I've been doing quite a bit of reading about the Vikings recently and one of the things that really stands out and is only just being taken notice of by historians is the language used by the Church to decribe the raids, invasons and settlements by Scandinavian peoples from the mid 7thC CE and the 11thC CE.
They seem to have taken it as an attack on Christians and Christianity by Pagans, I sort of get where they're coming from when so many monastries were being raided, but the way in which its spoken of is very much the language of "holy war" in an organised way, which I really don't think it was, as raids continued long after most Vikings were officially Christian. There may have been a few who saw it that way, who resented the Church and what it stood for, which was a united Europe under the sway of the Church in Rome. But I dont' really read it that way, I think to anyone who's been brought up as or has been polytheist for a long time the idea of one god who does everything is strange and being baptised probably wasnit that well understood by those who were presauded to take it. They seem to have just added the CHristian god to thier existing pantheon, although I don't think pantheon is the right word to describe non classical Pagan religions, its more like a family or race of gods who live in another part of the worlds. I think Pagans, such as Vikings might make offerings to their Gods for success, or invite a God to come with them, but in a totally different way to how Christian both then and I think now see it.
Not being a Christian, I try and understand the monotheistic world view, but it just dosent' gel with me, it makes little sense, whereas Paganism in its many forms mostly do, not all forms of it, but most.
Another conclusion I've come to from all my reading is how much of a culture clash there was between the urban Roman church and the mostly rural Pagans they were trying to convert, for one thing, where there are no towns, cities and urban living, there couldn't be bishoprics, although these were imposed however nominal they were in practice and how the Christians thought that if the leaders of a particular group were baptised then it meant all the rest of the peoples they rules over would now be Christians too. Of course it didn't work like that, I wonder if many now supposedly CHristian people felt like we Autists do when confronted by NT's and their cultural dominance?
