockburn's view. To be sure, scholars have for decades been stressing aspects of Viking life beyond the warlike, pointing to the craftsmanship of the Norse (to use the term that refers more generally to Scandinavians), their trade with the Arab world, their settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland, the ingenuity of their ships, and the fact that the majority of them stayed behind during raids.īut Winroth wants to put the final nail in the coffin of the notion that the Vikings were the "Nazis of the North," as an article by British journalist Patrick Cockburn argued last April. "The Vikings never got close to that level of efficiency," Winroth says, drily. In 782, for instance, Charlemagne, now heralded as the original unifier of Europe, beheaded 4,500 Saxon captives on a single day. In short, aside from ignoring the taboo against treating monks and priests specially, the Vikings acted not much differently from other European warriors of the period, Winroth argues. And there were enough people left-among the "many who survived the massacre"-to pay ransom to get prisoners back. After stating that the Vikings had killed the "entire multitude," for instance, the witness contradicts himself by noting that some of the clerics were taken into captivity. When the account of the Nantes attack is scrutinized, "a more reasonable image emerges," he writes. What's more, he says, such exaggeration was often a feature of European writings about the Vikings. But the witness account contains more than a touch of hyperbole, writes Anders Winroth, a Yale history professor and author of the book The Age of the Vikings, a sweeping new survey. To modern readers the attack seems monstrous, even by the standards of medieval warfare. Among the slain, allegedly killed while celebrating the Mass, was a bishop who later was granted sainthood. "The heathens mowed down the entire multitude of priest, clerics, and laity," according to one witness account. The Vikings gave no quarter when they stormed the city of Nantes, in what is now western France, in June 843-not even to the monks barricaded in the city's cathedral.
