Later they expanded into other Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, and Sweden. They also travelled to North America via Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and then on to Canada, but it ended up being too difficult a journey as the seas were very rough and their boats were too small for such a trek especially since they couldn’t carry enough food and water. Their ships were great for about a month at sea, and they were definitely a great size to travel up and down rivers to where they could attack various settlements, but crossing a huge ocean was too much of a challenge.
Something I find funny is that one of the Viking leaders, when they discovered some new land, decided to name it Greenland to convince other people to travel there to basically expand their kingdom. But it wasn’t green, it was barren and icy. A small farming settlement was established but Greenland to this day is sparsely populated with a total of around 75,000 residents.
Most of the wealth at the time was in England because more people lived there, and it was convenient to invade because it was the closest country to where the Vikings were settled in Norway. The people in England anywhere near the coastline, became scared to death over the concerns that the Vikings would come because the first attack everyone heard about was when the Vikings destroyed a monastery and killed almost everyone. Many Vikings ate psychedelic flowers, mushrooms, and roots, before a battle and this is where the name “Berserk,” came from as that is how their behavior was described because they went wild when fighting.
Some of the kings in England (keep in mind they were mostly a bunch of small kingdoms at the time), made deals with the Vikings to pay them gold and silver if they’d stop attacking and they promised to give them some land to farm. The various kings got tired of this after a couple of years and decided to put an army together and run the Vikings out of the country. At this point, the Vikings were building sturdier ships and they decided to discover other countries (which were all inhabited), such as France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey. They even had a large settlement in Kiev (yes, now the capitol of Ukraine), where they had to fight the Rus, later called Russians.
The men and women Vikings who travelled to some of these other countries saw things they could never imagine. They didn’t have beautiful palaces where they came from nor all the beautiful creatures, flowers, and weather. If there was anything that the Vikings loved most, it was spices. They hadn’t eaten anything with spices before and they went crazy over the food.
They wanted to get out of the raiding business but their problem was that they had nothing to trade. Scandinavian countries didn’t have too many things other countries were interested in. The Silk Road was bringing countries together like never before by having huge markets for pretty much everything imaginable, so people came from all over Asia, Europe, and Africa to buy, sell, or trade. They had products other countries were interested in, Scandinavia did not.
The demise of the Vikings was mostly due to 1) They were so spread out with villages in several countries, so the Viking culture got watered down by the home country especially when it came to Christianity taking over paganism. Vikings were tied to paganism and as their religion went away, so went the Vikings. 2) They could never successfully centralize control. Everyone wanted to be a king, so they became too spread out around the then known world to be powerful.
It was the Vikings that helped Britain become the rulers of the sea for so long. Since they were getting tired of Viking ships coming around and stealing, they decided to build ships of their own that were more sea worthy and built specifically with fighting in mind. The ships were larger than the Viking ships because they didn’t build them to go up and down rivers. So they would patrol a few miles off shore and attacking the Viking ships at sea to where they didn’t have a chance. I guess a great example of that which does not kill you makes you stronger. Britain’s Royal Navy was extraordinary.
One last thing. Many females were Viking warriors as well. They performed various roles including being shield maidens to where they’d hold the shields up in front of the men while the men attacked the enemy on the other side. Many female Vikings also became extremely effective fighting with a bow and arrow. Men from other countries were shocked to see women engaged in the battles especially when some of the female Vikings came after them with axes and swords, screaming and hopped up on drugs. Now that’s scary. 😊