Considering this, Norsemen believed there to be two possibilities in life: "success with its attendant fame or death." The necessity of defending honour with violence, the belief that time of death was preordained, adventure and fearlessness were core values to the Viking Age.
Norsemen believed that the time of death for any individual is predetermined, but that nothing else in life is. With this prevalence of violence came the expectation of fearlessness. Honour could be shamed from mere insults, where Norsemen were legally allowed to react violently. Personal reputation and honour was an important value among Norsemen, and so actionable slander was also a legal category, in addition to physical and material injuries.
This use of violence as an instrument regarding disputes was not limited to a man, but extended to his kin. As a natural consequence, violence was a common feature of the Norse legal environment. police-the enforcement of laws and verdicts fell upon the individual involved in a dispute. Lacking any kind of public executive apparatus-e.g. In the early Viking Age, during the late 8th century and most of the 9th, Norse society consisted of minor kingdoms with limited central authority and organization, leading to communities ruled according to laws made and pronounced by local assemblies called things. Parts of the tactics and warfare of the Vikings were driven by their cultural belief, themselves rooted in Norse culture and religion, and vividly recalled in the later Icelandic sagas written in the 13th-14th centuries after the Christianisation of the Nordic world. Danes, Norwegians, Swedish, Hiberno-Scandinavians, Anglo-Scandinavians, or the inhabitants of any Scandinavian colony who affiliated themselves more strongly with the culture of the colonizer than with that of the indigenous population." Vikings, according to Clare Downham in Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, are "people of Scandinavian culture who were active outside Scandinavia.
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