I'm not saying you are wrong, but do you have a source? I've seen the theory that viking raids started in part as retaliation for Charlamagne's anti-pagan policies and actions espoused in scholarly works so I'm not prepared to accept without evidence that it is merely a myth made up by white supremacists.
Not really, I haven't seen it in scholarly works so my bias is based on where I encountered it.
But you do get plenty of rubbish in scholarly works too, the fact that its mainly racist Neo-Pagans that adopt those theories does tell you something. It happens to less ugly political ideologies too, see Feminism and the nonsensical Kurgan hypothesis.
And all throughout history, it's the NAVAL superpower who usually won, from the Greeks thru the Vikings on to English and up to America today. Sure, there were exceptions, but generally speaking... if it's a land superpower vs a naval superpower... the land superpower is likely to lose.
The Greeks example doesn't hold water at all.
Carthage vs Rome
Sparta vs Athens
Persia lost to Greece due to logistics, their army was too big. The Persian navy came from Phoenicia which was a far greater naval superpower than Athens, the Athenians won because they controlled the good harbours through land power not because they had better sea power. The Macedonians who conquered the Persians were a land power, not a naval one.
America was an effective naval power once and it was fighting a naval war against another naval power.
And I know the Zulus beat the British in a few battles, but the Brits won that war in the end. I'm sure the Zulus thought the British superior firepower was 'dishonourable'. :laugh:
The Zulus don't seem that upset about the British conquest from what I've seen.
Did the Vikings aid the development of civilization in the west in any way? I studied the Varangians to a certain degree, but I know less about the Vikings in the west.
Only in England's pre-Norman political structure.
The victor also gets to write the official history, including all the "XXX the Great" nametags? Maybe it would be interesting to see the history of the world written more from the losers perspective
No they do not. Most of the examples of victor written history are when literate cultures defeat oral cultures. Often it is the other way round, the American Civil War is a good example.
The Magna Carta was the English saying "No, we're going to codify the traditions that we had for centuries that were given to us by the Vikings"
Yes, I'm oversimplying it, and yes, the Normans were only a few generations removed from being Vikings themselves, but they had absorbed the local continental traditions of Divine Right and general unwavering authority that didn't exist on the English Isle.
Its hard to tell whether or not Anglo-Saxon freedoms were a Viking thing or a Saxon thing. The Magna Carta talks about ancient traditions but it doesn't say they came from the Vikings. Usually Alfred the Great is thought of as creating all English values but that's just myth making.
Divine Right and unwavering authority were invented after the Protestant reformation. Normans didn't care about Divine Right, they lived in an elective monarchy where the King was a trumped up mayor and all the vassals killed each other all the time.
