Vikings & Polynesians: The Expansion of Two Ancient Cultures
It is a commonly accepted idea that our modern understanding of historical events and cultures, while impressive for what it is, suffers from various limitations that we often find ourselves ignoring or not noticing simply due to our lack of unbiased information for the time period in particular. For the most part, such a problem is often dealt with through the acquisition of historical knowledge from several sources, these continuous finds allowing historians to build a larger picture of events. However, such information is not always available, leading to a distortion of events from a modern perspective.
Such a situation can be seen when one takes into account two traditionally seafaring cultures. I refer to, of course, the Vikings and the Polynesians. The goal of this paper will be to address this issue of historical distortion particularly towards those two aforementioned cultures using modern findings in order to understand how traditional views of both these peoples need to be changed.
What modern society generally understands about Vikings can be summed up in one term; northern barbarians. To the vast majority of people, the Vikings were simply helmet wearing raiders and berserkers who stormed into villages on the seaside, taking what wasn’t nailed down and generally acting little better than the animals whose fur they chose to wear as clothing. However, it remains highly likely that this view of the Viking people is far from accurate.
William Fitzhugh, a museum curator at a Viking exhibit in the Smithsonian makes a similar argument on this particular issue, stating that the previously accepted historical record “has badly distorted our view of early Scandinavians (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds)”. He would seem to be correct, considering that as cinematic and exciting as the idea of a culture built solely around the idea of piracy and violence would be, it makes little sense for a people as widespread and influential as the Vikings. The Polynesian people also faced a similar one-sided tarring of their cultural reputation, being dismissed as “savages” of a different breed from the Vikings, the Europeans of the time defining the island people through their own cultural standard.
Due to the lack of written records from both these cultures, it could be understood how such a negative view could propagate, effectively becoming near-fact in the modern day. As other, more literate, cultures continue to report themselves as victims of the raiding Vikings, this perspective was almost sure to spread throughout the rest of Europe, if only by word alone. As seen in the account given by Adam of Bremen in the 11th century where the Vikings are typified as faithless “barbarians”, such a view has had quite a while to spread (Adam of Brenen, Source 1). It is interesting to note that in another account, this one from the 13th century and from the perspective of the Vikings, that the image of them being nothing but faithless barbarians doesn’t seem to hold up, the men in question seeming more like ardent explorers than monstrous pirates (Greenlanders Saga, Source 7). Even in the account before that one, one taken from inscriptions found on runic Viking memorials found in Germany, Norway and Sweden seem to paint the Viking people as simply another culture and not the barbarians they were portrayed as (Runic Memorial, Source 5).
This sort of historical broad brush is a frequent problem among historians, that of the voiceless non-literate culture being painted through the eyes of another biased one, it is only recently that such a problem has begun to see a solution. With archeological techniques improving in subtlety, greater use of technology and nontraditional methods of historical study, historians have now been able to see past the narrow perspective of the previous historical record and discover the depth of these non-literate people through a new vantage point. In reference to both the Viking and Polynesian people, many scholars believe that far from being “brutal despoilers” or simple “noble savages” respectively, the two cultures were both far more intelligent than they are given credit for (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds). Without interference from others, these cultures are believed to have created and maintained the use of advanced seafaring tools that allowed them to make the grand travels of “discovery… and colonization” they are both renowned for “long before the modern age of Western European began” (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds).
It is with this in mind that it can be understood that the negative view of the Vikings, first of all, as nothing more than brutal raiders seems to have been borne from repetition among the victims of said raids as opposed to actual knowledge of the larger group themselves. Originating from somewhere in southern Scandinavia, the Vikings themselves were a people who seemed to make great efforts toward expansion especially through sea travel. This desire was understandable of course, when one takes into account the nature of their homeland; the harsh winters and short periods in which they had to grow food proving as sources of stress for their population.
As such, the majority of raids were carried out by men seeking a source of respite from the hunger and overpopulation that plagued the Viking homeland. In fact, these men were likely “…social outcasts, political refugees” and sons with no land of their own searching for a place to call home (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds). In short, these were men with no hope and very little scruples. It would be unfair to tar the entire culture by the actions of such a small group.
