Regarding that :"Vikings never crossed pyriness"

Ikki

Member
Sep 26, 2006
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North Iberia
well..remember some threads ago when somebody said Vikings never crossed...ok..i have been informing myself and apparently a viking guy ( whose name i dont remember now) attacked Seville and arabians labelled vikings as "pagan warlocks"...so now, i dont know if what i have seen is wrong ,or if it´s right and then, your excuse for them not touring here is unconsistent:headbang:

as i prefer people telling me stories than reading loads of books as a way to learn history, could anyone in here ( umm preferably anyone that knows about it) tell me about that, is that right and they came???
 
Yes, it's right, and it is also wrong. The Scandinavian peoples have apparently had trades contacts all the way to Malta as far back as the Stone Age. To the best of my knowledge nobody knows for sure how they travelled to these places, but most have assumed (due to logic by way of putting together how the culture and the cult seems to have travelled over the millenia) that it happened mostly along the Atlantic coastline.
I beleive there were Norsemen who went down along the coast during the Iron Age, too, but I believe they got there by water. One does not have to cross the Pyrinees that way, which makes life a lot easier. So it's both right, and it's both wrong.

Also right is that Belgar was joking when he made the statement in that post. We do kid around a lot in this forum, so don't take it all too seriously. It's very Odin-like of you to seek the knowledge, though, so good for you. I can't arge with that! ;-)
 
Tyra said:
Yes, it's right, and it is also wrong. The Scandinavian peoples have apparently had trades contacts all the way to Malta as far back as the Stone Age. To the best of my knowledge nobody knows for sure how they travelled to these places, but most have assumed (due to logic by way of putting together how the culture and the cult seems to have travelled over the millenia) that it happened mostly along the Atlantic coastline.
I beleive there were Norsemen who went down along the coast during the Iron Age, too, but I believe they got there by water. One does not have to cross the Pyrinees that way, which makes life a lot easier. So it's both right, and it's both wrong.

Also right is that Belgar was joking when he made the statement in that post. We do kid around a lot in this forum, so don't take it all too seriously. It's very Odin-like of you to seek the knowledge, though, so good for you. I can't arge with that! ;-)


haha..hey,it´s ok, i understood the joke and laugh myself..in fact, i though it was a pretty good explanation for all those(including me) always asking why not coming here,why not,why not...

by the way, thanks ( in name of Odin) for the explanation, as you said that i though they never ever took the risk of coming here, by here i mean Spain, although i guess neither norse men nor arabians came exactly here where i am..( north coast)..terrible mountains, not nice weather and not lots of money save us i guess. I have always been interested in norse mythology, although you were surprised how little amount of books are in spanish about the topic, so mainly mines are in english and well...i would like to be a faster reader than i am,but i´m not..my next quest would be the sagas..but first i have to finish with the one i´m reading now and the last i bought...anyway, if you are so kind when i ask that would be a lot easier...
 
umm in the book i´m reading now the references to spain are very vague, they just give a date (844), a place ( Seville) and say it was not a nice quest for Vikings, but nothing about names of who came or what they did...maybe is the guy you mention, i dont know.
 
Maybe it has nothing to do with Viking in Spain ... but in France every year the city of Lorient organizes inter-celtic days and they always have celtic music troops from the Asturia-Galicia region of Spain.
If you are in Europe at that time of the year (August), this festival is a no miss as it is the biggest celtic gathering in europe.
This is just to show that the celts did in fact go along the coast all the way to Spain, settled there and brought with them their culture that got mixed with the local culture.
It is safe to assume that the Vikings could have crossed the Pyrenees into Spain.
 
