I love learning history about these things. I have never studied the Vikings, they were painted as savages when I was at school. I must get round to doing some proper reading on them.
The 'Mayans' are another group i want to learn about.
I also love to "un-label" these groups - that helps you understand them better, because it makes them human.
"Vikings" = Scandinavians
"Mayans" = Guatemalans (with the end-of-the-world scare, I always tried to remind people that "mayans" arent some mythical, ancient, extinct culture. 60% of Guatemala are Maya, also a lot of southern Mexico
In the same vein, about half of Peru is considered Quecha and or Aymara = "Inca", with over a million speakers of the old language)
the word "Viking" evolved, and changed meaning even by the time of the viking-age. Exactly what and when and how is obscure, but if we sortof cut it down to the raw basics, it is most likely that it started like
1. (Probably in the bronze age) bandits sailed down the fjords, the INLETS - "vik" (same as -wick-names in english), a viking was simply a notorious band of raiders coming down the fjords. Why fjords? Because Norway is full of mountains. In the bronze age communities/kingdoms were small, numerous and scattered. Imagine a criminal fleeing to Mexico, to avoid American juristiction. The long winding fjords allowed bandits to hit-and-run very effectively, for then to vanish in the many inlets. So the word "viking" most likely started out as a synonym for raider or bandit, just hill-people attacking fellow Norwegians, looting and raping as bandits always do.
2. With that use allready in vocabulary, by the Iron age the world would allready signify a raider, wether he be a bandit criminal, or a brave warrior raiding foreign settlements. By the viking-age Scandinavians use the word as a noun, to describe a brave soldier who has participated in foreign raids, and brought home loot and gold, often as a compliment "He is a great viking!"
3. Eventually, the word begins to signify more and more foreign adventures, and becomes a verb, with vikings themselves refering to "Let's go viking!" "He has travelled off viking in the south."
Black death strikes Norway, a "dark era" begins, and as the nation is rebuilt, gunpowder and new trends are imported. Old notions are pushed away as primitive, and the word falls out of use completely, untill national-romantic renaissance, especially in Norway and especially after centuries of being Sweden/Denmark's bitch, we begin to long for something to be proud of. Icelandic sagas are given attention, Snorris writings, and the tales of violence and horror is "better than nothing" because at least we are badasses and not bitches in those tales. Horns on helmets comes from a Swedish painter from the same period, responding to the new romantic idea of the ancestor barbarians, and from there on it will take us another century to form a much more realistic and nuanced picture of "vikings".
Today most Norwegians will almost compensate, and argue to you that vikings were "not as bad as everyone says" and such, which I consider common sense, but maybe not everyone does.
Normal viking-age Scandinavians were farmers, as you can imagine, but the pre-christian ones did worship warfare and death by war, and so participation in foreign raids was not too uncommon, and in certain periods youth were mass-drafted for adventures abroad, many went willingly, others were dragged along against their will, sortof something that was compulsory.
Due to the fragmented nature of populations, there were also wars between kingdoms, but that is the same for most places in those days, such as todays England - back then consisting of various rivalling kingdoms, warring for territory, on and off.
All of this stretches over centuries though, and over many independent kingdoms at the time, so there is no ONE right answer.
"Berserker" is an even more obscure and complicated term to decyphre
