Why didn't the Scandinavian raid/explore before 8th century AD? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14728747
This has always puzzled me, and I believe we have no indication historically why this is the case.
During the entire time when Rome ruled Western Europe & the British Isles, what the heck were the Norse doing in Scandinavia besides living peacefully and farming? We know what the Germans were doing (living in Germania, trading and warring with the Romans & Gauls across the Rhine). But there is scant history/sources about what is happening in actual Scandinavia beyond Myths.

Then, the Norse come into focus only during the Viking age, long after Rome has fallen and into the early middle ages.

My question is why did the Norse decide to come out of Scandinavia only in 800 AD and not before, when Western Europe was clearly a more pleasant land (which the Germans eventually migrated into)?

Do you think that the weather was basically much more pleasant back then in Scandinavia?
#14728889
It is now often believed that the Viking raids from Scandinavia from the start were attempts to ward off the Frankish expansion. Even in the early 8th century AD the threat from the south could be felt in Scandinavia. The Danes in particular could not but see the danger of invasion from the south and began building large defensive fleets and other ocean-based defensive systems. This was intensified when the Frankish leader Karl Martell (714-741) pillaged Friesland in 734 AD and killed their military leader.

This Frankish victory so close to Denmark was the main reason why the Danes built such a strong naval military fleet, yet even as early as the 720s they had built their first canal defensive system, the Kanhave Canal. Another system of defense was to place poles in the ocean close to the entrance to important ports and power centers. The first Danish maritime military base in Schlei is dated to 734 AD and the first constructions of the great wall known as Danevirke began in 737 AD. The Danevirke was a sort of northern European “Chinese Wall” – the palisade was 4-5 meters high, and from the top the Danes could view well the flat landscape to the south. The Danevirke was North-Europe´s largest defense construction in its time and lasted until the 11th century AD.

Charlemagne (748-814 AD) became the new Frankish king from 768 AD and spent his entire career expanding his realms in all directions. He also forcefully converted his new subjects to Christianity. In the year 782 AD he force-baptized 4500 unwilling Saxon (the Saxons of contemporary Germany south of Denmark) men by the town of Verden, close to present day Bremen. After baptizing the men, he decapitated all 4500 of them. The massacre was but one in a series of similar outrageous acts against heathens who refused Christianity. Adding to this important religious centers were destroyed and priests and priestesses were murdered, raped, tortured, and so on… The Franks were fought ferociously under the leadership of the Saxon king Widukind who used guerilla techniques as the only means by which they could stand against the Frankish land-army.

The Saxons found natural allies in the Danes and many Saxon refugees went there to tell the tales of massacres, sacrileges and abuse. King Widukind himself went to Denmark in 777 AD and received both moral and practical support from the Danish kings, who also made sure to strengthen the Danevirke wall. When Charlemagne continued his aggression against the Saxons in 798 AD, he sent a representative (diplomat) to the Danish king Sigfred at Lejre (Hleidargard, and ancient royal seat and the very one in which Beowulf once met with his monsters…), a Frankish attempt to stop the Danes from supporting and receiving Saxon refugees.

http://freya.theladyofthelabyrinth.com/?page_id=483


It may be the Franks who first provoked the Vikings into wreaking havoc all across Europe. Charlemagne's Frankish Empire posed an existential threat to their pagan culture and Viking attacks were initially directed against Christian monasteries in order to frighten the Franks. The very first Viking attack was on the Lindisfarne monastery in 793 AD, which signalled the beginning of the Viking Age.
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