Since I was a boy I have read and viewed everything on Vikings, Norse warfare and the European Dark Ages possible. Over the past twenty years these documentaries have tended to specific biased models: lineal historic chronologies; patchy military histories; New Age bleeding heart Olaf-needs-a-group-hug revisions; and my favorite, experimental archaeology orgies like Spike TV’s Deadliest Warrior. Still, I liked them all—just a rapidly aging kid who likes pirates; the bigger and bloodier the better.
But what really was the basis for the very time-specific phenomenon of Norse military dominance?
Any kid knows it had something to do with the amphibious nature of their expeditions, and most documentaries leave it at that, with an overview of their ship building expertise. Episode One of Vikings explores this in depth, and uncovers the Norse war engine, what a medieval hippie cry-baby might have called the ‘man-cleaving-carpentry-complex’. The filmmakers followed an inquisitive female academic who nearly broke her neck on numerous replicas, and an architectural historian to various archaeological sites and museums. What they found, was, as one curator put it, “very clever, very simple.”
A thousand years from now, if some similar team of geeks were to be poking into the riddle of American Empire, and how we enslaved a planet, they would surely trace our dominance to our petroleum-based military infrastructure. Like the Vikings before us we go anywhere we want and show up ass-kicking gear at hand. The Viking long ship was the Dark Age equivalent of the nuclear aircraft carrier. Their fortifications, housing and tools all came down to a wood-based economy. Yes, they used iron—including non-rusting bog iron—but that would be like their uranium. Their infrastructure was wood-based as ours—from our highways, battle tanks and jet fuel—are petro-based.
This point emerged as a result of the investigation not as the stated target, so I felt a little better about overlooking the humble oak, tens of thousands of which gave up their long lives to literally facilitate and support three centuries of bearded bloodshed. As I watched the unfolding evidence I recalled the research I recently did on modifying the naval rules for an Age of Sail war game. During the period of British naval dominance timber supplies were crucial to the belligerents, particularly a species of oak indigenous to Southeastern North America. Also, the crappy evergreen timbers generally available in northern latitudes were inferior for ship building and did much to account for the famously crappy Czarist Russian navy.
The resident geeks are generally right on point, with the Brit from York being the best interview, making comments like, “If you eat, this comes out the other end”, and equating Dark Age antler use with modern plastics manufacture. This documentary has enough raw interview footage and unsecured loose ends to make it a good source for drawing your own conclusions from military minutia to societal evolution.
