Who were the norwegian vikings and what did they do?

Question:Originated in Scandinavia
Expert boatmen - built Viking longships "Dragon ships"
Explored and settled the known World
Created terror wherever they went because of their brutality
Raped and pillaged and took slaves.
Many Brits have some Viking DNA
Settled Greenland and Iceland
Were dominant in Northern France and England
Reached the shores of America
Read much more than I can tell you by Googling "Vikings".
If you live in the UK, take a trip to York and see the Jorvik Museum.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Originated in Scandinavia
Expert boatmen - built Viking longships "Dragon ships"
Explored and settled the known World
Created terror wherever they went because of their brutality
Raped and pillaged and took slaves.
Many Brits have some Viking DNA
Settled Greenland and Iceland
Were dominant in Northern France and England
Reached the shores of America
Read much more than I can tell you by Googling "Vikings".
If you live in the UK, take a trip to York and see the Jorvik Museum.

Their names were Steve and Paul. They started out doing odd jobs, but finally settled down and opened an autoshop. The shop is still in Norwegia.

The Vikings were a fierce warrior culture, who were expert boatmakers and sailors. Their mastery of ocean sailing took them as far afield as Spain, Arabia (as it was at the time), Africa and quite possibly America, although this is as yet unproven.

They were fierce fighters but their success was not down to 'raping and pillaging' - this is just some Victorian idea that has sprung up over the years due to their fighting styles. Their successes were down to their trading and sailing skills - quite often when the Vikings landed in a new place they would make more of an effort to set up trade and blend with the locals than cause war. They normally only showed brutality when it was shown to them, although htree are reports of Vikings attacking Christian churches without warning - this was down to what the Christians were doing to them at the time, not simply because they were unnessesarily (sp?) brutal.

The vikings were also expert woodworkers, and many of their carvings have survived today for us to see - dragons, sea serpents, gods, animals - all carved in great details on their longboats, dagger hilts, food bowls and sometimes even into the metal hilts of their swords (they weren't quite as good at metalk as they were at wood however).

They were also a 'pagan' people, and believe that to die with a sword in your hand on the battlefield was the only way to go, and when your soul was released from your body you would be taken to Valhalla by Valkyries, and live the rest of eternity in Odin's Longhouse. There you would eat well, drink well and fight all you wanted - a true warrior's deathplace. Should you not die on the battlefield and by no other honerable cause (battlefield wounds were still acceptable) then you would not make it to Valhalla. I'm not sure on the history of Viking women, and I'm not sure of their afterlife.

The Vikings were a fascinating people, and many people in Norway, Sweden and some of Finland are direct descendants of them, which you will see if you ever meet them. For the most part they are quite fair skinned and haired, and tend to have a thick set body shape, capable of being huge and muscular (of course everyone is different though). They still retain their skills with wood and sailing, and the language is still quite close to how it was for the Vikings, all those hundreds of years ago .....

You might want to look up the archeology at Sutton Hoo, as there were some amazing armour, weapons and treasure finds there.

You're right to ask about "Norwegian Vikings" as "viking" is a description (more or less) of a job: it essentially means "pirate", but we have come to use it in modern English to mean specifically the Norse pirates of the 9th-11th centuries. There were, of course, also Danish and Swedish Vikings.

As the Viking were by definition raiders, what they did was raiding. The "Viking Age" is said to have started in AD 793 with a raid on the English monestary at Lindisfarne. There are several theories about why they started raiding, the most popular being that the good harvests of the Medieval Warm Period created a surplus populations that needed an outlet.

Another theory looks at the wider picture: the first raid was on a monestary and came less than 20 years after Charlemagne cut down the Saxon's Irmisul pillar - a holy site. Therefore, the beginning of the viking behaviour may have been backlash against the Christian part of Europe.

However, the people that we sloppily call "vikings" weren't *just* vikings. The Norse (the ancestors of the Norwegians and the Icelanders) didn't just raid England and France. They also explored the North Atlantic, establishing colonies in Ireland, Iceland and Greenland (and attempted colonies in North America) and traded with such far-flung places as Russia, Spain, Sciliy and Baghdad,