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As if a pack of wolves had broken into a flock of sheep: During the Viking raid on the monastery island of Lindisfarne in 793, the monks were slain, drowned in the sea or abducted.

The bloody act in the English Kingdom of Northumbria shocked the world of the early Middle Ages.

Spread through chronicles, but above all through the spiritual scholar Alcuin, who came from Northumbria and worked at the court of Charlemagne in Aachen, the news of the massacre reached large parts of the Christian West.

The attack is considered a bloody beacon of the Viking Age: with looting, pillaging, kidnapping, enslavement and the slaughter of entire villages, the clans from Scandinavia not only terrified the coastal inhabitants of northern and central Europe for two and a half centuries.

With the prospect of rich booty, the daring seafarers and explorers, as whom the Vikings are admired to this day, struck relentlessly again and again.

The Irish historian Colmán Etchingham speaks in the Arte documentary “In the Fangs of the Vikings” of “bandits on the side”.

That sounds unflattering, but it hits the surprising ambivalence in the life of the Northmen.

Because at home in their settlements, the dreaded warriors could be peaceful farmers or artisans.

And: raids alternated with trade trips, with the same actors.

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As diverse as their fields of activity were, the composition of all those Scandinavian population groups that were united under the name of Vikings was also heterogeneous.

A study published in 2020 in the specialist magazine “Nature”, for which skeletons from archaeological sites all over Europe and Greenland were examined, reveals great genetic diversity.

Influences even from Asia and Southern Europe testify to the lively exchange with distant regions.

And expose the overused stereotype of the fair-blooded Nordic warrior for what it is: a myth.

The derivation of the word "Viking" is unclear.

It is likely that the old Norse expression “fara í viking” was the inspiration - “to go on a pirate voyage”.

The long sea voyage could be in the name as well as the Germanic “vik”, which simply means bay.

There is unanimous agreement about the miraculous courage to death of the seafarers, who repeatedly set out on forays even after the heaviest losses.

Incidentally, not only men were involved in these companies.

When scientists from Stockholm University subjected the skeleton from a grave on Björkö Island to a DNA analysis in 2017, they discovered that a woman had been buried in it.

The additions - long sword, battle ax, spear, arrows, knife and two shields as well as two horses - identified her as a high-ranking member of the community.

Women were accepted as leaders by the Vikings: Reenactment scene from the documentary "Die Kriegerinnen der Viking"

Source: © Urban Canyons Ltd.

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A radio isotope survey also showed the warrior had traveled widely, since her early teens.

The find corroborates the thesis that women apparently played a greater role in Viking society than long assumed.

The documentary "The Viking Warriors" is dedicated to this aspect.

A secret of the Vikings' success was their ships.

As early as the first centuries AD, the peoples of Scandinavia were building ocean-going boats.

From the early Middle Ages onwards, the rough journeymen with their longships, the "dragons" - sailing and rowing - were able to sail both seas and rivers deep into the interior.

This was made possible by the shallow draft of less than a meter.

The ships were also extremely fast.

The preferred destinations differed depending on their origin.

Viking followers from Sweden set off mainly to the east and south.

They covered huge distances, also by pulling their boats over the narrow land bridges between the river systems of Russia.

So the so-called Varangians reached Constantinople and the markets of the Orient, which they mainly supplied with slaves.

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From Norway's fjords it went over the North Sea to the British Isles, on the Atlantic towards Iceland and later even to Newfoundland off Canada's coast, while from Denmark the destinations were in Franconia and Spain.

In Ireland, as Stefan Ludwig's Arte documentation shows, the looters, who disappeared as quickly as they appeared, had a particularly easy time.

Resistance could hardly be organized in the rival kingdoms.

But the warriors from the north, who often traded their booty on markets far from home, came partly to stay.

Dublin, for example, first became the port of the Vikings around 840 and eventually became a kingdom of its own.

In the Carolingian West Franconia they became an important power factor under the name Normans.

Normandy bears witness to this in the name to this day.

From there, the descendants of these settled Vikings later conquered parts of southern Italy including Sicily - and in 1066 conquered England under Duke Wilhelm.

The irony of history is that in the same year the haunted epoch in which Vikings from Scandinavia kept appearing as horrors in human form before foreign coasts.

Two weeks before Wilhelm's decisive victory over Harald II at Hastings, he and his Anglo-Saxons were able to destroy the Norwegian king Harald the Harsh at Stamford Bridge near York.

There are just 200 kilometers between this place and the once devastated monastery island of Lindisfarne.

200 kilometers - and 270 blood-soaked years.

“In the clutches of the Vikings”, January 16, 8:15 pm, Arte;

from 9.10 p.m .: "The Viking Warriors";

until January 22nd in the media library

The Vikings and their hybrid existence between farmers / traders and bandits

Source: Arte magazine

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