Norse mythology, the pre-Christian stories of the Scandinavian people, were documented in Icelandic manuscripts dating back to 1300 AD. Cats were considered the sacred animals of Freyja, the Viking goddess of love, fertility, and war. Kittens were often given in her name to brides, linking together Freyja's association with both cats and romance.

Vikings were a Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and Swedish people who lived around the coasts of Scandinavia (a region in northern Europe consisting of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland) during the late 8th century to the 11th century.

To better understand the origin of the Vikings, let's go back to Scandinavian history before the Vikings. The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric time period during which humans widely used stone for toolmaking. While not much is known of prehistoric Sweden, parts of Denmark, Scania, and the Norwegian coast line were free from ice around 11,000 BC, making human colonization possible.

At the beginning of the Nordic Stone Age (8000 BC to 2000 BC), it is believed that tribes lived in teepees and hunted reindeer on the tundra (where the subsoil contains permanently frozeßn water). As the ice receded northward, the taiga biome (characterized by coniferous forests) slowly appeared over most of Sweden, Finland, and northern Russia. (A biome is a major regional group of distinctive plant and animal communities best adapted to that region's physical natural environment.)

Stone Age hunter-gatherers survived life in northern Europe by moving south during the winters and north again during the summers, following reindeer herds and salmon runs and utilizing fire, boats and stone tools. Around 5000 BC, moose and deer roamed among lush forests in southern Scandinavia, and those people hunted seals and fished in rich waters. It is believed that the northern inhabitants learned pottery from neighboring tribes in the south.

The Bronze Age is a period in a civilization's development when the metalworking widely used involved smelting copper and tin from naturally occurring outcroppings of ore and then alloying those metals to cast bronze. Scandinavian sites from the Nordic Bronze Age (1800 to 600 BC) present objects made of wool, wood, imported central European bronze, and gold. Below, although no written language yet existed, petroglyphs from Scandinavia (images incised in rock that were a form of pre-writing symbols used in communication have been dated as belonging to the Nordic Bronze Age by comparing depicted artifacts with archaeological finds. For example, bronze axes were portrayed in petroglyphs. Petroglyphs depicting ships tell us that shipping played an important role in Scandinavian life. During this period, a warm climate permitted the growth of a relatively dense population and provided conditions for good farming, including that of grapes, until a deteriorating climate in Scandinavia of colder, wetter weather (600 BC to 300 BC) pushed tribes southward into continental Europe.

The Iron Age is the stage in the development of any people where the use of iron implements, such as tools and weapons, is prominent. Through the Roman Iron Age (1-400 AD), much of Scandinavia remained unrecorded by Roman authors, as much of Scandinavia existed on the most extreme periphery of the Roman Empire (31 BC to 1453 AD). While it appears that some Scandinavian tribes ransacked the Roman Empire through the 5th and 6th centuries, returning with gold and silver, declining Scandinavian populations experienced a cultural recession for a thousand years after the end of the Nordic Bronze Age, until the rise of another advanced civilization in the Viking Age.

The Viking Age is the period in Scandinavia and Britain from 793 to 1066 AD during which Scandinavian (mostly Dane and Norwegian) warriors and traders raided, colonized, and explored large parts of Europe, southwestern Asia, Northern Africa, and northeastern North America. These venturesome Scandinavians became known as the Vikings. The beginning of the Viking Age is commonly given as 793, when Vikings pillaged the important British island monastery of Lindisfarne, as described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of manuscripts containing entries from 1 AD to 1154 AD, copies of which were kept at various monasteries. Although the history recounted is believed to reflect the biases of its scribes, these manuscripts are the only surviving source of information for some times and places.

Scholars who of studied archaeological remains from the Viking Age believe that many, if not most, Viking Age Scandinavians did not go out raiding. Instead, they lived in the countryside where they farmed, raised cattle, hunted and fished. Survival was a continual struggle for the Vikings. Much of their land was among rough woods and mountains where winters were long and brutally cold. Short summers did not provide a long growing season for food crops. The Vikings employed methods of iron extraction and rock quarrying to make cooking utensils and whetstones, for sharpening blades and tools. Every member of a farm family shared in the work. The men, worked in the fields, hunted and fished. Women cooked and preserved the food, spun and wove wool, and sewed clothes. Because husbands and sons might be away from home for months or even years at a time, either fishing or making trading or raiding voyages, the women ran the farms in their absence. The youngest children probably contributed by helping to feed the anminals or gathering firewood.

Viking ships and seamanship

The harsh living conditions faced by most Vikings may have been what led many Vikings to take to the sea. The Vikings' ship building skill was first discovered in 1880 when archeologists uncovered a large burial mound that contained the remains of what today is called a longship (below) built between 850 and 900 AD. Since that discovery, modern boatbuilders have reconstructed old Viking ships, and sailors have used them to retrace some of the likely Viking journeys.

Designed for speed, the longship was a long, narrow, light-weight wooden boat with a shallow draft (meaning the ship was not immersed deeply in the water). These ships could travel on rivers no more than three feet deep. The shape of the longships was symmetrical, allowing the ship to reverse direction quickly. The Vikings were among the first to use a keel, or a narrow strip of wood down the center of the ship's underside, to add to its stability. Some of the Viking ships had a single rectangular sail, but the ships were also rowed with oars positioned along almost their entire length. Since there were no benches inside the boat, presumably the oarsmen sat on their sea chests to row. The hulls of their ships were built of overlapping planks of oak (or other types of wood) tied to the ribs of the ships with animal hair or roots of spruce trees. Stuffing the joints with rope, yarn or tar made the ships watertight.

