If men from a Nordic village were recruited to go viking and it was a successful raid how would that impact the local economy?

by Robinhood-Sucks
Steelcan909

So first off viking is not a verb! I know this is pretty common in popular perceptions, but I will summarize this in quotes, and then move onto the meat of your question!

(all quotes taken from this blog run by a historian of the time period)

Every so often I come across someone earnestly explaining that ‘Viking’ is a verb in online discussions. Let’s get this straight: it is not a verb. I really don’t know why this assertion exercises me so much, but it does, so I shall repeat: Viking is not a verb.

If Viking is not a verb, what is it then? The words from which our modern English word ‘Viking’ ultimately derives were Old Norse which is, broadly speaking, the language spoken in the Viking Age and medieval period in Scandinavia. See Viqueen’s blog for a brief discussion of how ‘Viking’ came to be an English word. Old Norse víking is a feminine noun that probably refers to a voyage abroad. Context suggests that it was probably violent but its actual meaning is not really known. Old Norse víkingr is a person that goes on one of these voyages. Að fara í víking means ‘to go on a viking voyage’. The word víking is still a noun in that expression, and the modern English word is also a noun according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The next question for English speakers is likely to be “Could víking have derived from a verb?” because the ‘-ing’ suffix sounds awfully verb-like in English. Modern English commonly uses the ‘-ing’ suffix to form present participles and gerunds (verbal nouns) from verbs. Thus ‘to sail’ becomes ‘sailing’. However, this is not the case with Old Norse víking and víkingr. Instead, the ‘-ing’ suffix indicates that they belong to a particular group of people, a form that we occasionally see in modern English surnames and in examples like the Old English Wuffingas (the people descended from Wuffa). Vikings were people who belonged to a group named for whatever we think the etymology of ‘Vik-’ is. For a discussion of that etymology see Norse and Viking Ramblings, but, the one thing that Old Norse víking and víkingr cannot be is a verb. The word formation does not permit it. For it to be a verb in modern English, there would have to be an English word ‘to vike’. Similarly, there would have to be an equivalent of that in Old Norse, but none exists. If it did, then the expression að fara í víking would almost certainly not have come into being, with a simple verb (perhaps að víka) being used instead.

No onto the question at hand!

There might have been some limited trickle down onto the population at large through the wider availability of trade goods that were bought with plundered goods (or more likely the silver earned by slave and fur trading with the Islamic world), but this is extremely difficult to quantify as there are no written sources that detail this process. No viking chieftain sat down and wrote down what happened to his looted goods, so everything that we know about the dispersal of goods into Scandinavia by the vikings is ultimately derived from archaeology and some pretty heavy speculation.

Right off the bat, we can dismiss the idea of a quasi-proto "charity" from the viking raiders towards their communities. There were no institutions spread across the Norse world that were capable, or interested, in societal action until the proliferation of the Church into Scandinavia starting in the late 9th century. Charitable works would eventually crop up through the Church, but prior to that, there were no broad institutions, besides the nobility (and they were far more local in scope) that could possible be reaching out to the far flung communities that composed Viking Age Scandinavia.

The money gained from raiding (and trading), both in cash (mostly silver) and in kind (slaves, trade goods) was largely swallowed by the Norse elite and used in their own competitions between each other. Competing for followers and warriors was an expensive proposition after all! Gifts to their followers included frequent gifts of gold jewelry and weapons as well as putting on feasts, patronizing poets, and maintaining the lifestyles of their hangers on (who were not always independently wealthy), and a not insignificant amount of money likely ended up in coin hoards.

Many of these have coin counts into the thousands, however these coins were not taken directly in raids. They were the fruits of trade with the Islamic world, especially in slaves and furs, that poured silver into Scandinavia via Russia until drying up eventually in the later 10th century. Other coin hoards contain coins that were minted in England under the Anglo-Saxons and likely leveraged as tribute (the Danegeld that bought peace, until the the next time it needed to be levied). So a good deal of the money that was leveraged through trade and intimidation wasn't even circulating in the world, but was instead being literally buried in the ground, expensive grave goods likewise were removed from broader circulation but often had a great deal of expense involved in their creation.

So there was a great deal of money being spent all in a relatively isolated circle of people, the martial elite of society, and the farmers, workers, slaves and so on of Scandinavia likely saw very little of the plundered or extorted goods that were taken by vikings.

Anders Winroth and Peter Heather would both also point to other avenues of wealth accumulation as a way of accumulating goods to be distributed besides just war/raiding. It is important to keep in mind that this sort of redistribution did not always take the form of weapons, horses, gold, silver, and so on that were earned in violence against foreign populations. These relationships could also be sustained by housing and taking in the children of retainers and bringing them up in the royal house access to luxury goods such as wine and other exotic trade goods were also a part of this distributive model. Peter Heather and Malcolm Todd would both emphasize the role of goods from the broader Roman, and later Medieval world, as a key part of the distributive patterns of these kings. Later on in the viking world, Roman goods obviously dried up, in some places Islamic silver took its place, and certainly the spoils of raids, and perhaps more importantly the tribute paid by other rulers to buy peace, were also a part of this model.

Anders Winroth even attributes the success of conversion to Christianity in Scandinavia to the success of rulers who converted to Christianity and the larger households they were able to support due to their connections to the broader European world, both through raiding and prestige gained through that as well as broader economic ties through trade.