Hi!
I'm born and raised in Denmark, and therefore I have heard ALOT about the vikings and our ancient history. But lately I've been thinking about art and ground-breaking artists.
In ancient Europe, Rome and Greece had a lot of ground-breaking artists and philosophers. The list is very long. But weren't the scandinavian vikings around for almost the same amount of time as Rome and Greece?
Well, the thing is, here in Denmark, we always hear about how insane and extreme the vikings were war-wise, but didn't they have any big artists and philosophers? ..or was it all about war and plundering?
The question in some sort of TL;DR, would be something along the line of; how come almost all the biggest artists and philosophers where based in Southern Europe, and why didn't we have that many of them up here at that time?
:)
-- (if there are any spelling- and/or grammarerrors, so sorry. English is my secondary language) :)
Another Dane here, hej :).
So, the viking age is not actually the same period as what you might think of as the classical era. The viking age is usually considered to have been from 796 to 1066 CE (e.v.t.), while the "classical era" when most of the famous Greeks and Romans lived would have been, extremely broadly, from 800 BCE to 500 CE. That's 270 years of vikings versus 1300 years of classical civilization.
The reason that we do not know much about any possible great viking philosophers is the same reason we know comparatively little about viking thought in general: Not much written material has survived. There were many more literate people in the Greek city states and the Roman empire than in Scandinavia. The vikings, it seems, did not write things down as often as the mediterranean civilizations, and when they did, the tree they would have been writing on would have rotten away some time between then and now.
As to great artists, well, art appreciation is subjective. I think the detail on the Oseberg ship is incredibly beautiful, for example.
There is a general tendency throughout medieval and especially renaissance Western thought to identify with the Roman empire and the Greeks which has perhaps made us a bit blind to the culture of, well, anywhere else.