The Vikings also build trading ships, known as knarrs, for carrying cargo and settlers to new lands. At about 53 feet long, they were shorter than longships, with deeper drafts that would have been useful for shipping supplies, people and animals across the seas.

The compass first reached Europe long after the Viking period, so how did the Vikings navigate? Some have theorized that the Vikings knew approximately where the main points of the compass lay by observing the position of the sun and the stars. Icelandic Sagas preserved in manuscripts from the fourteenth century and later provide us with addditional insight into Viking travels. Based on these writings, Viking sailors could tell when land was near by observing the flights of birds and the appearance of whales. After all, birds would not usually fly too far from land, and the presence of whales signaled rich feeding grounds that occur where the nutritious water from deep levels of the sea is forced up to the surface by land masses.

Crossing the Atlantic

The colonization of Iceland in the ninth century, primarily by Norwegians, was made possible by developments in ship building and seamanship. Iceland was discovered when two men, a Swede named Gardar Svavarson and a Norwegian known as Naddod. Both sailed separately toward islands near Scotland, were blown off course and landed on an unknown island that Naddod named Iceland. Between 870 and 930 AD more settlers arrived until the population grew to about 30,000.

Greenland was settled from Iceland. Around 1980, Erik Thorvaldson, also known as Erik the Red (because of the color of his hair), explored the coasts of an unknown island that he named Greenland. He later built a farm in the south, known as the Eastern Settlement.

Leif Eriksson, the eldest son of Erik the Red, sailed west from Greenland to a fertile land with a mild climate believed today to have been the east coast of either Canada or the United States, distinguishing him as one of the first recorded Europeans to reach North America. Eriksson and his men came ashore in an area he named Helluland, meaning Flat Rock Land - perhaps modern Baffin Island. He sailed further south to a heavily wooded region he called Markland, or Forestland, perhaps Labrador. Continuing south, he went ashore at a place where he found grapes growing, which he called Vinland, which means Wineland. Some scholars believe that Eriksson may have reached Cape Cod, Massachusetts, or even further south, based on a passage in Erik the Red's Saga that describes his voyage "to a river that flowed from the land into a lake and then into the sea. There were such large sandbars at its mouth that they could only get into the river at high tide." Some believe the river to be the Hudson and the lake to be New York Harbor.

Cats in norse mythology

The pre-Christian beliefs and stories of the Scandinavian people, known as Norse mythology, were orally transmitted in the form of poetic folk tales through the Viking Age. Our knowledge of Norse mythology is based on the same Icelandic manuscripts dating back to the fourteenth century that tell of the Vikings' voyages. Below, Freyja, the Viking goddess of love, fertility, and war, was strongly associated with cats, as they were considered her sacred animals. She was often portrayed in a chariot drawn by two horse-sized winged cats. Kittens were often given in her name to brides, linking together Freyja's influence over both cats and romance. (Above, artwork from 1852 by Nils Blommér depicts Freyja riding in her chariot with her cats.)

How did the Viking Age end?

Viking society was based on agriculture and trade with other peoples and placed great emphasis on the concepts of honor in combat and in the criminal justice system. Many of the great trade routes of the world were first established by these seafaring traders. Wherever they settled, they built thriving new towns or enlarged existing ones. They not only inspired local improvements in shipbuilding and sailing but brought ideas of equality and democracy.

By the end of the 10th century, more and more Scandinavians had abandoned their Norse religion in favor of Christianity, and Scandinavia was brought into mainstream Christian Europe. The end of the Viking Age is often defined by the unsuccessful invasion of England attempted by Harald Hårdråde in 1066. Instead, William the Conqueror (who was born in France) conquered the Kingdom of England in what was called the Norman conquest.

Nomandy is a region in northwest France which experienced extensive Viking settlement in the 155 years prior to 1066. In 911, the French ruler Charles the Simple had allowed a group of Vikings under their leader Rollo to settle in northern France with the understanding that they would protect the coast from future Viking invaders. These "Northmen" or "Normans" adapted to the French culture and converted to Christianity. They added features from their Norse language to the language of their new home, creating what would be called the Norman language. They intermarried with the local population and extended their territory westward.

Meanwhile in England, Viking attacks increased. In 991, the King of England agreed to marry the daughter of the Duke of Normandy to cement an alliance in defending against the raiding Vikings, but the Viking attacks continued. Many English kings were forced to flee to Normandy. When the English king Edward the Confessor died in 1066 with no heir to the throne, three competing noblemen laid claim to the throne. In what was to be the last Viking invasion of England, King Harald of Norway invaded northern England, but the forces of Harold of England prevailed. King Harald was killed and the Norwegians were driven out. A month later, William, Duke of Normandy, fought a close battle with Harold's army. Harold was killed and his army fled. William was now unopposed for the throne of England.

The Norman conquest created one of the most powerful monarchies in Europe. As William subdued rebels, he confiscated their lands and gave them to his Norman supporters. With each gift of land and title, the newly created feudal lord would build a castle and subdue the natives. By 1086, only two English landowners of any note had survived the displacement. The Norman conquest tied England more closely with continental Europe and away from Scandinavian influence.