Early Middle Ages

Viking Society and Culture: Farms, Laws, and the Longhouse

A guide to Viking Age Scandinavian society: farmsteads and free men, the Althing, law, slavery, women, and the longhouse.

In-depth article

Introduction

Viking Age Scandinavia was a world of farmsteads, fishing villages, and trading centers, ruled by petty kings and powerful chieftains, organized around kin and assembly, and tied together by longships, by long-distance trade, and by a shared Norse religion. The picture is not the one nineteenth-century romanticism painted: a society of warriors, helmed and horned, sailing off in search of slaughter and silver. It was a working, literate, commercial, agricultural world whose men and women, in the great majority, were farmers and whose participation in the famous Viking campaigns was only one strand in a rich and varied life. To understand the Viking Age as a whole, it is essential to understand the society that produced it. For the military expansion, see the Viking raids and expansion; for the religious life of the Norse, see the Norse mythology and religion.

The Scandinavian Land

The geography of Scandinavia shaped every aspect of Viking society. Denmark is a country of lowlands, islands, and fjords, well suited to cereal farming and to maritime trade. The long coastline, indented by numerous natural harbors, made it easy for ships to move up and down the country. The Danevirke, a series of earthwork defenses across the base of the Jutland peninsula, was constructed in stages from the eighth to the tenth centuries and marked the southern limit of Danish territory.

Norway is a land of deep fjords, mountain ranges, and scattered habitable strips along the coast. Travel was easier by sea than by land, and the political geography of the country remained fragmented for centuries. Inland communities lived on long, narrow valleys, separated from their neighbors by snow-capped mountains. Some of the most dramatic Viking remains, including the stave churches of later centuries, are a product of this difficult landscape. The cities of Norway were late foundations; Trondheim was founded around 997, and Bergen grew up as a royal and ecclesiastical center in the eleventh century.

Sweden is the most agricultural of the three Scandinavian kingdoms, with broad plains and lake-dotted lowlands. The Svear of the Mälaren valley and the Götar of Götaland were the two principal peoples, only slowly drawn together under a single crown. The Swedish heartland looked east rather than west, and the trade that flowed through Birka, the great commercial center on Lake Mälaren, was the source of much of Swedish wealth. The vast forests and lake systems of central Sweden were home to hunting and iron-mining communities, whose products were exchanged for the silver that reached the Baltic from the Islamic east. For the technological basis of all this maritime activity, see the Viking ships and technology.

The Farmstead and the Year

The great majority of Norse people were farmers, and the typical dwelling was the longhouse, a single rectangular building of heavy timbers, wattle-and-daub walls, and thatch or shingle roofing, divided into a central hall with a hearth for cooking and side rooms for sleeping, weaving, and storage. Cereal cultivation was at the heart of the farm economy; the principal grain was barley, used to make bread, porridge, and ale, with rye and oats also grown, especially in Sweden. Cattle were the single most important form of wealth, and the size of a household’s herd was a measure of its prosperity. Sheep provided wool, pigs, goats, and poultry supplemented the diet, and the horse was a high-status animal used for riding and war.

Dairy products — milk, butter, cheese, and skyr, the thick sour milk that has become an Icelandic national food — provided much of the protein of the diet. Meat and fish were eaten in quantity when available, and cured, smoked, and dried for the winter. Honey, the only sweetener before sugar, was used to make mead, and ale was brewed at home; a household that ran out of ale, especially in winter, was in serious trouble. The archaeology of farmsteads, with their middens of animal bone, broken pottery, and metalwork, makes it possible to reconstruct the diet and material life of the typical Viking farm.

Kinship, the Thing, and the Law

Norse society was organized by kinship. A person’s status, rights, and obligations were determined by his or her place in a network of kin, traced through both the male and the female line. Marriage was a contract between two kin groups, sealed by the payment of a bride-price, and the bride and groom had a say in the choice. Women could own property, initiate divorce, and represent themselves in legal proceedings; their rights under the law were substantial, and the legal literature makes clear that a Norse woman was in many respects better off than her Frankish or Anglo-Saxon counterpart.

The assembly, called the þing (thing) in Old Norse, was the central institution of Norse political life. At the thing, the free men of a district gathered regularly — in some places once a year, in others three times — to hear lawsuits, settle disputes, declare marriages, and make political decisions. The thing was both a court and a parliament, presided over by a lawspeaker who recited the law from memory and a chieftain who enforced decisions. The Icelandic Althing, established around 930, is the most famous of these assemblies, and it remained the center of Icelandic political life for centuries. Similar things existed in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and the system was a model for the folklands and hundreds of Anglo-Saxon England, which also developed courts that met in the open air. For a broader treatment of early medieval law, see law and governance.

Law was unwritten but not unknown. The lawspeaker of the Althing was required to recite a third of the law each year and to know all of it by heart. In the late Viking Age and the early high Middle Ages, the laws began to be written down: the Norwegian laws of the Gulathing and the Frostathing, the Danish laws of Zealand and Scania, and the Icelandic Grágás (“Grey Goose Laws”) preserve a rich body of early medieval Scandinavian legal practice. Many of the basic legal principles of the Norse — including the right of free men to participate in judgment, the duty of compensation rather than corporal punishment for most crimes, and the public nature of judicial proceedings — would prove durable in Scandinavian law for centuries.

