Vikings and the Viking Age: A Needs-Based Approach

Sammanfattning: The Viking Age has long been understood to be a time of great violence. However, research in the last 50 or so years has tended to focus only on more peaceful aspects of Nordic cultures during that period. This thesis works to change that, and tries to find ways to bring violence back into the fold. The aim of this project is to test Johan Galtung’s needs-based typology of violence against Viking Age Nordic practices, and to determine whether the application of these typologies affects our images of the Viking Age. The concepts of the Viking Age itself, and of how violence can be defined, are also explored. Further, the thesis seeks to understand how violence in the Viking Age became a potential cultural norm, how it manifested, and how these manifestations can be identified in the archaeological record. The results show that, though his typology and definitions of violence were written for the study of modern societies, Galtung’s research is invaluable to archaeological understandings of violence, which was found to have pervaded Nordic societies in a variety of surprising ways.