Belgar said:
Maybe it has nothing to do with Viking in Spain ... but in France every year the city of Lorient organizes inter-celtic days and they always have celtic music troops from the Asturia-Galicia region of Spain.
If you are in Europe at that time of the year (August), this festival is a no miss as it is the biggest celtic gathering in europe.
This is just to show that the celts did in fact go along the coast all the way to Spain, settled there and brought with them their culture that got mixed with the local culture.
It is safe to assume that the Vikings could have crossed the Pyrenees into Spain.

the local culture here where i live was celt as well, i mean, nothing to do with mixing with other celts but they were celts themselves and, actually they did not mixed pretty well with any other tribe apart from the ones existing in the north area( i guess we still have the label of not being very friendly,although i promise it´s not true:heh: ) They had the same pagan gods and basically same main activities...

haha, some of my friends belong to those organizations who travel and fight in those celtic parties..in fact, as a funny thing, maybe you have seen the commercial by Renault in which "scottish" warriors appear, well, they are in fact no scots, they are my friends because it was shoot in here, and the advertisement from the company was like " Recruting people looking like vikings":headbang: seriously...
 
Before the Germanic tribes pushed down from the north and the Romans pushed up from the south, and the horseback warriors from the steppes pushed from the east all of central Europe was all celt. Notably, the two cultures of Hallstatt and La Tene were entirely celt. Their areas covered areas all the way from Hungaryto northern Italy, Spain (celtiberians), Poland, Germany and Austira. Because their land got squished like a ketchup bottle, they migratd to the Brittish Isles and/or into remote places that were easily defended or that others didn't want. The pre-date the Norse by about 1000 years, but the two cultures share many traits of the Indo-European religions and social structure. The specific style of artwork, with the intertwining knotwork and animal motifs that we today associate with the Irish celts and the Norse, was actually brought to the them by the horseback warriors, the Scythians, from the east.
 
Ok..i dont know why i spent the time with books and not read wikipedia before...so, i´m going to include here what is written there about Vikings and Iberia, and it pictures that not only visited Seville, but Kingdom of Asturias which is very north. If anyone is interested in just keep on reading..


"By the mid 9th century, though apparently not before (Fletcher 1984, ch. 1, note 51), there were Viking attacks on the coastal Kingdom of Asturias in the far northwest of the peninsula, though historical sources are too meagre to assess how frequent or how early raiding was. By the reign of Alfonso III Vikings were stifling the already weak threads of sea communications that tied Galicia (a province of the Kingdom) to the rest of Europe. Richard Fletcher attests raids on the Galician coast in 844 and 858: "Alfonso III was sufficiently worried by the threat of Viking attack to establish fortified strong points near his coastline, as other rulers were doing elsewhere." In 968 Bishop Sisnando of Compostela was killed, the monastery of Curtis was sacked, and measures were ordered for the defence of the inland town of Lugo. After Tui was sacked early in the 11th century, its bishopric remained vacant for the next half-century. Ransom was a motive for abductions: Fletcher instances Amarelo Mestáliz, who was forced to raise money on the security of his land in order to ransom his daughters who had been captured by the Vikings in 1015. Bishop Cresconio of Compostela (ca. 1036–66) repulsed a Viking foray and built the fortress at Torres del Oeste (Council of Catoira) to protect Compostela from the Atlantic approaches. The city of Póvoa de Varzim in Northern Portugal, then a town, was settled by Vikings around the 9th century and its influence kept strong until very recently, mostly due to the practice of endogamy in the community.

In the Islamic south, the first navy of the Emirate was called into being after the humiliating Viking ascent of the Guadalquivir, 844, and was tested in repulsing Vikings in 859. Soon the dockyards at Seville were extended, it was employed to patrol the Iberian coastline under the caliphs Abd al-Rahman III (912–61) and Al-Hakam II (961–76). By the next century piracy from Saracens superseded the Viking scourge."




From that, I can extract that

1)Vikings never crossed the pyriness in the literal meaning, which does not mean they did not came here.
2) I´m afraid they did not feel very comfortable in here because they left or where invited to leave...
3)As years changed, Things changed, vikings returned to the south and now spend hourssssss there, drinking beer, having sun baths and eating little fishes and jamón...
4) Any Viking cannot use this excuse to not tour in here:headbang:

With this i guess we can close the thread and start with Greece in the name of Vagner.