Vikings in early medieval narratives: how an occupation became an ethnicity

‘ “Viking” was a job description, not an ethnicity’: this phrase will be familiar to anyone who has engaged with the recent public history of the Viking Age. Yet early medieval writers did not make such a clear distinction between occupation and identity. This chapter focuses, not on the word ‘viking’, but on the concept of the ‘Scandinavian seaborne raider’ as it is employed by modern historians and archaeologists. It is argued that early medieval writers represented the activities of ‘seaborne raiders’ in the Viking Age in terms of ethnicity; moreover, the grouping of disparate individuals and groups into a single descriptive mode can be recognised as concealing multiple identities and affiliations among those we now term ‘vikings’. Thus, the category of a ‘Scandinavian seaborne raider’ originated as a form of ‘othering’, but ultimately came to be used as a source of self-identity, too.