Should we stop using the term 'Viking'?

[Brian G Turner]

Mr LindyBeige lays out his argument:

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I've heard people call them Wikings
You might as well insist the British Isles should be called "These Islands". It's pretty embedded.
Or that decimate means only killing 1 in 10 ten as a punishment.
Very hard to change language. What do the Scandinavians think about it? Assuming most have even thought about it at all!

 

[thaddeus6th]

He makes a sound argument, except that we all know the word and are unlikely to forget it. And Viking sounds cool.

Ray, I do sometimes correct those who misuse 'decimate'.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I do sometimes correct those who misuse 'decimate'

Me too

 

[anno]

I thought it was a verb anyway?

 

[Ursa major]

I've heard people call them Wikings

Surely that should be reserved for the future name of those of us who want to look things up but can't be bothered to go to the original sources, as:

• the suffix, -ingas, is '(the sons or) people of' and is often shortened to 'ing' (as in Woking and Basingstoke)
• Wikipedia is often shortened to Wiki (well, it is by me)

so Wikings, itself a shortened version of Wikiings, means 'people of Wikipedia' (who are, obviously, the spiritual descendants of the Mee Generation).

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Wikings = Wikipedians = Wikifiddlers
Hmmm.

 

[The Judge]

I recall this from a trip to Iceland donkeys years ago. Our guide said that "Viking" most probably meant to go on a sea journey or derived from such a word, and that most men would go on one or two raids just to earn good money before returning to the important job of farming the land, which meant -- in Iceland anyway -- trying to wrest a living out of not-very-good soil and in the face of terrible winters (and not very pleasant summers, either, a lot of the time). As anno says (though I don't know if he was being serious or facetious) it was in effect a verb, as the men would go a-viking.

It's too well embedded now to be changed, so LB is rather spitting in the wind calling for an end to it. And I think it is useful as a catch-all term, certainly for those who went a-viking whether they plundered and left immediately, or they came as invaders and stayed, since they came from all the Scandinavian states, and it's a bit long-winded to say "men from possibly Norway or Sweden or Iceland or Denmark". (OK, we could say "men from what is now Scandinavia" but if we're going to use an anachronistic term, it might as well be the one which sounds more exciting!)

 

[anno]

I am never more than serious,check out my avator!!!

 

[The Judge]

That's what I thought...

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Mee Generation

I have a fairly intact set that was my mother's when she was a girl, I think from just before 1939/1940.

By the 1940s the binding is brown in colour, and displays a flaming torch on each book's spine

.
Certainly ours is brown with gold lines. I'd have to look and see if there was a torch.

I have an adult 1922 set which apologises for not updating the pre 1918 maps. It's currently thus the most accurate printed one for Europe as the atlases the kids had at school are now all wrong since the 1990s.

 

[Ursa major]

I have a fairly intact set that was my mother's when she was a girl, I think from just before 1939/1940.

My intact (I'm pleased to say) copy is one of the red-bound editions from the 50s (or early 60s). It still sits in the bookcase part of a bureau in my living room, the other occupant of the shelves being a 1955 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

I coined** the phrase, the Mee generation, when I discovered that many of the people with whom I communicated using the company's internal message boards (part of DEC's ALL-IN-1 system) who had quite wide ranging interests had also been brought up with access to The Children's Encyclopædia.


** - Though I'm pretty sure I wasn't the first to do so.

 

[Dave]

My first take was that he needs to drink less coffee!

My second thought was that he should stop taking what people say on the internet as fact of anything.

I also went to Iceland earlier this year and they have a whole tourist industry built on the Vikings so I think they would disagree with stopping use of the word. Interesting for me was that many Icelandic people have fairly Anglo-Saxon (that is another word that is equally a bit vague) features and there is a lot of ginger hair. They put that down to the Vikings bringing wives and slaves home to Iceland with them, especially from the huge slave markets in Dublin, Ireland.

If you lived on the Northumberland or Yorkshire coast, then your only contact with Vikings would probably have been as raiders. However, I thought it was obvious to everyone that they did settle here just from the language and place names they left behind, if nothing else. And I thought everyone knew they had farms at home to go back to in Scandinavia, when it was harvest time and sowing time.

I find the ambiguity in the fact they never stole from each other, but found raiding foreigners quite acceptable. Obviously, they just had a very low regard of foreigners. In their culture the first son inherited everything, so for the second son to start his own family he had no choice but to seek his fortune elsewhere. While closer to Scandinavia, the better farming land of Northumberland and Yorkshire was also probably better defended. I expect that is the only reason why more settled in western Scotland, Cumbria and Ireland.

We were all a little rougher back then. The Clan chiefs in Ireland and Scotland were probably more bloodthirsty than the best Vikings.

 

[BAYLOR]

Don't people realize that there is no historical proof that viking wore horned helmets?

 

[Danny McG]

Don't people realize that there is no historical proof that viking wore horned helmets?

 

[Toby Frost]

Ray, I do sometimes correct those who misuse 'decimate'.

90% of the time, I let them get away with it...

 

[Astro Pen]

Led Zeppelin were ahead of the curve, keeping it conceptual

From those wonderful folks who came "from the land of the ice and snow From the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow"
da dada dada, da dada dada, etc'

 

[.matthew.]

I think we should encourage Scandinavian armies to adopt the 'Viking' helmet, then we would have proof

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

I recall this from a trip to Iceland donkeys years ago. Our guide said that "Viking" most probably meant to go on a sea journey or derived from such a word, and that most men would go on one or two raids just to earn good money before returning to the important job of farming the land, which meant -- in Iceland anyway -- trying to wrest a living out of not-very-good soil and in the face of terrible winters (and not very pleasant summers, either, a lot of the time). As anno says (though I don't know if he was being serious or facetious) it was in effect a verb, as the men would go a-viking.

It's too well embedded now to be changed, so LB is rather spitting in the wind calling for an end to it. And I think it is useful as a catch-all term, certainly for those who went a-viking whether they plundered and left immediately, or they came as invaders and stayed, since they came from all the Scandinavian states, and it's a bit long-winded to say "men from possibly Norway or Sweden or Iceland or Denmark". (OK, we could say "men from what is now Scandinavia" but if we're going to use an anachronistic term, it might as well be the one which sounds more exciting!)

J - Is this not perhaps a bit sexist. I thought the folk of which we speak were one of the early enlightened peoples, that gave equal stastus to both women and men. To the extent that their womenfolk joined in the annual jolly across the North Sea to join in the fun.

Not withstanding :-

A hods as good as a sink to a blind Norse.

 

[.matthew.]

J - Is this not perhaps a bit sexist. I thought the folk of which we speak were one of the early enlightened peoples, that gave equal stastus to both women and men. To the extent that their womenfolk joined in the annual jolly across the North Sea to join in the fun.

It's always been my belief that men started going to war as a chance to get away from their women for a bit