I have seen a lot of hate towards the TV show Vikings that airs on the history channel. I was just curious from reading some of the responses on this sub. If it is true that the Vikings did not keep records of their lives as they did in other cultures how do we truly know what is true and what wasn’t. It is said in history that the victor is the one who writes history. Also that if outsiders were the ones who recorded things of Viking culture did they do so objectively or how they saw them?
I wrote a post about the vikings some months ago, here:
What sources are there that vikings actually existed?
Most sources concerning the vikings are either archeological - for example the Oseberg and Gokstad ships found in Norway, or the Valsgärde burial site - or literary. Among the literary sources are the sagas, epic tales written in Old Norse, the language of the vikings (and is to the modern Scandinavian languages what Latin is to Spanish, French and Italian). In modern Swedish, the word saga means fairy tale, which, to a degree, speaks for their historical accuracy, especially given that many of the classic sagas were written down in the 13th century.
Much of what we know about the vikings therefore comes from contemporary Christian and even Islamic sources; at the time Scandinavia had no literary tradition like the Christian and Islamic worlds did. The Annála Uladh, the Annals of Ulster, contain a vast amount of information on the vikings' activity in Ireland, just like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does in England. A problem with these sources is that since they were written by Christians, they portray the vikings in a very negative light. They weren't written as unbiased pieces of information.
In AD 793, the first viking raid took place at the monastery of Lindisfarne, an island off the northeastern English coast. This is what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says about it:
In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen people destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.
Another source is the writings of one Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th century Arab emissary to the king of the Volga Bulgars. On his journeys, he encountered a people he called the Rus, identified by scholars as Varyags or Varangians, mainly Swedish vikings who had travelled east across the Baltic sea, to present day Russia and Greece. He provides us with a first-hand account of a viking ship burial, where the vikings buried their chieftain aboard his ship along with his weapons and grave offerings. They then sacrificed animals to the gods, in addition to a slave girl, and subsequently torched the ship.
So yes, we definitely know that the vikings existed.
History Channel's Vikings is viking-inspired fantasy. It is inspired by the sagas about Ragnar Loðbrok and his sons, but even then you need to take two things into account. First off the sagas were written in the 13th century, but more importantly Ragnar is unlikely to ever have existed; historians believe he is an amalgamation of several different historical figures.
Great information thank your for this! Sorry to make you repost!