• @[email protected]
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    67 months ago

    I know there is absolutely tons of historic evidence of viking pillagers, but I do want to point out that, with that evidence aside for just a moment, most or all of what is written about them in historic texts was written by the people who wiped out almost their entire culture and replaced it with christian theocratic monarchy.

    They get a bad rap.

    • Zloubida
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      -17 months ago

      Nobody wiped their culture. Their culture evolved, and other cultures influenced this evolution, as they influenced the culture of their neighbors.

      • @Viking_Hippie
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        27 months ago

        other cultures influenced this evolution

        Specifically, the Catholic church influenced most of Scandinavia by persecuting and murdering people who kept to the old ways.

        • Zloubida
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          27 months ago

          Your main source for that is Snorri Sturluson, a Christian who wrote 200 years after Scandinavia’s conversion. He invented those murders in order to paint the pagans as stupid and stubborn people, needing violence to accept what he believed to be the truth. Historically, the conversions weren’t, with a few exceptions, violent in Scandinavia.

          Scandinavia’s conversion is more the result of an internal power struggle.

          • @Viking_Hippie
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            -17 months ago

            Your main source for that is Snorri Sturluson, a Christian who wrote 200 years after Scandinavia’s conversion

            Nope, my main source is the fact that that was the way that the Catholic church “converted” countries as well as “apostates” and “heretics” in places they already controlled.

            Christianity didn’t become a major religion and political force through the quality of its message. It did so through the quantity of its violence.

            Scandinavia’s conversion is more the result of an internal power struggle.

            If by “internal” you mean some Scandinavian rulers being forced to convert at the point of a sword and then trying to do the same to the rest, sure. That’s a really weird definition of the word, though.

            • Zloubida
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              37 months ago

              Yeah, you have no other source than your biases, then.

              • @Viking_Hippie
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                -27 months ago

                If you ignore the source known as “most of the history of Europe” then sure, I have only my biases 🙄

                • Zloubida
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                  37 months ago

                  It’s not a source.

                  • @Viking_Hippie
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                    -27 months ago

                    No, it’s the vast majority of all sources available.

                    Claiming that the Catholic church used violence to convert pagans is like claiming that the Pacific Ocean is larger than a standard burrito.

                    It’s such an obvious truth based on all available knowledge that not even the most ignorant and brainwashed zealot would ever claim otherwise in good faith.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        Oh lol, okay, tell me about the phonology of norn and younger futhark used in the age of vikings? How about any self-description of iron-age viking society before 1066, anything at all? Who were their leaders, how were rights allotted? Nothing remains but their versions of catholic prayers and before that their versions of oral germanic traditions like norse mythology, which was much more widespread.

        Basically, we know nothing about them that they told us themselves, in fact their systems of writing have only been properly compiled in the last century but the language is still entirely extinct.

        Because of Crusades. Because of Catholic Crusades on Vikings.

        • Zloubida
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          37 months ago

          There never was any crusade in Scandinavia.