Vikings as a civ

[Squirrel]

Originally posted by Loaf Warden
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't 'Viking' a profession? The Vikings were the ones who actually got on the ships and went out to pillage and all that, were they not? Did the women and children and (if there were any) non-sailing, non-combatant men qualify as 'Vikings'?

I've thought this since Civ II came out, but now that the Vikings are being restored for Civ III, I thought I should bring it up. It seems to me having a civ called 'Vikings' would be just like having a civ called 'Pirates' or 'Knights'. Surely something like 'Northmen' or 'Norse' would be better. Though that does leave the question of what the formal noun would be, an issue that didn't exist in Civ II. 'Norway' would be inadequate, and I can't think of any other options just off the top of my head. Still, unless I am misunderstanding the history of Scandinavia, it seems to me the word 'Viking' is too specialized to refer to the entire civilization.

And does anyone know what the Viking UU will be? I can think of two possibilites. Either a Longboat (perhaps a Galley that can cross sea squares?) or a Viking warrior. See, they could call the civ 'Norse' and the UU 'Viking'. I know what I would want the Viking to do. When it marches into a city, you should have the option of plundering it and then leaving without capturing it. You could still capture if you chose, of course, but this way you could terrorize other civs and steal their gold without taking them over, thus leaving them alive to be raided again later.

You are absolutely right, Loaf Warden. The Vikings were not a civ as such, but rather the name given to the traders and warriors that sailed out to trade and/or fight. However, Civ is not historically correct in many other means, so I guess we have to live with this small mistake too. Civ is supposed to sell and I think a civ called the Vikings sells more than the Scandinavians or the Norse.

The UU is the berserker, as some has pointed out. I have no idea where that name comes from. I guess it will replace the swordsman. Many have suggested that the Viking UU should replace the warrior, but they fail to remember that the Vikings ruled the battlefields hundreds of years after the Roman Legions. A warrior-type unit would simply be obsolete by that time.

Btw I really liked your idea of the Viking UU being a looting unit! Another idea is to give the Berserker the ability to attack directly out of the boat, like the Marines.

Personally I think the Viking UU should have been a naval unit. E.g. a longboat that is able to traverse ocean squares and replaces the caravel.

I guess the Vikings will be expansionistic and commercial. These are perhaps the two least attractive special abilities, but they are historically correct.

 

[sabo]

The Vikings and Mongols were pretty close as to how their societies were, except there were more farmers and fisherman with the Norse, the mongols were basically hunters, but they advanced there civiliazation the same way, but robbing and looting. The Vikings did not have alot of natural resourses which is why they never won the Super Bowl.. (kidding)

 

[Ralf]

Originally posted by robehans
THEY WERE NOT RUTHLESS BARBARIANS!!!

Oh yes, they could be pretty ruthless and barbaric.

For example, making a "blood eagle" meant that they opened the chest and took out lugns and organs, then outfolded them on each side of the now opened chest. The big sport was to try to accomplish this while the poor victim was alive as long as possible.

Nice chaps!

They had a complex monotheism with a mythology written in runes on several stones...

Complex monoteism? Give me a brake! Viking pagan religion was maybe complex, but it sure as hell wasnt monoteistic in any sense of the word. They converted to christianity from 1050-1100 AD and forward, but thats another story.

Vallhalla = The place where the Norse gods lived!

Valhalla was their idea of paradis. A place that ONLY those who died in battle and killed many enemies could visit after death. There one could continue the god work and participate in huge exiting fantasybattles over and over again. And of course get rewarded afterwards with lots of valkyrias, beer and food. Not to mention sharing the glory and admiration with each other. Those who DIDNT died in battle or killed anyone went to "Hel" - their idea of hell. A gloomy boring place there one was suppose to feel rather ashamed with oneself.

 

[Hjortþór]

the name berserker comes from a mushroom the vikings eat and they got aggresive because it is poision. The mushroom(sveppur)is called berserkja sveppur(mushroom)

 

[sabo]

So the Vikings ate "shrooms?" they must have been the original Hippies... hahaha

 

[Loaf Warden]

Originally posted by Squirrel
\Another idea is to give the Berserker the ability to attack directly out of the boat, like the Marines.

