On an embassy to the Bulgars of the Volga, at the beginning of the 10th century, the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan discovered a troop of merchants surrounded by slaves and warriors bristling with arms.
The scholar of Baghdad contemplates with curiosity these fair-haired barbarians whose women enjoy a certain freedom and who punctuate the funeral of their leader with a human sacrifice.
He calls them “Rus”.
The Byzantines named “Varangians” these bold adventurers whom they took as mercenaries.
Among the Franks, these same navigators were referred to as “Men of the North” or “Normans”.
We know them today as the “Vikings”.
You are not born a Viking, you become one
Produced for the National Geographic channel, which will broadcast it from Sunday, the documentary series
Vikings: glory and decline
points out from the outset the abusive, but oh so convenient, use of the name that sticks to the skin of these Scandinavians.
We are not born a Viking, we become one.
“
The word 'Viking' describes a function rather than a nationality,
explains historian David Petts (University of Durham).
The term refers to Scandinavians who were explorers, pirates and to some extent traders
.”
At his side, a cohort of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian researchers were mobilized to synthesize the current state of knowledge in six episodes.
Like an adventurer emerging from a fjord at the bow of his ship, the program is not lacking in ambition.
He seduces with panache.
Tumultuous Battles of Britain
The series embraces all of the history and spaces affected by the Viking phenomenon.
From the first looting of monasteries to the tumultuous Battles of Britain, from the cataracts of the Dnieper to the bogs of the coasts of Newfoundland.
Memorable sequence, an Icelandic researcher chants like a skaldic poet an extract from the
Völuspa
, a poem peddled in Old Norse by Christian monks.
Archaeological excavations have nuanced the picture of a world punctuated by the drumming of conquest and predation.
Burials have thus yielded Arab ornaments and Orientalizing copies, vestiges of a taste for an exotic elsewhere;
other pagan tombs contained Christian symbols, markers of religious interactions and aggregations.
And in Yorkshire or Normandy, cohabitation and assimilation have infused language, iconography and daily life.
The Viking was not lost, he was transformed.