The Viking Expeditions from Central Sweden (700-1000):
The Causes and Effects that the Expeditions and Viking Culture
Had on Each Other.
- Contents:
- Chapter 3: Contributing
factors for the expeditions.
- Chapter 4: Effects that the
Expeditions had on the Svear.
-
- 1.3: methods. The Viking expeditions
between 700 C.E. and 1100 C.E. from central Sweden were influenced
by factors such as the culture, resources, and technology of the
Viking age Swedes. The factors contributing to the expeditions were
primarily situational, with the expeditions having substantial
effects on the culture of the Svear. In this paper I have
researched the factors involved in the Swedish Viking movement to
the east, particularly focusing on the cultural factors behind the
journeys of the Swedish Vikings as they traveled back and forth
from central Sweden and Byzantium and the Islamic world.
Most of the available materials concerning these expeditions
concern trade routes and settlements, but very little has been
researched regarding other possible contributing factors. From my
preliminary reading it appears there are three general areas to
consider, climate and geography, culture and population, and
technology and resources.
Although, culture and population size are heavily influenced the
resources and climate, it appears that the culture and population
of the pre-Viking tribes in central Sweden were the primary
motivating factors behind the expeditions, and were the most
affected by the expeditions.
The purpose of this thesis is to explore some of the factors behind
the Viking expeditions from central Sweden. The key to
understanding the causes for the expeditions will be identifying
the environmental and social conditions that were affecting people
in central Sweden around 700 C.E. to 1100 C.E. Parallels in other
regions and cultures have been used to help identify possible
causes of the Viking expeditions from central Sweden. Three general
categories of possible contributing factors, namely climate and
geography, technology and resources, and culture and population,
are surveyed briefly to try to build a reasonably accurate picture
of conditions in central Sweden at the end of the Iron age, about
700 C.E. and during the Viking era which followed.
Books, popular periodicals, journal articles, faculty members,
bibliographies, and maps have been the sources used in researching
and writing this thesis. There are hundreds of books and a few
dozen articles on Vikings in general. The overwhelming majority of
books and articles have concentrated on the Norwegian and Danish
Vikings and their travels westward in the Atlantic to Iceland,
Greenland, Canada, and west and central Europe. The information
about Swedish Viking travels was much scarcer, and information
about Sweden prior to 1200 C.E. was even scarcer. Most of the
archeology books were primary sources, the remainder of the books
were secondary sources. Among the history books on Vikings, about
one book out of a hundred dealt with the Swedish Vikings, the
Svear, although many books had small sections regarding them.
Most of the information came by gleaning many small bits of
information about the Svear from a number of the books, plus
extrapolating from the characteristics of neighboring tribes, it
has been possible to suggest some components of the Svear's
culture. The best overview of the Viking period
was A History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones (1984), which was recently revised to
include more recent archaeological evidence. It covers the culture
and history of Scandinavia and its peoples from the Bronze age,
beginning around 1800 B.C.E. in southern Scandinavia, to the end of
the Viking period, around 1100 C.E.
Jones provides very good maps and figures and makes good use of
pictures of artifacts to help with explanations. His book
additionally analyzed the movements and destinations of the
different Viking groups. Two other good overview sources, with
special emphasis on travels east, were The Viking
Road to Byzantium by H. R.
Davidson and The Vikings in History by F. D.
Logan. The Viking Road to
Byzantium was particularly useful due to focus on the Swedish
Vikings and their movements east and south, particularly their
activities in what became Russia and Turkey. The Vikings in
History, another overview source, had particularly useful maps;
additionally, it also had helpful annotated bibliographies and
substantial information about the settlements started by the Viking
expeditions.
There were only a few journal articles on the Vikings and related
topics. I did many searches through various on-line databases of
journals and abstracts, these searches included the Public Affairs
Information Service (PAIS), the Wilson Indexes to Journal Articles
(WILS), PsychINFO, the National Newspaper Index (NNID), and the A
Matter of Fact Database (AMOF) for references to Vikings, Rus,
Svear, Varangians, and so forth . The articles pertaining to
Vikings were mostly found in archaeological, psychology, and
medical journals. For example. one article in a psychology journal
dealt with theories about Berserks and may help provide some
insight into the role warfare played in the culture at that time
period. A chronic problem in researching this paper has been the
absence of many journal issues with potentially useful articles.
Either they had gone to the bindery for a few months or were
missing from the libraries without explanation.
Popular magazines, with the exception of National Geographic, have
not mentioned much about Vikings other than exhibitions of Viking
artifacts. National Geographic has had two articles in the last 25
years on Vikings, one in April, 1970 and one in March, 1985. The
later article, "The Viking Trail East," dealt with the activities
of the Vikings, mostly the Swedish Vikings, in Russia and Turkey
and it was helpful in providing an overview of their major trade
routes and practices, listing a lot of the sites where the
artifacts were found.
Some of the University of Michigan faculty members that had been
recommended were Dr. Valerie Kivelson in the History department,
Dr. Astrid Beck in Studies in Religion, Prof. William Miller in the
Law School, and Dr. William Lockwood in the Anthropology
department. Dr. Beck's specialty is in the mythologies and
religions of pre-Christian Europe and Prof. Miller's specialty is
in Icelandic Viking law. Due to scheduling constraints, it turned
out to be far more fruitful and less time consuming to contact
graduate students in the appropriate fields, who could be contacted
in the evenings and on weekends. Although they are not as
experienced in their fields as the faculty, the graduate students
provided a lot of useful pieces of information about sources and
were able to help answer many of the questions that I was not able
to answer myself through further reading.