That's a good thought, too. The Vikings were quite adept at those naval raids, so giving it the marine landing ability centuries before anyone else can do it would also be a good way to represent their going "a-Viking".

Still, I hope someone at Firaxis reads my raiding idea and takes it seriously. Even if it isn't the Viking UU, I'd really like a unit in the game that can do that.

I guess the Vikings will be expansionistic and commercial. These are perhaps the two least attractive special abilities, but they are historically correct.

That's my guess, too. Despite their reputation as warriors, I think they were too mercantile to be given the Militaristic rather than Commercial attribute, and they were certainly too wide-spread to not be given the Expansionistic attribute. Who else would even have been capable of stretching from Russia in the east to Canada in the west in the 11th century? Brief as their stay in Vinland was, I still think it's pretty darn impressive.

 

[Squirrel]

Originally posted by Hjortþór
the name berserker comes from a mushroom the vikings eat and they got aggresive because it is poision. The mushroom(sveppur)is called berserkja sveppur(mushroom)

Thanks for teaching me this In Norwegian that mushroom is called "fleintsopp" and does therefore not give a clue to the name "berserker".

 

[Zerzes]

Originally posted by Loaf Warden
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't 'Viking' a profession? The Vikings were the ones who actually got on the ships and went out to pillage and all that, were they not? Did the women and children and (if there were any) non-sailing, non-combatant men qualify as 'Vikings'?

At least in Sweden all the people living in Scandinavia during the "Viking era" could be called vikings. Including women and children. And if swedes can live with it, so should the americans

The expression "Norse" (or in swedish "nordmän") I have never heard anywhere else except for this forum... Maybe Norway and Sweden have different definitions of what a viking is, but I would be rather upset if the civ was called "The Norse" or anything like that. My guess is that Norse is used more by other civs to refer to the people of the north, rather than being what the northen people are calling themselves. That makes it almost like calling an african civ "Negros" or something

I'm not saying they called themselves Vikings either, but that is at least the name under which they became famous.

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by Zerzes
The expression "Norse" (or in swedish "nordmän") I have never heard anywhere else except for this forum...

Then you must be quite deaf

Try a little search. I searched after "norse" on alltheweb. It gave me 553,986 references. So the name "norse" isn't exactly unknown outside this forum (although "viking" gave 6 times as many hits).

 

[Zerzes]

I have never searched for foreign articles about vikings. I should have clarified and said that I have never heard a swede refer to the norse instead of the vikings (and also that I meant norse in the meaning of viking, how many of your hits had to do with vikings?). That is also why I guessed that it is an expression mostly used by other countries. Maybe norwegians feel a closer kindship to the expression norse though, since "Norway/Norge" probably is derived from it.

 

[TheNiceOne]

I think all of the 10 first hits had to do with vikings, most of them with norse mythology.

Here in Norway we call the people vikings, but we normally use the Norwegian equvivalent of "norse" when need an adjective to describe anything related to the vikings.

So in Norway, you'll probably hear the equivalent of "Vikings developed norse mythology"

P.S. In Norway, the word used for "norse" is "norrøn".

 

[Zerzes]

Originally posted by TheNiceOne
Here in Norway we call the people vikings, but we normally use the Norwegian equvivalent of "norse" when need an adjective to describe anything related to the vikings.

You're on to something there. Even though I would spontaneously use the adjective nordic instead of norse, but norse might be the correct term.

There is no swedish adjective form of viking I can think of, so all phrases needing one has to be rewritten in some way. "A viking ship" or "a viking family" is transformed into nouns as "vikingaskepp" and "vikingafamilj" in swedish for example. Interesting observation there.

Isn't most "adjective-requiring" situations rewritten into using a noun including viking rather than the adjective norse/nordic? Can you think of other examples than "norse mythology"? Because I think that norse is a bit too general. Norse mythology is ok, since it is well defined and not strictly a viking mythology (even though the connection is strong). But if you talk about norse war tactics on the other hand it doesn't have to mean viking war tactics, does it?

