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Email Address There was an error, please provide a valid email address. The Irish annals, such as the Annals of Ulster , record far more attacks by Irishmen on other Irishmen, including the raiding and burning of churches, than attacks by Scandinavians. It seems more likely, however, that Christian monasteries were initially targeted because they were poorly defended and contained portable wealth in the form of metalwork and people.
Settling in richer Christian lands also offered better prospects for some than remaining in resource-poor Scandinavia.
The conversion of Scandinavia was gradual with Christian missionaries preaching intermittently in Scandinavia from the eighth century. While there was some resistance, Christianity and Norse paganism were not always fundamentally opposed.
The same craftsman clearly catered for both pagans and Christians. The first Scandinavian king to be converted was the Danish exile Harald Klak. He was baptised in AD with the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious as his sponsor, in exchange for imperial support for an albeit unsuccessful attempt to regain his throne. Indeed, coming into contact with Christian kingdoms which were more politically centralised arguably led to greater unification of the Scandinavian realms.
Read more: Viking homes were stranger than fiction: portals to the dead, magical artefacts and 'slaves'. Subsequently, the letter turned out to be a fake. Some people on the extreme right whom we have interviewed in recent years have told us that these events were decisive for the formation of their strongly anti-Islam views.
Right-wing extremists also periodically made anti-Islam comments in the s, but far more striking was their support for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and their use of Nazi greetings and the swastika symbol. Concepts such as stealth Islamization and Eurabia imply that Islam is slowly but surely taking hold in European societies and replacing the secular and Christian values on which these societies are based. A number of anti-Islamic ideas are shared by both moderates and extremists.
The Eurabia theory is one example. According to this theory, Muslims in Europe have a hidden agenda whereby they will gradually take power in Europe. Similar ideas have found a receptive audience that is wider than individual politicians and the members of a few extremist groups.
Half of the population agreed that Islamic values were wholly or partly incompatible with the values of Norwegian society. In addition, almost a third expressed a desire to distance themselves socially from Muslims. On the basis of several other indicators, the researchers behind the survey concluded that slightly over a quarter of the respondents scored highly in all dimensions and thus, according to the researchers, could be categorized as Islamophobic.
In other words, we are not talking about marginal views here. Nevertheless, there is a very crucial distinction between the parts of the population that support some of the claims of the Eurabia theory and those that hold the most extreme anti-Muslim views. Previously, in an article in the Journal of Political Ideologies , Maria Reite Nilsen and I compared how leaders of the far-right organizations Stop the Islamization of Norway SIAN , Pegida Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicisation of the Occident and Vigrid defined what they thought was the most important problem of our age and how they thought the problem could be solved.
Even such a comparison of viewpoints among leaders of far-right organizations revealed significant differences. Yet it was also the Vikings that introduced Christianity to Norway.
Beginning more than 1, years ago, the Viking Age was a time of religious change across Scandinavia. The story is a long and complex one, but utterly fascinating at the same time. Most modern scholars dismiss the depiction of the early Vikings as pagans who hated Christians. While they did hold pagan beliefs, most scholars now believe church attacks were nothing to do with religion. To the Viking, churches and monasteries were simply badly defended buildings with riches behind their walls.
It's known that the Vikings worshipped many gods. This may go some way to explain why some were so quick to adopt the concept of a Christian god. Let's look into what we know — and what we think — in more detail. There isn't a great deal of evidence of Old Norse paganism as very little was written down. Rooted in rituals and oral tradition, Old Norse was fully integrated into everyday life.
So much so, that it was seen as lifestyle rather than religion. The concept of religion as we know it today was only introduced to Scandinavia through Christianity. Paganism is occasionally mentioned in viking sagas. However, such sagas were mostly written down in Iceland in the 13th-century, a couple hundred years after Christianity was introduced. Who knows how these more modern beliefs coloured the memories of history?
Read more : Norse Mythology. We do know that chieftains held a priest-like role, and that pagan worship likely involved the sacrifice of horses. We also know that Vikings weren't one people. They lived in groups across a vast region. That said, it's likely that these groups saw themselves to a certain extent as one with other speakers of Old Norse across northern Europe.
The pre-Christian belief systems shared many ecological, economic and cultural ties. Like the Greeks and the Romans before them, the Vikings worshipped several gods. Odin's son Thor—the God of Thunder—and the goddesses of fertility Freyr and Freyja are other notable names. The raids on the British Isles and elsewhere brought the Vikings into more regular contact with the Christian world.
It's believed that the Vikings maintained their own beliefs after the raids, but came under political pressure to convert if more peaceful relationships were to be formed. Christians were not supposed to trade with pagans.
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