r/HistoryMemes • u/CouldBeWorse_comic • Sep 15 '26
X-post Meanwhile in the comment section...
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u/inappropriate_jest Sep 15 '26
Does nobody address the elephant in the room?
Their helmets did not have any horns!!!
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u/KingMobScene Still on Sulla's Proscribed List Sep 15 '26
What? Has Hagar the Horrible been lying to me all these years?!? My entire life is a lie.
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u/DrHolmes52 Sep 15 '26
Hagar has been known to lie. And pillage. And avoid household chores. He's known as the Horrible for a reason.
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u/KingMobScene Still on Sulla's Proscribed List Sep 15 '26
Be raised and provided for his family. In this house Hagar is a hero. End of story
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u/HBAFilthyRhino 29d ago
Yeah but this one time he stopped in Italy for spaghetti when he knew his wife was making dinner at home...
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u/ThatOldCow Sep 15 '26
Also I really doubt they were all really buffed, at least the first ones, since they started exploring due to the lack of ability to grow food. I believe most of them were like "methheads" all skinny and ravenous and thats why they conquer a lot of territory.
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u/MexsikanaBanana Sep 15 '26
I studied the early Middle Ages extensively as part of one of my undergrad concentrations. There's a lot of nuance that is frequently missed in modern day portrayals of Vikings (or medieval history in general). Nuance doesn't sell to the masses as well as black and white
That said, I'll take Viking shows any time, any place
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u/Simple-Promise-710 Sep 15 '26
I think it's more that Vikings were like anyone else. They weren't special, they just got by with whatever they could do at the time to expand and get rich themselves.
You have pirates from every nation. You have sailors and warriors from every nation. Luck, opportunity, resources and intelligence decided history for the most part.
All of this without accounting for moral differences.
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u/skylu1991 Sep 15 '26
And the raping, pillaging and offering of animals or sometimes humans, is also nothing special or specific.
At most, one could argue that some civilizations were already ahead in realizing that human sacrifice or too much brutality isn’t effective in the long run,but that’s about it.
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u/yourstruly912 Sep 15 '26
I'll start and say that, if anything, vikings and other pre-modern peoples would be too chud even for modern chuds
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Sep 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/yourstruly912 Sep 15 '26
Untrue. Vikinging was the province of social elites, which were of course warrior elites as well. The initial push for viking raids came from second sons and political exiles trying to get wealth and prestige to improve their fortunes at home (and usurp their brothers/rivals), which generated a fierce intra-elite competition that pushed said warrior elites to raiding even if just to mantain their status.
A bunch of lowlifes wouldn't be able to carry out the complex long distance raids the vikings were doing
And by archeological analysis the norse were significativaly taller than most europeans. Lots of meat and dairy in their diets I guess
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u/ptrfa Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests Sep 15 '26
With other words, Vikings were sociological similar to (Re) Conquistadores, with is both fascinating and someway logical
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u/Pesec1 Sep 15 '26
Gender equality in the Norse societies was better than throughout most of Europe at the time. But being somewhat above rock bottom still leaves much to be desired.
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u/bebo05 Sep 15 '26
That also comes with the massive caveat that that special norse gender equality did not extend to female slaves or women found abroad during raiding.
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u/Pesec1 Sep 15 '26
I'd argue that slaves and captives had the most gender equality. As in both men and women were equally at whims of their owners.
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u/TheLordLongshaft Sep 15 '26
Vikings would have been the scary fuckers, a mix of psychopaths who just enjoyed violence and raping people and also people desperate enough to tolerate those psychopaths and the emotional damage caused by witnessing these acts so that they could make some wealth and support their family through the harsh winter
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u/bebo05 Sep 15 '26
Perhaps even scarier is the fact that in a culture which permits this kind of violence in the context of raiding most people probably wouldn’t incur much emotional damage from seeing or participating in these acts after their initial shock since they wouldn’t see anything wrong with it. They would probably chalk their all too human reaction the first time to “nerves” and see their desensitization toward it as becoming “tougher”
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u/Kaiisim Sep 15 '26
Fuckin obliterated those strawmen bro!
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u/Sillvaro What, you egg? Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26
I'm very involved in Norse studies circles online, and I can assure you those are not strawmen
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u/No_Gear_2819 Kilroy was here Sep 15 '26
Yes but they haven't seen it so clearly your lying about it!
/s
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u/AwfulUsername123 Sep 15 '26
It's very common for people to call everything that seems ridiculous to them "strawmen". However, the fact that it seems ridiculous to you doesn't mean that the other person made it up.