F. D. Logan and G. Jones had the
most helpful bibliographies. Their books, The Vikings
in History (Logan 1983) and A
History of the Vikings (Jones
1984) contained annotated lists of references. The comments and
evaluations they provided seemed plausible, based on having read
some of their references and having had some of the sources
recommended to me by faculty members. I found several books in
Sweden that also contained long bibliographies of sources. However,
it was too difficult to acquire more of the sources after I left
Uppsala. Two other bibliographies in English that were not in
books, one by Judith Mack and the other by Luana Josvold, seemed
good, but were a little too general and too old. Apparently, new
technologies have changed archeology, and have caused reassessments
of already known artifacts and sites.
This summer, June through September 1993, I spent two months
studying courses in modern Swedish social institutions and the
Swedish language at Uppsala
University in Sweden, followed by a month of traveling. I
traveled by train, bus, foot, boat, and car, in other regions of
central and southern Sweden to learn as much as possible about the
local geography, landscape, terrain, and history, both on this last
trip and during June of 1991. During the months at Uppsala, I used
the resources available in the public and university libraries and
the museums in Uppsala and Stockholm. Additionally, since I was in
Uppland, one of the regions studied in this thesis, it was
relatively easy to make on site visits to areas mentioned in
various sources, and to the coast, rivers, lakes, and land. As a
result I was able to make first hand observations, during the prime
of the growing season, of some of the areas of focus in this study.
This thesis is primarily a literature search of material on the
Viking age, focusing on central Sweden. The search was supplemented
by discussion with the U. of M. faculty, U. of M. and Uppsala
University graduate students, lists of references, on-line
databases on books and articles, regional maps and charts, and
personal visits to some of the actual sites. It seemed easiest to
use the literature search to focus on why the expeditions were so
successful and then work from there.
As part of the literature search, I located many secondary sources
and compiled some lists of their references to get an idea of what
to look for in the libraries in Sweden. In order to do this, I had
explored as many of the sources as possible here in Ann Arbor,
before I left for Uppsala, Sweden. Most of the searching was done
electronically using key word searches on library databases.
However, an initial problem with the key word searches was that
using the word "Viking" as a key word listed all of the many
hundreds of books published by Viking Press. Although the climate
and the shore level of the Baltic have changed measurably in the
last 1000 years, I believe that my on-foot visits to sites helped
provide a feel for the territory mentioned by some of the sources.
These regions included the Mälar archipelago, the forests,
rivers and lakes in south and central Sweden, the fells in southern
Norrland's iron producing regions at the water shed. The provinces
that I visited included Skåne, Småland, Värmland,
Östegotland, Södermanland, Uppland, and Dalarna,
Jämtland, and Lappland, in Sweden, and Sör-Tröndelag
Fylke and Nordland Fylke, in Norway. Additionally, visiting the
many archeology and history museums and farmers' markets provided
the opportunity to see and discuss the use of this century's tools,
artifacts, and foods from Sweden's and Norway's many regions first
hand and to compare them with the descriptions of ancient ones.
Maps and charts from variety of disciplines have helped determine
possible distribution of populations, artifacts, and possible
crops, living conditions, and so forth, through comparison and
interpretation. My experience in hiking and traveling outdoors plus
several years experience in gathering and interpreting tactical
information for the U.S. federal government have helped allow a
better understanding of reconstructing a region based on bits of
information.
A significant problem with studying central Sweden was that there
were so few sources, particularly historical sources, covering
anytime before the 1200's. Foreign cultures had very little contact
with the Svear, and the Svear themselves, left virtually no written
traces, except for rune stones and rune staves. However, there has
been a great wealth of artifacts collected from archeological sites
in central Sweden. These artifacts were elements of life in central
Sweden and could provide information about life and
culture in past times. However, as M. Burström summarizes very
clearly, there remains the problem of interpreting the combination
of the archaeological finds and the sparse written sources.
In studies of prehistoric social conditions within present day,
Sweden considerable interest is usually attached to the historical
sources. Written records that describe conditions in Scandinavia
prior to the Middle Ages, however, are not only few in number but
also meagre and difficult to interpret. In spite of this, earlier
research has often started out from the written records and on the
basis of these records, interpreted the archaeological record. The
problem with this strategy is that it is possible to interpret the
archaeological record in so many different ways that it can be used
to illustrate almost any historical statement at all. Because of
this, written records should not be allowed to govern the
archaeological interpretation at too early a stage. Further research into prehistoric societies in present-day
Sweden ought therefore to be primarily based on the extensive
archaeological record. (Burström : 149)
The problem of over-interpretation of the handful of historical
sources has been so large that it was noticeable to me early in the
beginning of this thesis. Unfortunately, most of the archeological
sources required extensive interpretation and were focused on very
narrow subjects. Also, because there are only a handful of
historical sources dealing with central Sweden and its inhabitants,
they are too few in number to be used reliably. These sources
mostly described conditions outside of Sweden, and it is probably
not possible to relate these accurately to the general population
in Sweden at the time.
Through the use of a literature search supplemented by maps and
personal visits to sites in Sweden this thesis explored some of the
contributing factor behind the expeditions from central Sweden by
the Svear tribe from 800C.E. to 1100C.E. The sources used were
historical accounts, journal articles, archeological references,
and geographical studies of the Nordic region around the Baltic
Sea.
Chapter 2.
Thesis Index.