How Did the Vikings Become Christians?

  I recently took a class in Christian History and one of the things in the class caught my attention and really inspired me and made me feel excited.  I was learning about how the Vikings became Christian.  I grew up as a kid thinking the Vikings were super cool and I have vivid memories of running around the school with sticks pretending to be a Viking and playing with my friends.  So finding out that Viking history is a part of Christian history was an amazing fact for me and added to my strong belief that it is so exciting to be a Christian.

  At this time the Vikings called Scandinavia home and during this time they went through a drastic and rapid religious change.  At the time the Vikings were polytheists.  Which means they were pagan and believed in many gods.  They began to attack and raid Christian monasteries along the coats lines mainly due to the fact that monasteries were wealthy and they were not very heavily defended.  When they Vikings plundered these monasteries they also took Christian monks with them as slaves.  From what I know of Christianity, isn't that exactly how you would expect Christianity to change the heart of a Viking?  Through humble slaves.  From what we can see the Vikings started converting to Christianity quite rapidly.  One of the ways we can see this is archaeologically.  We can see pagan burial practices disappearing and Christian type burials appearing.

I would really like to explore this topic further in my blog in the future but for today, I am happy to know that Vikings are in my Christian family history, and I am so inspired that with their rapid conversion we can know the same thing can happen today.