North Germanic peoples

• 1. Introduction

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  North Germanic peoples left their names across the map of Europe in ways that still endure today. Normandy in France takes its name from "Northman." Dublin's old Oxmanstown district preserves the memory of their eastern settlements. Russia itself likely draws its name from the Swedish term related to rowing. A single linguistic group originating from the Scandinavian Peninsula managed to stamp their identity from North America to the Caspian Sea, and understanding how requires tracing a story that begins not in the Viking Age but thousands of years before it.

  Who were these people before the longships? What forces drove them outward in such numbers that medieval historians called Scandinavia the "Factory of Nations"? And how did raiders who terrified the coasts of Ireland and France eventually become the ancestors of some of Europe's most stable modern nations? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots in the Earth

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  Modern-day Scandinavians carry more ancestry from the Yamnaya culture than any other population in Europe. That ancestry arrived in southern Scandinavia during the early 3rd millennium BC through what archaeologists call the Battle Axe culture, a local variant of the Corded Ware culture, which was itself an offshoot of the Yamnaya. With these new people came new genetic lineages, specifically haplogroups R1a and R1b, replacing the earlier predominance of haplogroup I.

  Scandinavia holds the distinction of being the only region in Europe where the Bronze Age was significantly delayed across an entire region. When bronze did finally arrive, its importance was rapidly taken up. The Nordic Bronze Age that followed shows genetic ties stretching far beyond Scandinavia, connecting to the Beaker and Unetice cultures of Continental Europe and even the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures of the Eurasian Steppe.

  By the Iron Age, the people of Scandinavia were exporting slaves and amber to the Roman Empire in exchange for prestige goods. Gold and silver artifacts found in burials from this era testify to the wealth that trade generated. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in his book Germania, singled out the Swedes (whom he called Suiones) as governed by powerful rulers and as skilled seafarers. North Germanic tribes were also skilled metal and leather workers, rounding out a trading profile that made them significant partners even to the empire that dominated much of the known world.

  Because so many Germanic tribes later traced their origins to Scandinavia, early medieval historians gave the region a striking pair of nicknames: Officina Gentium, the Factory of Nations, and Vagina Nationum, the Womb of Nations.

• 3. Society and Belief

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  Among the early North Germanic peoples, kinship ties shaped everything from trade to warfare. Society divided into three classes: chieftains, free men, and thralls (slaves). Free men were those who owned and farmed land, though merchants, craftsmen, and the armed retainers of chieftains known as housecarls were not locked into any single class.

  Women in North Germanic society held considerably more independence than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Legislative and judicial power rested with the free men at a popular assembly called the Thing. Disputes that could not be resolved through the Thing were sometimes settled by single combat. Chieftains held court in mead halls where they hosted lavish feasts for their followers, and merchants regularly pooled resources in joint financial ventures.

  Burials reveal the texture of what mattered. Men of prominence were interred with horses, chariots, ships, slaves, and weapons, all understood as provisions for the afterlife. At the pinnacle of the religious world stood Odin, ruler of Asgard in North Germanic cosmology and chief god of the pantheon. Those who died in battle were believed to gain entry to Folkvang, Freya's Hall, or above all to Valhalla, Odin's majestic hall. Thor, the thunder god, was particularly popular among ordinary people. Runes, the Germanic writing system, carried an association with both Odin and magic.

  Religion was typically observed at outdoor sites, though temples existed as well. The Temple at Uppsala was the best known of these. Stories and myths circulated in two forms: carved onto runestones or transmitted orally by skalds, the North Germanic poet-scholars who preserved cultural memory across generations.

• 4. A People With Many Names

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  The early North Germanic peoples almost certainly shared a common identity, yet they apparently had no single ethnonym to describe themselves. Their shared character was expressed instead through geographical and linguistic Old Norse terms: Norðrlǫnd meaning "northern lands" and dǫnsk tunga meaning "Danish tongue." Most individuals would have identified primarily with their home region.

  To outsiders, these people accumulated a remarkable collection of names. Germans called them Ascomanni, meaning Ashmen. Anglo-Saxons knew them as Dene (Danes) or heathens. The Old Frankish word Nortmann, meaning Northman, passed through Latin as Normanni and into Old French as Normands, giving both the Normans and Normandy their names. The Irish used two terms: Finngall, meaning "white foreigner," for Norwegians, and Dubgall, meaning "black foreigner," for Danes. Dubliners called them Ostmen, meaning East-people, and the area of Oxmanstown in central Dublin still carries that memory.

  In the east, Slavs, Finns, Muslims, and Byzantines knew them as Rus' or Rhōs, a term probably derived from rōþs-, meaning related to rowing, or possibly from the area of Roslagen in east-central Sweden, where many of the Vikings who traveled to Slavic lands came from. The Arabs of Spain called them al-Majus, meaning fire-worshippers, though they applied the same term to the Basques. After the Rus' merged with the Slavic population of what became Kievan Rus', the North Germanic people remaining in the east became known as Varangians, from the Old Norse Væringjar, meaning "sworn men," the same root as the Varangian Guard that protected the Byzantine emperors.

  The Old Norse term norrœnir menn, meaning northern men, gives us the English word Norsemen, though in scholarly usage Norsemen tends to refer specifically to early Norwegians rather than to North Germanic peoples broadly.