Social Hierarchy

Norse society was hierarchical. At the top were the kings and great earls, whose power rested on land, on military leadership, and on the loyalty of lesser chieftains. Below them were the great landowners, who might control entire districts and whose longhouses were the centers of large households of free tenants, hired laborers, and slaves. Most of the population were free farmers, owning their own land or renting from a lord, and bound together with their neighbors by ties of kinship and the thing. At the bottom were the slaves (þræll in Old Norse), who could be born into bondage or captured in war, and who had no legal personhood of their own.

A free man’s honor was central to his place in society. Norse culture was obsessed with reputation, and the great saga literature treats the acquisition and defense of honor as the central drama of human life. The fines and compensations built into the law were the formal mechanism for limiting blood feuds, and the system’s emphasis on negotiation and payment was a remarkable alternative to the blood-vengeance that could otherwise have torn a small community apart.

Slavery

Slavery was an important part of the Viking economy. Most slaves were captured in war or in raids, especially in the early Viking Age, and were then sold at trading centers such as Dublin, Hedeby, and the markets of the Baltic and Russia. The Rus, in particular, ran a flourishing slave trade down the rivers to the Islamic world — a trade in which Slavic-speaking captives predominated, and from which the modern English word slave (and the older Slavonic) derives its name, and the German Sklave and the older Romance equivalents. The Norse word for slave — þræll — and the English word “thrall” both describe this institution. Recent archaeological and isotopic work, including DNA studies of burial sites on the Baltic and the Volga, has confirmed the scale of the trade and shown that many of the people involved were, in fact, of Slavic and Baltic origin. The Viking slave trade was, in human terms, the largest and most consequential industry of the early Viking world, and it is impossible to understand the political economy of the Rus without it.

A slave could buy his or her freedom, could be manumitted by a generous master, or could simply run away. The children of slaves were born into slavery, and the institution was not challenged in Scandinavian law until the Christianization of the North. The church taught that all Christians were spiritually equal, a doctrine that gradually eroded the legal status of slavery, but the institution was not abolished in Scandinavia until the high Middle Ages. For the wider place of the church in this transformation, see christianization of Europe.

Women in Norse Society

Norse women had a more prominent role in public life than their Frankish or Anglo-Saxon counterparts. A wife was her husband’s partner in the management of the farm, and in the long periods when the men of the household were away on campaign, she would run the estate. A widow often inherited her husband’s property and could continue to manage it on behalf of her children. A woman could represent herself in court, own land, and sell or buy property. Several of the most important figures in the Icelandic sagas — Auðr Unnr, the widow of the Ketill flatnose of the Norse settlement, or Hallgerður Höskuldsdóttir, the wife of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi in the Brennu-Njáls saga — are independent, decisive, and powerful.

Divorce was relatively easy by the standards of the age. A wife could divorce her husband for impotence, for cross-dressing, or for repeated beatings; a husband could divorce his wife for adultery, for spending too much of his money, or for a long list of other causes. The children of a dissolved marriage were carefully accounted for in the law, and the property of the household was divided. The existence of easy divorce, combined with the substantial property rights of women, was one of the most striking features of Norse law and was remarked on by foreign visitors.

Town and Trade

Although Scandinavia was overwhelmingly rural, the Viking Age also saw the growth of substantial urban centers. Birka on Lake Mälaren, Hedeby at the base of the Jutland peninsula, Ribe on the western coast of Denmark, and Kaupang on the Oslofjord were all major trading towns by the ninth century. Their archaeology reveals a population of craftsmen, traders, and ship-owners living in closely packed houses, with workshops for comb-making, metalworking, and bead production, and warehouses for the storage of imported goods. Coins and weights for the weighing of silver, much of it from the Islamic world, have been found in quantity.

The towns were partly seasonal. Ribe and Hedeby, the best excavated, were largely abandoned in winter and brought back to life in spring, when the trading season began. The archaeological record shows a population that included a significant number of women, suggesting that the trading centers were not just seasonal markets but also places of permanent residence. By the end of the Viking Age, the towns were beginning to grow into cities. The foundations of Lund in Denmark, of Trondheim in Norway, and of Sigtuna in Sweden date from the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and these places would become the medieval cities of Scandinavia. For the wider context of trade, see the Viking raids and expansion.

Conclusion

Viking Age society was a working, agricultural, seafaring culture that produced, and was in turn shaped by, the great Viking expansion. Its farms, assemblies, and laws were the soil from which the raids, settlements, and trading networks of the Viking Age grew. To understand the Viking Age as a whole, it is essential to understand the Norse farmstead, the Norse family, and the Norse thing — the institutions on which the whole edifice rested.

Further reading

  • Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015).
  • Stefan Brink and Neil Price (eds.), The Viking World (Routledge, 2008).
  • Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Boydell, 1991).