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VIKING SAGAS ON COMBAT AND CURIOSITY
ECONOMIC TIMES 17/2/24
LIFE WAS TOUGH FOR VIKINGS, THEY WERE FIERCELY INDEPENDENT PEOPLE, AND VALUED TRUST AND TEAMWORK
DEVDUTT PATTNAIK… AUTHOR OF BUSINESS SUTRA

The Greeks had inspired the Romans 2500 years ago. The Romans established a great empire around the Mediterranean for over a thousand years. Around the time they turned Christians, they began encountering barbarians from the North. The Celts, the Gauls, the Goths, in the western or Latin end of the Empire, around 500 AD, and later, the Vikings, in the eastern or Greek end of the Empire, around 1000 AD.
    Like the Greeks, life was tough for the Vikings, and they were fiercely independent people. Some, not all of them, travelled on ships to distant lands to raid. The shipping experience taught them the value of trust and teamwork. Vikings lived in Northern Europe (Scandinavia), in cold, dark, wintry lands, close to the Arctic. They had to fight to survive. So their mythological sagas spoke of battle all the time. Their gods fought frost giants in icy lands, and trolls who lived in dark, damp spaces.
    The gods even fought each other. The realm of the gods was located on branches of a giant tree, and it was feared that the roots of this would eventually be gnawed by demons, and everything would one day come to an end, even for the gods. A depressing worldview.
    The Vikings believed that if they died bravely in battle, they would be taken by Valkyries to Valhalla, a great hall to wine, dine, and fight with the gods themselves. This motivated the Vikings to fight. And to face death fearlessly. Those Vikings who died non-violent deaths, because of disease, accidents, and old age, had an unremarkable afterlife in the land of shadows ruled by Hel, a goddess who never smiled.
    The Vikings had two sets of gods, the Vanir, who enjoyed trade and the Aesir, who preferred the raid, as revealed in the following story. The Vanir and the Aesir were both gods, but very different. Vanir had magic, and Aesir had strength. Freyja of the Vanir visited the Aesir and displayed her gold, giving it to all those who made her happy. Under the spell of gold, the Aesir soon forgot all about loyalty to the clan and kept seeking more and more of the shiny stuff, offering gods and services in exchange. They stored more and shared less.
    Aesir blamed Freya’s magical gold for this shift in values. Aesir tried to burn Freya alive, but she resurrected herself each time, for she had magic. This led to war between Vanir and Aesir, which was inconclusive. Finally, the Vanir and the Aesir decided to make peace. Two Vanir went to live with the Aesir, and two Aesir went to live with the Vanir. Thus, they would learn about each other’s ways.
    The two Vanir, Freyr and Frerja, children of the wealthy Njord, taught the Aesir how the fertility of the earth and the sea can help them survive, and how accounting ensures fairness. The two Aesir, Hoenir and Mimir, taught Vanir about the value of loyalty and comradeship over being calculative.
    The Vanir liked the handsome well spoken Hoenir, but not the silent Mimir, who only whispered in Hoenir’s ear and spoke to no one else. Hoenir and Mimir always travelled together, talking to each other secretly, and this made the Vanir so uncomfortable that they killed Mimir. They did not realise that while Hoenir was handsome and charming, he needed Mimir’s counsel to make smart decisions. The two worked well as a team. Without Mimir, Hoenir had no good counsel. All he could say to the Vanir in meetings when they sought a decision was, ‘Let others decide!’
This story reminds us that different cultures value different things, and for a civilisation to thrive, we have to learn how different cultures function. The Aesir had to learn the trading ways of the Vanir based on agreements and negotiations. The Vanir had to learn the raiding ways of the Aesir based on trust, teamwork, and unquestioning loyalty.
The Aesir were traders and accountants who valued policies and profit over people. This creates a fair professional ecosystem where relationships do not matter and nepotism does not take root. The Vanir were all about people, about bonding, about passion and trust. Here, connections matter: you bypass the rule for the relationship, like breaking the protocol for the benefit of a friend.
The Romans saw the Vikings are barbarians and were eager to make them Christian, for they believed their truth was the universal truth. They were not interested in learning from ‘lesser’ people. For Romans, the other had to be subjugated. They were resources and rivals to be enslaved and brought into the Roman fold. In time, the Viking lands of Scandinavia would give rise to the Dutch, who would change the world forever by inventing the stock market, a financial revolution that provided vast amounts of credit to the newly emerging industrial economy. Was this because the Vikings turned Christians, or was it because the Vikings remembered their old ways– the ways of the Aesir and the Vanir? We can only speculate.

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Posted by Kamlesh Tripathi

Author, Poet, & Columnist

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