Why Everything You Know About Vikings Is A Lie
True story - There are historical accounts (well, there’s at least one historical account) in which English people whine about how the Norse men bathe so often they’re able to seduce the local women away from their husbands.
(via notanightlight)
Also the Vikings were known to be complete dandies. They sought bright colors, jewelry, imported Persian silks. Ribbons. Little mirrors sewn onto clothing, in Sweden. The men had long hair that was scandalous to Christians, and they carried combs and earspoons and such things with them. I recall seeing documents where the eastern Norse were big on baths and one of their demands in a particular negotiation was “we get to have baths drawn for us whenever we want”, which was often.
They used soap with agents designed to bleach hair to try to make themselves blonder.
SRSLY. Look at this stuff.
I’m sorry longhaired prettyboy viking men in gaudy clothing and jewelry, bleaching and combing their hair, doesn’t match with your Conan-the-Barbarian manlyman aesthetic.
…or the fact that a significant portion of the Norse were traders, fishermen, farmers, and herders, and weren’t raiding, pillaging warriors or hired Byzantine thug-bodyguards.I also like the parts about how maybe women didn’t dress as modestly as some interpretations of the evidence suggest. And, like, putting BIG METAL CLIPS and STRANDS OF BEADS right across the breasts … kind of draws the eyes right there.
beatsandblades considering that you just posted something Viking related - thought you might be interested in this.
Oh my god, I LOVE THIS.
It also should be noted that they had tweezers and ladies used them to shape their eyebrows and keep their faces neat. It should also be noted that they had the most civilized laws toward women pre christian era in europe. Women were allowed to fight, allowed to inherit or acquire wealth, allowed to have bastard children or be raped without it being a mark against their honor and virtue. In fact, if the family of a raped woman wanted justice, they were free to kill the rapist under the law. Women were also free to divorce their husbands.
Viking men also composed POETRY as a sign of their virility and reciting poetry to a woman without her father’s permission was considered unseemly, because that was part of courtship and the young man had to take care that he wasn’t challenged or killed for doing so.
The men also had magnificent purses as status symbols, as demonstrated by the find of amazing purse cover in the Sutton Hoo burial ship, which was generally a fancy fancy archaeological windfall. And why not? This suggests most anything made of fine quality materials and made with painstaking craftsmanship could be a status symbol, with little evidence of modern gender panic about the function of ornamentation.
BONUS: after their colonization of Britian, the native menfolk thought they were unfair because they took all the women folk by being handsomely groomed and BAthiNG regularly HOW DARE THEY. There’s a post about that floating around on tumblr you could probably find if you believe in yourself hard enough.
The modern interpretation of vikings, as with most distorted views of the barbarism of previous ages, was pretty much invented by British Victorians as a combination of a sort of sensational hyper-masculine nostalgia (”remember when we were like being constantly invaded by those barbarians? That’s because they were brutes, but damn it those MEN were MEN*. I mean, they have to had been. They invaded us.”) and as a sort of self-congratulatory “well at least we aren’t like THAT any more” cultural asspat. It’s similar thing that happened with Renaissance scholars about the so-called “medieval period”, lots of facts were distorted or outright invented to make the current age and location look better. Which is not to say the Victorians also provided their own more romantic and chivalric idea of that period, too, which further distorts things. IN ANY CASE Here’s a summary and extract of a book about Victorian ideas of Vikings, in lieu of me being too lazy to find a more comprehensive or succinct paper.
*see also Weimar Republic-era German fascination and cultural connection with their own idea of “Viking”. But that had a more vengeful edge and was informed by social discontent and near-destroyed national pride. And of course NOTHING BAD EVER CAME OF THIS PROPAGANDIC VIEW OF HISTORY.
Pillaging your village while looking positively FABULOUS at the same time~
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
THIS IS MARRIAGE!!
Thats right!
Permission to be a bad ass. Nod.
He looks back at the guy like, “SEE THAT? SHE SAID YES. YOU’RE SO FUCKED.”
Like, guys. Sparta was so kick ASS sometimes when it came to women. Spartan women were given these small knives so that if their husbands came home and tried to hit them or assault them, they had a weapon within reach. That weapon was for CUTTING THEIR HUSBANDS’ FUCKING FACES so that when he went out in public everyone would know he was an asshole, abusing jerkface and they would publicly shame him.
I DID NOT KNOW THAT THAT IS GREAT
LET’S JUST TALK ABOUT SPARTAN WOMEN FOR A SECOND.
In Sparta, women could own land and were considered citizens. THAT IS A HUGE BIG FUCKING DEAL. Why? Because that was RARE AS FUCK and there are lots of places TODAY where women don’t even get that much.
Divorce was totally fine, and a woman could expect to keep her own wealth and get custody of the kids because paternal lineage wasn’t very important. And it didn’t make her a pariah! She could totally remarry, no big deal at all.
Spartan women participated in some fuckin’ badass sporting events, too. And because they were expected to be as physically fit as the Spartan menfolk (who all had to serve compulsory military duties, btw, and couldn’t marry until they finished them at thirty) they didn’t have time for lots of swishy dresses. So they wore notoriously short skirts. According to some accounts, their thighs were visible at all times. HOLY SHIT.
Also, In Sparta men only got their names on their graves if they died in battle. And women? Women only got their names on their graves if they died in childbirth. THE SPARTANS COMPARED CHILDBIRTH TO FUCKING BATTLE AND IT WAS VIEWED AS A GODDAMN BADASS AND HONORABLE WAY TO GO OUT.
FUCKING SPARTAN WOMEN. THIS DUDE HAD FUCKIN’ BETTER MAKE SURE SHE’S COOL WITH WHATEVER HE’S DOING, IF HE KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKIN’ GOOD FOR HIM.
^^ I throughly enjoyed the history lesson dashed with the colorful adjectives.
I mean, he knew she was Cersei… lol
And the women were trained the exact same way as men were. As children they were equals ; they were not allowed to wear clothing until a certain age and at that point they were sent away to a training camp until they were 18. It was only the men who were sent into the wilderness for an extra two years to ensure their strength for battle.
Plus the women could marry whomever they pleased and the men weren’t allowed to live with the women in their house until she said so. And they were tough in Sparta but also all about family. To have male offspring was good luck, to have female offspring was an honour.
This part of the movie was true; King Leonidas really did kill a man because he insulted his wife and he always ensured that he had his wife’s approval. And while Leonidas was away in battle she did rule Sparta on her own.
Sparta knew what was up.
The Vikings are actually very similar to this!
There’s a lot of evidence of women being super hardcore warriors, either protecting the homestead while the men went viking, or even going viking themselves. (Viking is actually a verb, the act of going on raid.)
They also had divorce, which involved the woman getting together her posse and declaring that she divorced her husband three times - first at the entry to her property, second at the door of her house, and finally at the foot of her marriage bed. After that, she was no longer married to the dude, and could take all of the property she brought to the marriage and leave, usually to return to her parent’s home, but often also to marry some other guy.
…
The moral of this story is that patriarchy doesn’t just affect our present, but also our view of the past. Think that women have been oppressed across all cultures, throughout history? Wrong! Women have been kickass equals for millennia, but it is always the goal of oppressors to rewrite the past so they can use it to support their lifestyle in the present.
History is written by the victors, and right now, the victors are men.
(via bonehandledknife)
Vodka Tia Moran