Vikings were More Social than Savage: Society Revealed in Ancient Text

Vikings once ruled the ocean, sacking seaside villages and towns as they sought to conquer more lands. Yet Vikings may not have been the violent savages that they are so often portrayed to be in modern media. It turns out that Viking society may have been far more social than savage in nature.

In order to understand Viking society a bit better, researchers delved into ancient Icelandic manuscripts, the Sagas of Icelanders. This unique corpus of medieval literature dates to the settlement of Iceland about a thousand years ago. Within these manuscripts, Viking sagas were preserved that could lend hints of reality. Yet in order to see the truth behind these stories, the researchers had to employ a novel technique.

The researchers applied methods from statistical physics to social networks. With this method, nodes (connection points) represent individuals and links represent interactions between them. Using this, the scientists were able to home in on the relationships between the characters and societies depicted within the manuscripts.

"This quantitative investigation is very different to traditional approaches to comparative studies of ancient texts, which focus on qualitative aspects," said Ralph Kenna, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Rather than individuals and events, the new approach looks at interactions and reveals new insights--that the Icelandic sagas have similar properties to those of real-world social networks."

In all, the scientists mapped out the interaction between over 1,500 characters that appear in 18 sagas, including five particularly famous epic tales. They found that although an "outlaw tale" has similar properties to other European heroic epics, the overall network of saga society is consistent with real social networks.

The findings reveal a little bit more about the social society of Vikings. More specifically, it reveals that Vikings were likely not the violent people that so many portray them to be. Instead, it's likely that this group of people was social, as revealed by their stories.

The findings are published in The European Physical Journal B.