• 5. Expansion Before the Viking Age

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  Between 512 and 520, Frankish annals and the Old English poem Beowulf both record that a king of the Geats named Hygelac or Hugleik conducted a raid in the Rhineland. He carried off significant plunder but was killed before he could return to Scandinavia. That episode, set before the period historians conventionally call the Viking Age, hints that North Germanic seafarers were testing European coasts far earlier than the late 8th century.

  Before the 7th century, Norwegian seafarers had already settled Shetland. During this same period the Frisians were the main rivals of the Scandinavians for control of the North Sea. By the 8th century, the Swedes had established colonial settlements in modern Estonia, Latvia, and along the southern shores of Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega in present-day Russia. The settlement of Grobiņa in Latvia and the Salme ships found in Saaremaa, Estonia, stand as physical evidence of that reach. Across the eastern Baltic, Old Norse became the common language of a warrior culture with distinctly Swedish roots.

  One of the most remarkable episodes from the earlier period concerns the Herules, who according to the 6th-century historian Jordanes were driven from Denmark by the Danes, themselves described as an offshoot of the Swedes. The Herules' migration is thought to have occurred around 250 AD. Then, around 510, centuries after their expulsion, the Herules returned to southern Sweden after their kingdom in central Europe was overwhelmed by the Lombards. Their name has been linked to the word erilaz found in Elder Futhark inscriptions and to the later title of Earl.

  The Yngling dynasty of the Swedes was founded in the 5th century and operated from Gamla Uppsala. That royal line would later be considered so foundational that the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson began his history of the Norse peoples, the Heimskringla, with the legends of ancient Sweden.

• 6. The Viking Age

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  In the late 8th century, North Germanic tribes launched a massive expansion in every direction that lasted until 1066. Historians have proposed several overlapping causes: overpopulation, political tensions created by rulers like Harald Fairhair who drove restless men into exile, disruption of trade with the Abbasid Caliphate, and the fear of a Carolingian invasion of Denmark itself. Charlemagne's destruction of Frisian naval power in the 8th century almost certainly helped clear the sea lanes for Scandinavian dominance.

  In the west, Norwegian Vikings came close to conquering Ireland entirely before their defeat at the Battle of Clontarf, yet they remained embedded in Irish cities for generations afterward, particularly in Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick. The Uí Ímair dynasty rose to prominence among these Norse-Gaels, establishing the Kingdom of the Isles. In eastern England, Danish Vikings carved out a territory that became known as the Danelaw. England proved the most heavily targeted part of Europe, and the resistance of Alfred the Great was likely the decisive factor preventing complete Scandinavian conquest. In the early 11th century, England did fall under the rule of the Danish king Cnut the Great, becoming part of his North Sea Empire from 1016 to 1042.

  In Francia, Hamburg was burned in 845. A group of Vikings under Rollo settled in Rouen in the early 10th century and founded the Duchy of Normandy. Their descendants, the Normans, went on to conquer England, Southern Italy, and parts of North Africa in the 11th century and played a leading role in launching the Crusades. Their subgroups include the Anglo-Normans, Scoto-Normans, Cambro-Normans, Hiberno-Normans, and Italo-Normans.

  In the east, Swedish Vikings known as the Rus' conducted extensive trade with the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate and launched raids on Constantinople itself. The Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan described them as tall, blond, and the most "perfect physical specimens" he had ever encountered. The Viking Rurik is believed to have founded the Rurik dynasty in the 9th century, which eventually grew into Kievan Rus'. In the 10th century, the Rus', working alongside surviving Crimean Goths, destroyed the Khazar Khaganate.

  Norwegian Vikings opened the North Atlantic entirely. They settled the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, the Faroese Islands, and Iceland. Iceland became a refuge for Scandinavians seeking to preserve their traditional way of life outside of centralized authority, and the literary heritage that Icelanders produced remains essential to any modern understanding of early North Germanic history. In the late 10th century, Erik the Red discovered Greenland and oversaw its Norse settlement. His son Leif then made what the source calls the first documented trans-oceanic voyage in history, followed by the attempted Norse colonization of North America.

• 7. Christianity and Consolidation

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  By the mid-11th century, the same forces of centralization that had once pushed restless North Germanic men outward now drew the remaining Scandinavian societies inward. The tribal structure gave way to the organized kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Conversion to Christianity was part of that same shift, replacing the Norse pagan tradition that had underpinned everything from burial practice to political legitimacy.

  The Scandinavian settlements in Greenland, which had been established during the Viking expansion, disappeared in the 15th century. That slow dissolution on the North Atlantic fringe stood in contrast to what was happening in the continental core, where the descendants of Norse settlers had long since become the Normans of France, the Rus' of Eastern Europe, and eventually the Russians.

  With the rise of romantic nationalism in the 19th century, a political movement called Scandinavism emerged, calling for the unification of all North Germanic lands. During both the First and Second Schleswig Wars between Denmark and Germany in the 19th century, large numbers of Swedes fought on Denmark's side out of concern about the German threat to North Germanic peoples broadly. In Norway, pan-Germanism attracted prominent supporters from the mid-19th century onward, with advocates imagining a unified state spanning all "Germanic tribes." That current ran dry in 1943, when the Axis powers were being pushed back on the Eastern Front and Norway itself was under German occupation.