(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.)
