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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 855028" data-attributes="member: 2205">As southern Scandinavia and northern Germany are considered the be the homeland of the Germanic language family and culture, it's propably fairly safe to conjecture that the "proto-Vikings" were about the same as their relatives that lived north of the Rhine in what Caesar called Germania.  Certainly some aspects of their culture can be reconstructed back to that era, including the names of many of the deities, which can be reconstructed to proto-Germanic (interestingly enough, Grimm (more famous for Grimm's fairy tales probably, but professionally he was a brilliant linguist) believes that the Odin-Wotan cult is a later phenomena, and Thor-Donnar was the original king of the gods.  He even believed that the Odin cult never actually even reached remote parts of Iceland and Greenland before Christianity.)All of these Germanic peoples have traditionally raided each other for loot, slaves, etc., but several factors led to the "Viking age" in which the vikings arose as a culturally distinct and recognizable phenomena out of the incessant raiding that was already happening.  These include:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A linguistic shift that turned very closely related languages into two distinct familities or dialects, Western Germanic and Northern Germanic (the former being the ancestor of German and English, amongst other languages, and the latter the ancester of today's Germanic Scandinavian languages.)  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A religious shift -- the norsemen remained pagan whilst their southerly Germanic languages became Christian.  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A cultural shift -- the southerly Germanic nations became somewhat "Romanized" culturally.  These three items served to essentially seperate the Norsemen into a distinct ethnic group from the morass of closely related and inter-related Germanic federations that existed before that.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The development of the classic viking longship, which was technologically superior to any other European sailing craft of the time, at least certainly in terms of coastal raiding was concerned.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The supposed (although not proven) "population boom" of the north.  There's no evidence of this except for historians who have tried to look for something to explain the apparent explosion of Viking raids.  I believe, however, as do some other historians, that this is more perception than reality -- the now distinct cultural groups and the technological superiority of the Vikings led to spectacular successes and the appearance of a "new" threat when really all that was happening was what had been happening for centuries already.</li> </ul>Of course, the development of a distinct viking culture is a post-Roman phenomena.  You can't talk about vikings per se before the time that they actually arrive any more than you can talk about 9th century Americans, because the culture simply didn't exist even though the ethnic groupings that later developed as vikings (or Americans) were certainly already in existence.  At most you can say an un-differentiated early Germanic group that lived to the north of the range of the Germanic culturo-linguistic area.Ireland was indeed populated by celts during the Roman times, but it wasn't until the 11th century that the Gaelic celtic language that is dominant now came to the fore.  The Roman era "irish" were more akin to the welsh or the cornish prior to the spread of the Gaelic celts into Ireland and from there to Scotland.</blockquote>

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