Vikings, connecting peoples

NEW YORK Alltid lika fascinerande att läsa om vikingar, och om omvärldens beskrivningar av svensk historia.
En av de få saker folk i världen kan tänkas känna till om densamma är ju vikingarna, så när människor jag möter undrar om mitt konstiga namn förklarar jag alltid att det är an old norse name which means "woman who fights".

Nu tipsade min vän Anthony om att TV-kanalen PBS just sänt ett program om vikingar, inklusive information om den möjligtvis förfalskade Vinlandskartan (se bilden) som jag faktiskt inte kände till. Den som vill läsa om hur våra anfäder beskrivs för de amerikanska mediekonsumenterna kan klicka här.














Såvitt jag kan bedöma (?) bjuder PBS på en bra och modern berättelse, även om jag saknar den avgörande informationen om att det var de västskandinaviska vikingarna som for västerut (till Vinland, Irland, England och Normandie) medan de östskandinaviska drog österut (till Ryssland och Miklagård).

Särskilt fastnade jag för beskrivningen av hur kosmopolitiska vikingarna var. Obligatorisk läsning för alla storsvenskar som ser ett blont etniskt urfolk framför sig:

What was it about the Vikings that made it so easy for them to assimilate into foreign cultures?

William Fitzhugh [curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History]: "I think the Vikings were very adaptive. They learned to take advantage of whatever situation they found themselves in. When they settled in Europe, they took farmlands, yes, but they also met new people; they took slaves, but the slaves became part of their families. Their languages were not that different; they were all Germanic-based languages. (Many of the place-names in the British Isles, in fact, date from Viking times.) And the Vikings were not on a special crusade. They weren't trying to bring paganism to Europe. Quite the opposite, in fact: They were receiving influences from a Europe that they saw as somehow technologically and maybe in some ways politically superior. They weren't out to kill everyone in the countryside but rather to find a way to live, to set up shop, and I think they just readily mixed in.

Mycket rörande är också de fina orden om vad vikingarna kan betyda som förebilder för dagens människor:

In the end, what do you feel was the Vikings' greatest impact on the world?

Fitzhugh: I think that without question it was reconnecting humanity, making the world a smaller place by travelling huge distances, connecting peoples from Baghdad to Scandinavia to southern Europe to the north Atlantic to the mainland of North America.

From a social or economic or religious point of view, no matter what you think of it, the Viking period was a kind of hinge in European history. It was the time you went from early history and classical civilization into what we know as modern Europe and a modern world, in which people are exchanging ideas and moving around rapidly and exploring new frontiers, looking for new resources and new connections. When we look into the future now, I think we implicitly look back to the Vikings as the origin of this kind of human endeavor to find new horizons, go new places, use new technology, meet new people, think new thoughts.

In a millennium era as we're in now, this is the inspiration of the Vikings: It's not only the historical impact that they had on Europe and in discovering the North American continent for the first time. These things are interesting and important, but I think that we should look at the Vikings in a broader sense, as a kind of a human myth come true that we can draw on—that is, we can look to space, to the oceans, to explorations among our own peoples, finding new ways of getting along, mixing, and sharing.