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I'm watching History Channel "The Vikings"...and have some thoughts..
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For those of who have seen it, you know how brutal it is. But it's also very interesting.
As I am watching these tough men, women and children go out in battle and kill each other with swords , axes and bow and arrow. They rape, and slaughter anything in their way. But then at the end of the day, if they survive, they go home to their own family and are great fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and leaders.
The soft and sensitive side comes out in them from time to time. They truly believed what they were doing was NOT wrong. And they showed real feelings of remorse for things that they might have done, that even they thought was wrong.
Some Vikings were worse than others of course. Some of them were too brutal and evil even in those days standards.
So, do you think people back in those days were more evil than they are nowadays. Did religion play a role in it? Vikings believed in several Gods such as Tor, Freja, Odin and more...When you died, your paradise was Valhalla, a place you went to to fight, feast and die only to wake up repeat it all over again. That was their paradise!
IDK...I know we humans change over time. But I try to figure out exactly what it is. Why were people in general so "evil"back then?
Is this a pshycology question or history question? "The Vikings", I just got into the show about 2 months ago and had to catch up with 6 seasons...excellent show. As for historical accuracy, not bad. Thank God they didn't include those ahistorical silly horned helmets you seem to see in previous Viking capers. But one should never forget that this is a historical drama using modern dramatic elements.
But no one really knows what they were thinking 1,500 years ago. There is still a lot they don't know, particularly about religion...the writers when they didn't know, invented stuff. Basically, yeah, they practiced slavery, raided and pillaged, killed priests wherever they found them (the show in particular does a good job of showing the religious aspects of these encounters as it was such a huge component of life then - Vikings vs. Christianity). But they were also explorers and settlers, farmers, and very successful in trading, they were excellent navigators and boat makers. They found that raiding worked for them, maybe because the Nordic soil was to poor to farm.
Thus you cannot judge them using modern moralistic standards. That's a mistake that many make when looking at historical events, thus you have the idiots condemn Columbus or the Founding Fathers for being slave owners. Life was cheap no doubt in those times, slavery existed and Vikings were very active in the slave trade. They weren't evil, it was simply part of life that they grew up with and were accustomed to living. Evil for them may have been something else - dishonor, fratricide, theft from your own clan. They could not comprehend that killing during raiding or taking the slaves of your enemy was evil.
Valhalla? Who knows. That's just part of norse legend. Most of the tales were invented long after the Viking culture passed on.
The Prose Edda opens with a section called Gylfaginning, or the 'Beguiling of Gylfi', that describes how a legendary Swedish King Gylfi visited three Heathen gods in order to question them about the origins
of the world. Snorri uses the replies King Gylfi receives to layout the creation myth and cosmological structure of northern Heathendom. Gylfi learns that everything began in an empty chaos that contained a world of heat and light called Muspelheim, and an opposing dim, dark and cold world called Nifelheim. The two worlds were separated bya chasm, Ginnungagap. In the extreme physical forces that operated across Ginnungagap a giant named Ymir came into being. He was nourished by milk from the udders of a primordial cow, Audhumla. Audhumla next licked the salty stones around her into the shape of another giant, Buri. By an unspecified process Buri fathered a son, Bur, who wed a giantess, Bestla. The couple produced three sons, one of whom was Odin. Odin and his brothers created the physical world by killing Ymir and, in an act of prodigious violence, tearing the body apart and flinging the pieces in all directions. The giant's blood became the sea, his flesh the land, his bones the mountains and cliffs, his skull the vault of the heavens. Later, as Odin and his brothers were walking by the sea, two logs washed up on the sands, and from these the gods created the first human beings by breathing life and consciousness into them. They named the first man Ask and the first woman Embla. Ask means 'ash', the meaning of Embla remains obscure.
The Vikings and the Christians thus knew different history. Yet it's similar.
Is this a pshycology question or history question? "The Vikings", I just got into the show about 2 months ago and had to catch up with 6 seasons...excellent show. As for historical accuracy, not bad. Thank God they didn't include those ahistorical silly horned helmets you seem to see in previous Viking capers. But one should never forget that this is a historical drama using modern dramatic elements.
But no one really knows what they were thinking 1,500 years ago. There is still a lot they don't know, particularly about religion...the writers when they didn't know, invented stuff. Basically, yeah, they practiced slavery, raided and pillaged, killed priests wherever they found them (the show in particular does a good job of showing the religious aspects of these encounters as it was such a huge component of life then - Vikings vs. Christianity). But they were also explorers and settlers, farmers, and very successful in trading, they were excellent navigators and boat makers. They found that raiding worked for them, maybe because the Nordic soil was to poor to farm.
Thus you cannot judge them using modern moralistic standards. That's a mistake that many make when looking at historical events, thus you have the idiots condemn Columbus or the Founding Fathers for being slave owners. Life was cheap no doubt in those times, slavery existed and Vikings were very active in the slave trade. They weren't evil, it was simply part of life that they grew up with and were accustomed to living. Evil for them may have been something else - dishonor, fratricide, theft from your own clan. They could not comprehend that killing during raiding or taking the slaves of your enemy was evil.
Valhalla? Who knows. That's just part of norse legend. Most of the tales were invented long after the Viking culture passed on.
I posted it in psychology because how my op is worded.
Valhalla is the viking version of paradise. Not invented after the viking era.
All the asa gods were true gods to the vikings.
I posted it in psychology because how my op is worded.
Valhalla is the viking version of paradise. Not invented after the viking era.
All the asa gods were true gods to the vikings.
Well, not really, who knows - Valhalla was part of the mythology picked up from a few poems of the time, that was really more fleshed out centuries after the Viking Age along with horned helmets and the perception that Vikings dranks out of the skulls of the slain. It's unclear if the Norse even believed in it or if it was just a literature creation. There is no archeological evidence one way or another.
So, do you think people back in those days were more evil than they are nowadays. Did religion play a role in it? Vikings believed in several Gods such as Tor, Freja, Odin and more...When you died, your paradise was Valhalla, a place you went to to fight, feast and die only to wake up repeat it all over again. That was their paradise!
IDK...I know we humans change over time. But I try to figure out exactly what it is. Why were people in general so "evil"back then?
"Back then??"
There's a religion right now in 2018 who thinks nothing of strapping on a suicide vest or driving a truck through a crowd of innocent people so they can go to heaven and collect those 92 virgins.
Yeah, gramps. Tell us what you actually know about Islam. Not much, clearly. You don’t know any Muslims personally. In fact, your comment leads me to think you left school before learning about what transpired under the guise of Christianity (and “Freedom”).
Then why is there radio silence from Muslims when there's a drumbeat of atrocities? Or their denouncing "terrorism is all forms" meaning of course what they consider Judaism? If modern-day Scandinavian immigrants to the U.S. did some of these atrocities in the name of the Vikings would the Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish descendants say "this is horrible but we lost our identity and we're not the only ones to commit terror"? Or did those immigrants and their descendants do something really weird; assimilate and work?
I don't think much has changed within the minds of men. Hitler, by all accounts, loved his dog. MyI generation knows him as the Most Evil, but probably that's because we defeated him. He was a piker compared to Mao Zadong, who probably killed more humans than all others combined
Maybe a true student of world history can confirm or correct me.
We know Hitler as evil because he was.
If we do not think as poorly of Mao, it is probably because we know less about the things he did, and, as you said, we did not fight a war against him.
Do not minimize the evil of Hitler and his minions. There is a reason that his relatives made a pact not to continue the family line.
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