Hmm, I got carried away in linguistics there

 

[Loaf Warden]

I have to say, it's fascinating to hear the Norwegian and Swedish sides of the story. As an English-speaker, I've grown up thinking of the word 'Norse' as synonymous with 'civilization that produced the Vikings'. So Scandinavians today are not called 'Norse', but rather 'Norwegian' if from Norway, 'Swedish' if from Sweden, and so on. We speak of 'Norse mythology', but not 'Viking mythology'. I've never thought of 'Norse' as meaning strictly 'Norwegian'. Though I suppose it can mean that, I think most English-speakers use it to mean something more like 'medieval Scandinavian'. Or at least, I do. I suppose I can't speak for anyone else.

For my part, I have to admit that in reality I use the word 'Viking' as freely as anyone else. I'm more likely to say "The Vikings reached America several centuries before Columbus" than I am to say "The Norse reached America etc." Though I suppose there's an element of accuracy in that, considering the people who got in the boats and went out to sea generally were Vikings. But that's just rationalizing, since I am probably also as likely to say "Viking women had more freedom than any other women in Europe at the time" as I am to say "Norse women etc." Still, I could only refer to Odin as a 'Norse god', not a 'Viking god', and the "Saga of the Volsungs" is a great Norse epic rather than a Viking one. If there is a consistent rule for when to use which word, I would certainly love to discover it.

In the end, I suppose it's just as well they use the word 'Vikings' in the Civ games. My question was more from idle curiosity than from any great desire to change what Firaxis is doing. 'Viking' may not be the most accurate word, but nothing else seems to do much better. I hadn't realized the Swedish may take exception to the word 'Norse'. I suppose 'Northmen' for the plural noun and 'Nordic' for the adjective could have worked, but what would the formal noun (country name) be? (For that matter, what will it be anyway? 'Vikings', probably--they certainly didn't strain themselves to come up with something better than just 'Aztecs'.) But when it comes down to it, I guess 'Northmen'/'Nordic' would be a little too specialized in a game with such an enormously wide fan-base. Most people know them as 'Vikings', and apparently that's even true in Scandinavia itself. I have to say I'm kind of surprised by that, but then, I've grown up speaking only English, so who am I to argue with the Vikings here at CivFanatics?

 

[Zerzes]

 

[Hagbart]

Vikings is the name used for the people living or coming from the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) in the 'Viking Age'. The Viking Age started in 793 when Vikings plundered a monastery in Northern England and ended in 1060 something when the Viking army lost a big battle to the English.

In (old) Danish/Norwegian 'Vik' (vig) means bay. So Viking could mean people from the bays.

Northmen/norse is the word used by the people in England/France about the people coming plundering from the North. It is not a word used much in Danish. Viking is used almost all the times about the women too.

In 800 Danish Vikings conquered half of England and the area was then known as Danelagen (Danelaw). Many people immigrated there and slowly became a part of England. Later the Danish King Svend Tveskæg (Twobeard) conquered all England. At this time The Danish king ruled Denmark, Norway, Iceland and England plus small parts of other countries.

The Vikings traded in big parts of Europe. Swedish Vikings traded and settled in Russia along great rivers and all the way down to Constantinoble, maybe even Baghdad.

Norwegian Vikings traded/settled/plundered in Greenland, Britain, Iceland and America/Newfoundland.

Danish Vikings traded/settled/plundered in Britain, Northern France, Germany, even all the way south to Spain and Italy. Normandy in France was settled by many vikings. Slowly they adapted French culture and language. The King in this area was called Rollo, and his grand-something-son William? later conquered England.

Of course the people where mixed so Swedish Vikings sometimes raided England too etc.

Many times they did not raid the cities, but took taxes not to do it. For example Paris paid taxes to the Vikings several times.

The Vikings traded ivory from Northern Africa and hides from Russia. I think they should definitely have the commercial trait.

 

[Hagbart]

That thing about the Vikings eating poisonous mushrooms all the time is a myth. Maybe a few did do it, but the vast majority did not.

 

[Athelstane]

It was the berserkers who ate the mushrooms before entering battle. The mushroom is actually a drug problem in Norway today, as the mushrooms are used as a narcotic. Its effect reminds of LSD

 

[Hagbart]

Really? ...crazy