Nick Trueman wrote: |
I dont believe a mace was beneath any culture, I also dont believe Norse peoples came into any contact with maces during the Viking period. I exclude the Ruso/Norse who traveled into eastern Russia. |
How do you assume that the Ruso / Norse who travelled into eastern Russia, and other places like Byzantium, didn't come into any contact with other Vikings back home or in various other parts of Europe they had colonized? Harald Hardrada was a soldier in the employ of the Byzantines for many years and fought in North Africa, Syria, an Sicily. He most certainly encountered a variety of exotic weapons and armor, and he ended up returning to Norway to become king and then invading England, albiet unsuccessfully ;)
It's not like the Vikings only went into one zone and never came back. Guys like Gange Rolfe roamed all over nearly the whole extent of Norse infested territories before settling down in Rouen. He could almost as easily ended up in Russia or the Baltic or in Ireland.
Given their vast trade networks, propensity for extremely far-flung foreign adventures, constant fluid, restless movement in this period and their demonstrable readiness, even eagerness to experiment and innovate, I think it's bizarre to assume that the Vikings would have not had awareness of and contact with all kinds of foreign influences or that they would have simply had some kind of ingrained rigid cultural prejudice against them. We also know for certain that they were very quick to adopt foreign cultures from language to dress to quite specificaly military kit. For example Norman heavy Cavalry and Rus horse archers.
Whether or not they had maces is not something I can say but some of these arguments seem to me to have holes in them unless I'm missing something. If they didn't use maces at all I would guess it was due to pragmatic reasons, such as not using cavalry.
I would say the jury is definitely still out, I'm learning a lot here. From Elling Poldens post I've learned that aparently they did use some kind of long hafted mace-like weapon with a stone head called a "Pålstafr".
Thanks for posting those images btw those are fascinating weapons.
J