Book Smart

The Vikings: scourge of the seas, masters of the strategic rampage, fearsome warriors of the frozen North…

Actually, this somewhat lopsided view of medieval Norsemen is the product of the much-later Romantic imagination. The preferred, more accurate term is “Norse,” Wolf says.

“Vikings were only a tiny fraction of the total population of Scandinavia in the Viking Age, roughly the late eighth century to the 11th century,” she says. “Most Scandinavians of the period engaged not in raiding abroad but in peaceful activities at home. They were farmers, trappers, fishers, craftspeople and the like.”

Wolf says her book is mostly concerned with daily life at home in medieval Scandinavia. Their daily lives were just as multidimensional as the warriors.

“Those at home were the ones who built and equipped the ships, accumulated the supplies and obtained the good required to fill cargoes. They were the ones who made the voyages — and by extension, the Viking Age — possible.”

Wolf says that her research yielded a deeper understanding and profound respect for the technological advancements that the Scandinavians made in the Viking Age.

“Bridges and fortresses were built with great ingenuity, and great advancements were made in shipbuilding and navigation. This enabled the Scandinavians to travel long distances and spread wider into the world than any other European people had done and would do until the voyages and colonizations that followed in the wake of Columbus in the 15th century.”

Today, many scholars, Wolf among them, point to Norse expeditions as an early form of globalization. By the 11th century, the Norse were seeing themselves as part of a wider European civilization. By the 19th century, Viking culture had been largely romanticized and idealized and sometimes influenced the work of artists such as the German composer Richard Wagner.

In the early 21st century, Viking and Nordic cultures have become favorites of re-enactors. Wolf says that perhaps some of the appeal comes from the many fascinating aspects of daily life in medieval Scandinavia.

“The daily life of a Nordic trader in Russia or a Viking marauder in England or a farmer or fisherman were all quite different from each other,” she says.

We can use the term “fisherman” here completely without fear of gender sanction because, Wolf says, that profession was composed entirely of men in medieval times. On the other hand, women, whether united to warriors, fishermen or farmers, played significant and well-respected roles in their households, having total and literal responsibility for keeping the home fires burning while the men went raiding, sailing or tilling the fields.

Wolf says she hopes that her students pick up on such often-surprising aspects of ancient societies. This semester she is teaching a graduate course in Old Norse and an undergraduate lecture course on the Vikings, for which she is using the book as a text.