@Archaia brings forth Vikings

Here’s an excerpt from interviews with SAGA creators Brian Gottesman and Ara Katz at AmberUnmasked.

I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about the Viking Age.  The image most people have of an early medieval Norseman is of a violent, ignorant savage.  The truth is that there’s another side to Norse culture to which most people are never exposed – they were great artisans and technicians, master shipbuilders and navigators.  They were well traveled – there were Norse colonists and merchants pretty much everywhere between the shores of Newfoundland and the steppes of southern Russia. They wrote some of the greatest literature Western civilization has ever produced, and some incredibly intricate and moving poetry.  And they were very savvy lawmakers – a lot of the concepts we take for granted today, like trial by jury, came at least in part from Scandinavia. In some places they were pioneers of republican government – early Iceland had laws, a legislature and a court system but no king. So they may as a group have been warlike (though I’m not convinced they were exceptionally so) but they were also products of an extremely sophisticated and in some ways cosmopolitan culture.

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