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What Did The Vikings Do Before They Began to Play Football?

By Anatoly Liberman

The first documented raid of the Vikings goes back to 793. For more than two centuries they were the terror of Europe. A good deal is known about their conquests, ships, and morals. The Old English chronicle and the sermons written at that time are full of heart breaking descriptions of the Norsemen’s cruelties. But the origin of the word Viking has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction, though some progress has been made in recent years. To us the Vikings are Scandinavian sea robbers who looted the treasures of Europe, conquered great territories, and settled in England and France. It is not for nothing that one of the northern provinces of modern France is called Normandy. And William the Conqueror, the Bastard, defeated the Britons in the battle of Hastings at the head of a Norman army. However, on the continent by 1066 the erstwhile Vikings had become French barons and spoke a dialect of Old French, so that the ethnic “Normans” overpowered medieval Britain twice: as Danes (hence the existence of hundreds of Scandinavian words in Modern English) and as the French (from whom English has countless French words). But the word Viking predates the raids quite considerably. It was common to Old Norse and Old English, and some scholars even suggested that Old English had lent it to Old Norse. If that hypothesis had been substantiated, some modern Scandinavians might have taken umbrage at it. As I mentioned last week, politically-minded people like to lend words but hate borrowing them.

At the end of the 7th century, almost exactly a hundred years before the rapacious Vikings sacked Lindisfarne Abbey, an Old English word that can be modernized as Viking scathe turned up. It meant “piracy.” As Christine Fell explained: “In the seventh century wicing appeared [in Old English prose texts] without national overtones. In the ninth century it could be used of piracy in any context, including the Scandinavian, but in the late tenth century the association with northerners became more pronounced.” In Scandinavia, the name Vikings was given to the brave men who made military expeditions to foreign lands. The points of view of the attackers and the attacked were, not unexpectedly, different.

Taking part in such raids remained an almost indispensable rite of passage for a long time. It was part of growing up, a sign of maturation, a recognized way of showing one’s mettle. One could spend several years in plundering the English, the French, the Germans, or the Slavs, amass great wealth, come home, marry, and become a respectable farmer, a role model to his community and sons. Or the doughty warrior might perish. Then his mother would erect a stone in his memory and have a runic inscription carved stating that so-and-so was a good drengr (“valorous man”) and that he had lost his life abroad. A thousand years later we would read the inscription and meditate on the fortunes of that fellow and on the grief of his parents. Only when military expeditions of the Viking age had lost their importance, did the word Viking deteriorate and come to mean “a figure of fun”; it thus shared some ground with berserkr “berserk.” Yet in the sagas, recorded in the 13th century, berserks are crazy, almost invulnerable bandits, while the Viking past is romanticized. Old men are often described as saying that in their youth they were on “viking” (that is, on expeditions), but now they were decrepit and unfit for such deeds.

The main etymological difficulty is the relation between two Old Norse words: víkingr (masculine) “Viking” and víking (feminine) “Viking expedition” (the accent mark designates the length of the vowel, not stress). They must be connected, but it is not immediately clear which was derived from which. Before going on, I should warn our readers that all the sources in the Internet use outdated material. As noted above, some progress in discovering the origin of the word Viking has been made in recent years. Most publications are in the Scandinavian languages and German, and finding them is not always easy.

These have been the main lines of research. Old Icelandic had the word víc “bay” and a place name Víc. So víkingr can be traced to either of them, with the meaning “people living in a bay area” or “people of Vic.” But not all the Vikings were born in the same place and their main occupation was not haunting bays, fjords, and creeks, as an old but excellent dictionary put it. Besides this, we should keep in mind that a good etymology of Viking has to account for two similar but distinct words rather than one. There was also Old Engl. vic “town,” a borrowing from Latin. The conjecture that this is what the Vikings called their camps (whence the word Viking) strains belief.

The breakthrough came when a tie was established between víking(r) and the Old Scandinavian noun vica “one shift of oarsmen changing places with another at the oars”; this noun is related to the verb vikja “to turn” (those with some knowledge of German will recognize its cognate weichen; it has the same meaning). The famous Viking ships were propelled with oars, and it is credible that the word for “sea voyage, expedition” owes its existence to the idea of an oarsman’s duty, the shift spent at the oars. The line between what we today sometimes euphemistically call “explorers,” armed medieval traders undertaking sea voyages and ready to defend themselves or obtain their booty by force, and sea robbers was blurred, so that the narrowing of meaning in a word like Viking is natural. A víkingr would then be someone on a rowing expedition. The occurrence of nearly the same word in Old Norse and Old English would also find a plausible explanation. It may perhaps be premature to declare the riddle solved, but we seem to be on the right track. In another context the Vikings were called Varangians. From an etymological point of view the two appellations have nothing in common. Incidentally, there is no reason why we spell Viking with a capital letter.


Anatoly_libermanAnatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

Recent Comments

  1. Knight

    “. . .And William the Conqueror, the Bastard, defeated the Britons in the battle of Hastings at the head of a Norman army. . .”

    I hate to nitpick but ‘Britons’ would be the wrong application of the word given the period. ‘English’ or ‘Anglo-Saxons’ is what it should be for historical accuracy. Let us give some credit to the people who held sway on that island for over six hundred years and who founded the tongue we currently speak.

  2. J P Maher

    Aha, Shift work! Ingenious update. Variants of the German verb weichen include die Weichen ‘switches’ on US railroads/ on UK railways ‘points’. When US sailors weigh anchor, the band plays Anchors Aweigh.

  3. NEJC

    @Knight

    OED2: Briton n. 2. A native or inhabitant of Britain or of the British Empire.

  4. J P Maher

    VIK is attested in the name of Ireland’s County Wicklow ‘Viking harbor’. Another thing the Vikings did was to eat lox in Co. Kildare, where the lox (Lachs) leap — at Leixlip. This is ca. 10 miles west of Dublin. Norsemen caught salmon there on the river Rye — Abhann na Rí — King’s Stream. Abhann = Avon and is akin to Hindi Punj-Ab ‘Five Waters’. And Rí is cognate with Latin Rex and Sanskrit Raja. — Leixlip is now home to, besides salmon, Guinness, Intel, Hewlett Packard — or was till the Celtic Tiger was shot by Wall Street geniuses.

  5. J P Maher

    correction: meadow, not harbor

  6. J P Maher

    There was no British Empire in 1066.

    OED2: “Briton n. 2. A native or inhabitant of Britain or of the British Empire. Knight omits:
    — “Not in general use in this sense until the early 18th cent., esp. following the union of England and Scotland.”

  7. Ellen Cameron

    Near where I live, there is a 50- or 60-year-old, *very* nice neighborhood of spacious homes on wide lots, with many trees and beautifully landscaped yards. The people who live there, in a not-quite-gated community, are extremely proud of their neighborhood and don’t allow any hoi-polloi around. I giggle every time I drive by, because the name of the place is “Garthwick,” or “Barnyard Bay.”

  8. […] the meaning “week,” referred to the change of shifts in rowing. In my post on the etymology of Viking, I supported the idea that Vikings were called this from taking turns at the oars. Such was hardly […]

  9. […] week. Quite some time ago, I devoted a special post to it. Later the root of week turned up in the post on the origin of the word Viking, and it was Viking that made our correspondent return to week. My ideas on the etymology of week […]

  10. […] week. Quite some time ago, I devoted a special post to it. Later the root of week turned up in the post on the origin of the word Viking, and it was Viking that made our correspondent return to week. My ideas on the etymology of week […]

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