Stardate 20030801.1432

(Captain's log): Mat writes:

Great piece. But the Normans were NOT Southern Europeans or Romantics. They were Danes, Vikings of the same family that bred the early English kings.

In a sense the Normans were yet another cultural mongrel. The Norman kingdom was established by the Vikings through conquest, but the Norman language was Romance, not Germanic. By 1066, they had become more southern European than northern European, culturally speaking, and they thought of themselves as French (to the extent that this makes sense in that era) rather than as Viking. The Normans who conquered England in 1066 crossed the channel using ships based on Viking designs, but fought using southern European military doctrine and technology, and their kingdom was ruled using southern European feudalism, with the dominant religion being Christianity. By 1066, the Normans had been thoroughly assimilated into southern Europe.

After 1066, the early Norman kings ruled from England but continued to rule Normandy, and their imperialistic ambitions were oriented around adding the rest of France to their kingdom. I don't recall any indication that they thought of Scandinavia as "theirs" or that there was any desire to include Scandinavia in the empire they were trying to create. Over a period of time they ceased thinking of themselves as Normans ruling England and started thinking of themselves as English who also ruled Normandy (and later, as English who no longer ruled Normandy). They never really thought of themselves as Vikings at all.

There are elements of Celtic culture to be found in Normandy to this day. Some of their folk music, for instance, is more closely related to the Celtic folk music of Scotland than it is to the music found elsewhere in France. And there are still a few people in both places who speak Celtic, but almost all of them are very old and the language is dying out. It's well studied and will be preserved by researchers, but a hundred years from now it won't be spoken by anyone in Scotland or France outside of a university.

The Vikings represent a decent example of how any claims of pure cultural heritage anywhere in Europe, or anywhere in the world, are total nonsense. Cultural mixing and cross-pollination has been going on everywhere all through human history, through trade and diplomacy but also at the point of the sword. Every traditional European culture and tribe and language, with the possible exception of the Basques, is a mongrel to some degree and can point to many ancestors.

The influence of the Vikings on European history is a curious one, because they were martially successful but not culturally all that infectious. Their main contribution as a practical matter was to upset the apple cart and to wipe away a lot of older civilizations which had begun to stagnate. In the early days mostly they were interested in plunder, so they were more like locusts leaving only destruction behind them. But later the Vikings started moving into the areas they conquered, and they mostly adopted the local cultures. A lot of military invaders make great cultural changes to the areas they conquered, but in terms of cultural heritage the Vikings actually left behind very little; a few words, a few place names, maybe some folk culture.

Their religion had no important impact. In areas where the Vikings invaded and settled, you don't see the locals beginning to worship Odin and Thor. Exactly the opposite: the Vikings usually embraced the local Christianity, and indeed eventually Christianity replaced the traditional religion even in the homelands from which the Vikings had come.

There's much to admire about the Vikings. The Icelandic Sagas are held to be one of the world's great bodies of epic poetry. Viking warriors and traders ranged widely in southern Russia and are thought to have reached both the Black and Caspian seas. They were the greatest mariners of their age, and the only ones in Europe at the time capable of making voyages across ocean expanses without remaining within sight of land. Evidence is accumulating that they established a colony in Canada's Maritimes, and they unquestionably did colonize both Iceland and Greenland. But none of those colonies were great successes, and the Greenland colony was eventually abandoned. It doesn't really seem as if the Vikings could prosper on their own. (Or maybe it was just that Greenland and Iceland are godforsaken rocks on which no sane person would want to live absent modern technology.)

The Normans crossed the Channel using ships based on Viking design. But later European shipbuilding technology, which created the ships with which the Europeans embarked on the "voyages of discovery", borrowed very little from Viking ship technology. Almost all of the later European seafaring technology, from the designs of the ships to the art of navigation, came from local development or from the Chinese and Arabs. European ships in the 14th century look much more like contemporary Chinese ships than like the Viking long ships. The primary historical significance of the Viking seafaring technology is that it carried the Vikings themselves to various places so they could wipe out the locals.

As a culture involved in memetic competition, the Vikings were a one-trick pony, extraordinarily good at a couple of things but not really distinctive at much else. They were martially successful for a couple of hundred years mostly because of their