Well, no. What I meant is, that some of the things that we associate with the vikings are, still to this day, things that could just as easily be complete fabrications. A large amount of the things we think we "know" are things based on complete hearsay. Many of the most quoted texts are accounts of second or third hand accounts. For example, everyone has heard of the temple in Uppsala. It's interesting, though, that no temple has ever been found, and no traces of the things that one assoicates with Norse cult and ritual space are there. Adam is the only one who writes about it, and yet, he also writes with conviction, that there are cyclops living up north. Now, if you were trying to prove that a place needed conversion, wouldn't you spice things up with writings about horrid sacrifices and black magic, such as the ones claimed to have existed at Uppsala? All that aside, Adam never ever went to most of the places he describes. Neither did Tacitus or Procopius. At least Saxo traveled to some of the places he writes about and was Norse by heritage himself, but both his and Rimberts' accounts are also strongly flavoured with Christian spice. It was to their benefit to make the Norse look as bad as possible (all except for Tacitus, but he instead was supposed to do the opposite). Even Caesar had a political goal in mind that caused him to want us to look horrid. The same obviously goes for that prayer. Today, when you hear those lines, you'd say that's what the monks in Lindisfarne all prayed when the monestary was raided. We think we "know" that, because we've been told that so many times, because that is what the original source says. The original source, however, was written in Swizerland many decades after the event, and by someone who, by all accounts, was not even there to hear the prayers. Pure hearsay, in other words. And he wrote it to make the Norse as a whole look bad. It was, after all, not the vikings, the raiders in their ships, who needed converting. It was the Norse people, the farmers and women and children in the Scandinavian home lands that were to be converted. This would give lots of power and an influx of papal monies to your own bishopric. So, someone came up with the brilliant idea that went something like this: "Lets just tell the Pope that they're all bad and the tools of the Devil. He will see the need for us to convert them if we make them look like Satan's deciples in the very worst way. Let's base it upon some of the things they might have done, twist facts and embellish. All is fair in love and war, right? This is not just war against Satan, but war against the other bishopric, who also want to convert them and have all that money and power. It's not like those barbarians can write anything in their defence ( haha, they "write" with sticks!! Haha!) and send to the Pope, and he will never in this lifetime travel to the cold north to find out the truth for himself, so we'll get away with it scot free. What's to loose?"
Ever since then, the world seems to have swollowed that version wholesale, and so my people still have to defend ourselves as the filthy, simple minded violent pigs without any sense of morals we were depicted as, which is very much a part of why we continuously get dragges into the extreme right wing movement. It is because we were depicted as warriors with only killing and war on our minds, who purposely desecrated the religions of other peoples that we look so damn interesting to people like Hitler's desciples. They have bought the myth wholesale, completely disregarding the Thing and its power, the reasons for raiding, and the legal and societal effects that behaving like a beserker would carry with it, the standing of women, the farmers and the religion's foundation in respect and honour. So, what I am getting at, is just that many of the things that we "know to be true about vikings" is not necessarily true at all, but rather myths crates over 1000 years ago by people on a mission to hurt us. It's kind of like the world deciding to believe everything George W Bush says about Iraq as the gods' honest truth and then perpetuating it for several centuries. If we did that, in 1000 years, we'd have a pretty fucked up idea about every day life in Iraq in 2006, don't you think?
I suggest heavy drinking and avoiding contact with people you don't like... has always worked for me. Unfortunately, the world is full of stupid people, and there's not much to be done for it, because most of them have no interest in learning better, and they keep turning down my suggestion to make public stupidity a capital offense.