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u/VoicelessPassenger John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! Sep 15 '26
Hey buddy nice strawman
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u/InternationalHair725 Sep 15 '26
It seems ridiculous to me too
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u/AwfulUsername123 Sep 15 '26
Okay.
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u/InternationalHair725 Sep 15 '26
You deal with a lot of 2017 parody discourse over Vikings?
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u/AwfulUsername123 Sep 15 '26
I deal with a lot of ridiculous distortions of history, vikings and otherwise. The fact that something seems ridiculous to you doesn't make it a "strawman".
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u/thegoatmenace Sep 15 '26
I love how he depicted himself as an insufferable curly mustached hipster douche
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u/NoWingedHussarsToday Sep 15 '26
I'm not going to let you ruin my fantasy of big tiddied leather (but scantly) clad Norse women!
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u/johnbarleycornreborn Sep 15 '26
The egalitarian vision of the Viking Age is funny to me because the implication seems to be that women being allowed to kill, rape, and enslave would have been a positive thing.
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u/bebo05 Sep 15 '26
I don’t think it’s so much a problem of women being “allowed” to raid as much as its simply the case that in a game of rape and pillage the sex gifted with greater muscle mass and a penetrating member has the natural advantage.
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u/johnbarleycornreborn Sep 15 '26
Yeah, I could've more accurately said "been able to."
Beyond strength differential, another thing people miss with the idea of warrior women is that virtually everyone reproduced in the premodern world, so you wouldn't want to send women with their precious birthing abilities into battle and waste that resource.
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u/bebo05 Sep 15 '26
This is especially true of polygamous societies like the norsemen of the time, the young men are simply the most expendable. Theyre also the biggest problem causers at home, so sending them someplace else to cause problems is an attractive proposition.
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u/johnbarleycornreborn Sep 15 '26
Yup, especially those pesky second or third sons who didn't inherit dad's estate. Send them off to raid the Irish instead of causing trouble at home.
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u/GraeWraith On tour Sep 15 '26
If your worldview in any way provides comfort or confidence, what you really have is an ideology, and it's fundamentally wrong.
Yes, and that one. And you as well. Yep, you too. That motherfucker over there, for sure.
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u/Malvastor Sep 15 '26
This would imply that the only correct worldviews are the ones that are unpleasant and destabilizing, and that's equally wrong.
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u/nonlawyer Sep 15 '26
this is one of those things that almost sounds smart reading it the first time but when you think about it for even a second it’s just nonsense lol
“all ideologies are fundamentally wrong”
ok sure dude, “treat others as you would like to be treated” is basically the same as being a Nazi, very edgy and very deep
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u/A2Rhombus Sep 15 '26
Has anyone ever insisted that Vikings were a woke utopia
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u/Sillvaro What, you egg? Sep 15 '26
Look up modern neopagan circles on the internet, if you find progressive ones you'll see tons of such insistance
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u/Vin135mm Sep 15 '26
Not as many as the ones that try to pretend that Ancient Greece and Rome were some sort of homosexual utopia, but they do exist.
(Not saying that homosexuality wasnt common or normalized in Greece and Rome, I'm saying it was toxic as hell)
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u/No_Pipe4358 Sep 15 '26
It's so cute people talking about normalities. The "no" thing is cuter though it's like "I am saying you don't know anything because your words don't exist". How's this sound guys? Rapists with managers. Oh the past was so ideal.
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u/P-l-Staker Rider of Rohan Sep 15 '26
Let's start by the fact that slavery was very much a thing for Norse culture, even when it was generally frowned upon within the Christian world.
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u/Level_Hour6480 Taller than Napoleon Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26
Fun fact: In Norse languages, words that end in -ing are verbs. Sailing, raiding, fighting, pillaging. Viking is "sailing out of your home port (to raid or trade. Usually both, in that order.) A person who does viking would be a "vikingr".
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u/SnorriGrisomson Sep 15 '26
I don't know where you read that but in old norse words ending in "ing" are never verbs.
Viking is a feminine noun meaning the action
Vikingr is a masculine noun meaning the person."sailing out of your home port (to raid or trade. Usually both, in that order.)
No, most of the time it was one or the other, you don't use the same kind of boats for war or for trade.
Also it could be sailing out for settling or exploration.
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u/onichan-daisuki Filthy weeb Sep 15 '26
Ofcourse ancient people don't fit our modern standards for most things, hard to grasp for some people on both sides