A Deep Dive into the Viking’s Honor Code

Horned helmets, matted clumps of braided hair, bared teeth, and bloody bodies: this is modern day society’s view of the Vikings. They were believed to be a savage group of Scandinavian pirates, sailing the frigid seas on their long boats to pillage and kill other groups of people, but this is not the full story. It’s hard to get a complete understanding of what the Vikings were like considering there are limited written sources from their era. During their reign from around 800 A.D. to 1100 A.D., the only records of them come from religious entities, mostly writings about being attacked by the Vikings, which creates a bias. Since they are the victims of these attacks, they portray the Vikings in an aggressive light, which hints at the origins of society’s view of them today.

The other accounts of the Viking’s come from a couple hundred years later when the stories they told orally were finally written down. These were contained in the Icelandic Sagas and the stories about Norse Mythology, which painted the Vikings in a very different manner, giving historians a new way to interpret their culture. For example, from these tales, historians found evidence that the Vikings actually lived in complex societies with a social hierarchy that was built on a strict code of honor and trust. However, within those same stories about honor, there are actions of deception that go hand in…