My own take on this is that yes, vikings are absolutely a type of pirate. I should probably justify this.

I define a "pirate" as someone who conducts robbery and/or acts of criminal violence (as opposed to state warfare) using ships. Boarding other ships is just one kind of pirate activity - not necessarily the *main* (and definitely not the only) pirate activity. The Caribbean pirates that have become the cultural archetype of piracy often attacked coastal or island settlements - and their contemporaries operating out of North Africa would *preferentially* attack coastal settlements, because it was a lot more profitable. The loot was *a lot* better, and also there were ample opportunities to enslave people to sell. Hm, sounds a lot like the old viking playbook, right?

Weren't viking raids acts of war rather than acts of piracy? I'd say no, because in the majority of the late Nordic Iron Age, there weren't really any cohesive state-level constructs in Scandinavia at all. Viking raids were usually carried out by minor warlords, local chieftains and groups of farmers and craftsmen who went raiding seasonally. They'd then sail to places like England, Ireland and France (or, very often, just elsewhere in Scandinavia) to carry out brutal hit-and-run attacks on usually poorly-defended high-value targets and go back home a lot richer (and often with enslaved prisoners). *This* is precisely the activity that Northmen of the time would refer to as going viking. ("viking" is an activity, a "vikingr" is someone who carries out that activity.) As power centralized and kings consolidated their power, they established more organized armies and naval forces, and the viking raids were gradually supplanted by coordinated military activity and outright warfare. But by then, they didn't really resemble the typical "viking raid" as much as just another example of medieval amphibious warfare.

Weren't most people in Scandinavia at the time peaceful farmers and craftspeople who never participated in piracy? Sure! But they also weren't vikings, and certainly didn't consider themselves vikings. As said, "viking" is an activity (and a kind of part-time job descriptor), it is a modern invention for it to denote an ethnic or national identity.

(Fun fact, by the way: In Danish, the native word for "pirate" is "sørøver", which literally means "sea robber". Swedish has "sjöröver" and Norwegian has "sjørøver" with the same etymology.

All three languages also have "pirat", which like English "pirate" is a loanword from Greek.)

@datarama were the raids seasonal? In The Dawn of Everything from David Graeber and David Wengrow, they talk about seasonal hunter gatherers, which have a different social arrangement (hierarchical or more egalitarian) during a more dispersed season, or when the all gather in a settlement for part of the year. Could this apply here?

@isma_rgz Raids were highly seasonal, for the simple pragmatic reason that you *really* don't want to go sailing in Iron Age sailships during the Scandinavian winter if you can at all avoid it - so raiding typically happened in summer. Also, most of these people were farmers who raided part-time, so they had to be home to oversee planting and harvesting. But the social arrangement was pretty typical for a settled agrarian society.

(Incidentally, this is very likely the reason why Nordic women had unusually high social status for a patriarchal Iron Age society: They were in charge of many high-status farmsteads, households and other holdings while men were out raiding. This meant that they also had to be able to organize (and participate in) armed defense if their own home got raided, so they had to learn tactics and weapon skills. Obviously not all the men went raiding (quite a lot of them were probably as unfit for that sort of thing as, say, I myself would be!), but many of the rich and high-status ones did. Unsurprisingly, since coming home with a large pile of loot was a very effective way to become rich and high-status in the first place.

Incidentally, since going raiding is also a very effective way to get yourself killed, it wasn't that unusual for women to inherit and own large amounts of valuable property, including land.)