Comment by INTPenis
16 hours ago
I know it's frustrating but media sort of reflects the most cautious and the most adventurous opinions of archaeology. Because saying vikings started at 793 is just a safe archaeological opinion, while even the romans built coastal forts along the british east coast to defend against "pirates".
Then the media will turn around and print something absolutely outlandish based on a total hypothesis, just because it attracts clicks.
Those forts: https://www.roman-britain.co.uk/military/roman-frontier-syst...
This site suggests "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians". That seems like the more parsimonious explanation.
Yeah but again we're coming up against safe archaelogical assumptions based on findings. But when we're talking Saxons and Frisians I find it hard to fail to mention the Angles and the Jutes.
> This site suggests "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians". That seems like the more parsimonious explanation.
More... than what? What do you think Vikings are?
Scandinavian? Different tribes? Danes, at least?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Europe_a...
INTPenis is mentioning Angles and Jutes because they were in present day Denmark (and England). You might ask what the cultural difference is, from Vikings, and I'd flounder. Vikings spoke Old Norse, a germanic language related to whatever the other tribes spoke (um, West Germanic, such as Old Frankish). They believed in gods related to the gods of these other tribes and used similar runes.
Well, the Saxons famously had Saxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seax
If you want to say this is an arbitrary modern set of categories ... I guess the Romans are responsible for the categorization really, by writing down tribe names such as Frisii.
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