Davide Zori

What really fascinates, I think, is this exploration, this human urge to move beyond the known and into something that has not yet been discovered.

Viking essentially meant a seaborne pirate.

So not all Scandinavians of the Viking Age would have been, or considered themselves to have been, Vikings.

Only once you get on a boat and try to pirate stuff would you become a Viking.

And that's how it started with people going seasonally abroad to opportunistically engage in some kind of wealth production that could be trade or it could be raiding.

And I think sometimes they probably brought trading goods on board and then decided as they showed up whether it'd be more profitable to raid or to trade.

We have to imagine a constellation of chieftains that are in alliance with each other, that are fighting each other, sometimes expanding, claiming more power, and then, I would say, collapsing again.

The drive of the sort of alpha-type chieftain to control and to sustain power is one of the motors, the engines of the Viking Age that pushed them beyond their own shores as they tried to accumulate more wealth to reinvest in the political economy and generate bonds of loyalty with their supporters.

I think that it's important to consider the ideological motivation.

I think that the fatalism and the push towards honor generating stories about your accomplishments was a high motivator.

Based on the trading that took place in the pre-Viking age, the Scandinavians had a great deal of information about where the towns were, where the stored wealth might be, let's say, in monasteries, perhaps.

They were trading even as far as what's today Estonia, Lithuania, and we have pretty clear evidence of that.

And that pushes the mast and the sail on top of a wooden ship back by 40 or so years.

So now we're back to the middle of the 8th century.

And then with that, we get this debate of when does the Viking Age begin?

The Viking ship is the catalyst of the Viking Age.

It allows them to show up quickly, hold their shallow-drafted ships onto the beaches, and sail out quickly.

They can go up the rivers with these shallow-drafted boats.

They can easily take down or put up their sails, so it makes these ships really versatile.

This is a place where wealth has been stored up, where the elites sometimes are retiring to and giving wealth to monks so that they have prayers for their souls after their death.