Regardless of their behaviors, these men were aided in their expansion and colonization efforts through the use of well-designed ships, commonly known as Viking longboats. The boats allowed them to travel great distance across the ocean on journeys that encompassed thousands of miles, all the way from Scandinavia to nearly every part of Europe and even to North America, reaching the continent over five hundred years before Columbus could discover it (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds). The Vikings would then settle all over the European continent, forming colonies and fiefdoms that would then become rich as they expanded through trade. This would ultimately prove to be their undoing in a sense, as their separation would rob them of a common identity and ultimately lead the Vikings into losing their power as the people assimilated into the local population.
The Polynesians were similar to the Vikings in a certain sense, inasmuch as one can compare the two while still maintaining a coherent argument. The Polynesian people embarked on a similar seaward expansion, encompassing roughly four thousand miles across the Central Pacific. It was through this expansion effort that the they were able to make their first colonization attempts, their target being the massive series of islands in the Central Pacific commonly known as Polynesia, hence their name. Despite being spread out over a series of islands and ocean that covered an area roughly “twice the size of the United States”, the Polynesians began to truly emerge as their own distinct people, the different islands remaining closely related in traditions and language with no external population to disrupt the homogenous nature of their lifestyle (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds).
It was in this environment and time period that the Polynesian people flourished and sought to expand even further from their primary islands of Tonga and Samoa. Discarding the hollowed out logs they used as canoes, the Polynesians developed a different sort of boat, “a twin-hulled vessel similar to a modern catamaran (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds).”. The wide decks and raised platforms of these new ships supported large amounts of cargo and a great deal of passengers along their hundred-foot length. With masts and large sails in addition, these new vessels allowed the Polynesians to travel farther and for far longer, letting them “leapfrog from island to island across four thousand miles of open ocean” (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds). It was not only in the building aspect that the Polynesians proved themselves apt in when it came to sea travel, but the navigation as well. Utilizing a variety of methods, from “the position of stars on the horizon, and an intimate knowledge of wind, currents and bird flights”, the Polynesian people charted their way across the central and eastern Pacific (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds).
Yet this period of prosperity and exploration did not last forever for the Polynesians, as we now know. Finding their current island homes suitable, the Polynesians no longer made long excursions over their sea and slowly began to lose the skills they had developed. By the 16th century, Europeans made contact with the Polynesians who by this time barely remembered their seagoing past. Due to differing sensibilities, these Europeans portrayed the Polynesians poorly with even sympathetic descriptions coming off as intensely harsh and needlessly insulting of the entire people as a whole. In his 19th century book, Polynesian Researches, one William Ellis described the people of Polynesia as “immoral to a disgusting degree (William Ellis, Source 9)” and went so far as to say that “no portion of the human race was ever perhaps sunk lower in brutal licentiousness and moral degradation (William Ellis, Source 9).”
This sort of reputation would follow the Polynesian people for well over a century, harming their image among other people. Contact with European explorers only served to further harm the Polynesian people and, ultimately, led to the downfall of a great part of their culture when “Peruvian slavers decimated the population in 1862, (Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds)” leaving no elder alive to read their people’s unique script, or keep alive the memories of their storied past.
While both the Polynesians and Vikings showed intelligence, skill and sophistication that many other cultures around the world were still struggling to develop and accomplishing feats that many others would take centuries to mimic, their eventual desire to settle down led to a decline in their “seagoing prowess” and in their culture as a whole, leading to their eventual obscurity. Through the diligence and effort of modern historians though, we now have a wealth of knowledge on the skill and intelligence of both of these important cultures of the past and the great feats they accomplished in shaping their section of the world. Far from being savages or simple barbarians, the Polynesians and the Vikings were true explorers and makers of history.
Works Cited
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, W. B. (n.d.). Vikings and Polynesians: Exploring New Worlds (300-1100). In W. B. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Discovering the Global Past (pp. 145-185).
R.I. Paige, Runes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) pp. 46-51.
Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) pp. 142-152
William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, vol. 1 (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), pp.72, 86-87, 95, 97, 106
