What Was the Difference Between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Vikings?
Today we refer to Viking Age Scandinavians generally as Vikings as though they were one group. Linguistic nuances over the modern use of the word Viking aside, the fact is that the historical group known as “Vikings” were not a homogenous people. We know from various sources that from as early as the late 8th Century, broad geographically related forms of identity, such as Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian existed. These are not to be confused with the notion of national identity of the modern era—there were no unified forms of government that we would consider a nation-state quite yet, although they would develop closely thereafter through the late middle ages. Further confounding the subject of identity among Viking Age Scandinavians are regional differences. The Norwegian group who sacked the city of Nantes in 843, for example, referred to themselves as Vestfaldingi, or Men of Vestfold. This tells us that there were also regional differences among various groups within the context of their broader geographic affiliations.
Why do we think of the Vikings as one people?
Our sources for the Vikings and their culture are an accumulation of chronicles and histories written first and foremost by religious scholars. Even the Muslim chroniclers framed their examinations of the Vikings within the cultural lens of Islam. The historian al-Yaqubi, in his geographical study of the Mediterranean, linked the Scandinavians from Sweden known as the Rus to those from Denmark who sacked Seville, in Spain. He wrote that the attack on Seville, in 844 A.D. was carried out by, “the Magus, who are called the Rus.”
Back then, the monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam sought to unite the peoples of the world under one god. Their convictions about their own faith created a perceptual lens about the world that today we would call “us against them.” The differences between outside groups were of little or no consequence because, ultimately, it was believed that they would eventually be converted and brought into the fold. Therefore, an extremely two-dimensional view of Viking Age Scandinavians was created, one which broadly described them all as “pagans.”
Fast forward to the 19th century when a renewed interest in the Viking Age began, the first scholars to approach the subject had little more than these religiously biased texts to go on. And let us not forget that the 19th century was still an age of belief, where Christian dogma was still (for the most part) universally accepted in Western Europe. What this allowed was for the same slanted view of Viking Age Scandinavians to persist for a time, which eventually led to the cultural perception that the Vikings were in no uncertain terms one people. We have since realized the inadequacy of this view. Unfortunately, the cultural perception of the Vikings continues to propagate the one-people myth.
So, What Was the Difference Between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Vikings?
Most of what we know about the Vikings both politically and culturally is derived from analyses of the Danes. Chroniclers such as Dudo, Alcuin, Saxo Grammaticus, Rimbert, Notker, among others, all focus nearly exclusively on the Danish people to form their conclusions. Therefore, we know much, much more about Viking Age Danes and their exploits than any other group. This is not surprising since the Danes were far more involved with the politics of the continent than the Norwegians and the Swedes.
In contrast to their cousins in Norway and Sweden, the Danes consistently appear to have been a regional, cultural, and military power from the mid-8th century onward. Even the Franks admitted in the Annals of Fulda that the Danes were the most powerful among the Northmen. As a political power, the Danes also had the closest thing to a monarchy of any of the the three regions. Although they experienced political turmoil at the beginning of the 9th century, their rulers reigned fairly consistently throughout the Viking Age, giving the Danes a political and societal strength the others did not have.
The Danes were also heavily involved in regional politics. The Royal Frankish Annals recorded that the Danes sent an emissary in 782 to Charlemagne’s court, along with other Saxon leaders, to hold formal political discussions in response to the massacre of Verden, in which the Franks captured, forcibly baptized, and murdered three thousand Saxon warriors just miles from the Danish border. Although there is no mention of what came of that meeting, it demonstrates that the Danes were heavily involved in the events of the time and did not simply appear from nowhere.
Finally, the Danes developed far more ambitious plans for territorial conquest than any of the others. Their invasion of Britain, the establishment of the Danelaw, and the settlement of Normandy are a testament to their ambitions. Militarily, they are thought to have been more organized and disciplined, and probably better equipped, than their Swedish and Norwegian cousins.
It is against this body of knowledge about the Danes that we tend compare the other Vikings. Unfortunately, we do not know all that much about the early political formations of Norway and Sweden. The Ynglingasaga, the saga of the Yngling Dynasty in Norway, purports to tell of the events that led to the formation of Norway’s monarchy, but it offers very little in the way of substance about the structure of their society, the influence they exerted over neighboring peoples, and the cultural backbone that drove their ambitions. We do know that the Norwegians were poised to conduct raids before their Danish cousins—they were the first to attack Ireland and Western France, and are thought to have carried out the raid on Lindisfarne—but ultimately did not exert the same influence as the Danes across Europe. An example of this is the invasion Brittany in the late 9th Century where Norwegian Vikings took control of the regional center of Nantes. They held it for years until the Bretons expelled them, only to find a derelict city and no concerted effort to colonize the land as had been done in Britain and Normandy by the Danes.
Similarly, the Swedes, then known as Varangians, or Rus, were poised to discover and pillage new lands in the east along the Volga and Dniepper rivers. Their expeditions, however, were of a different sort than the Danes and Norwegians in the west. The goal of the Rus was primarily to trade (or so we think). They established long trade routes to the middle east and around the Black Sea and avoided much more than that until the late 9th century when, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle, the brothers Rurik, Askold, and Dir were “invited” by the slavs to be their rulers. To this day, why this event occurred is unclear, but most historians believe this was a capitulation by the Slavs to years of raids. What is clear is that the entire passage that speaks of the Rus is extremely short, and from this moment on, the Rus who did move east to join the ruling class quickly assimilated into Slavic culture and ceased to be what we would call “Vikings”.
We are lucky insofar as we know the Swedes were likely the most different among the three groups. The account of Ibn Fadlan during his embassy to the land of the Khazars demonstrates a few stark differences between the Rus and the Danes. For one, the Rus were allegedly covered in blue tattoos, which is not something that was commonly reported by Frankish scholars. The method of burial for their king, their grooming habits, among other things stand in contrast to their western cousins. Likewise, the Frankish chronicler Rimbert recounts the mission of Anskar to Sweden to convert them to Christianity where he describes the unusual and shocking religious rituals of the Swedes at Upsalla. This is evidence that from a cultural and religious standpoint, the Swedes were, for a time, very different from their Danish and Norwegian cousins.
The Danes: The True Vikings?
Due to our general ignorance of the political and cultural structure of early Swedish and Norwegian society, it may be said that the real difference between the three groups is how much we know about them. By that account, the Danes are far and above the most familiar to us, and drive our conception of what it was to be a Viking. From there, we can say that the Norwegians participated in Ireland and France, but culturally much of what we think we know about them is conjecture derived from our familiarity with the Danes. Likewise, much of what we think we know about the Swedes is a derivation of what we know about the Danes. Further reenforcing this notion is the idea that the greatest Vikings of the day were Danish. Therefore, dare I say, the Danes were the true embodiment of what we refer to today as “Vikings”.
