In THIS charming Mailbag Missive, it was implied that Viking use of chariots was an anachronism, created by poor scholarship.
What about Thor? the Norse Storm God supposedly was transported across the sky in a chariot drawn by two goats.
Ah…goats & the SDMB…a fine old tradition! From launching them into orbit via home-made cannons, to ah, “other applications” in newbie initiations… 
Dangit, Bosda, you beat me. More to the point, Snorri Sturluson specifically refers for Thor’s chariots and goats in one of the quest myths from the Prose Edda. Naturally, like most of my cites, my copies of the (translated) Eddas are packed away in storage.
Doesn’t Beowulf come riding into a town in a chariot in a rage and the women of the town are forced to expose themselves to him to get him to calm down?
Well, okay. I knew about Thor’s goats, but I had half forgotten. Nevertheless, I expect real Vikings would no sooner drive a chariot than they would sip tea with their pinkies sticking up in the air. Snorri’s story about Thor and Utgard-Loki, which features the goats and chariot, begins “Þat er upphaf þessa máls.” If my Old Norse isn’t too rusty means something like “It was at the beginning of time”. It’s one thing for a god to fly through the air on a magic chariot drawn by magic goats at the beginning of time. It’s quite another for a self-respecting Viking warrior to try slogging through real woods and real swamps in a real chariot drawn by real animals. Thor’s mileage may vary.
:dubious:
Chariots, as well as other cultural artifacts, do not appear out of thin air.
If Thor had a chariot, then in all likelyhood, there were chariots. And the idea that there were fewer roads after “the beginning of time” seems unlikely.
Damn, I may have to rethink this. I got this chariots-don’t-belong-in-Viking-art idea from “Romanticism and Revival” a chapter by Jöran Mjöberg in the book The Northern World, edited by David M. Wilson (1980). Now that I look, I can find references to “chariots” or two-wheeled carts being discovered in several Viking burials, including the Oseberg cart. The purpose of these carts appears to be in dispute.
Ahem.
Be careful. The meaning of the word “chariot” varies between “a cart with two large wheels, carrying one or two standing passangers, drawn by horses, used in the ancient mediterranean world for warfare and for racing” to “a speedy horse-drawn vehicle”.
heimkringla on line
this make you feel better? 
The Oseberg cart is a four-wheeled chariot, there is an image on The Viking Ship Museum’s webpage. The Oseberg ship itself was used as a burial ship for two women, most probably a queen and her servant. I believe the consensus it that the cart is not a chariot for use in battle, but rather the queen’s method of transportation. (You don’t expect a queen to walk? :p) The ship itself was “in all probability intended to be used as a royal pleasure vessel for sailing along the coast.”
First I want to apologize if the sarcasm in my first post offended anyone. Let us reason together, because I ain’t doing so well on my own.
In Snorri’s prose edda, the Norse noun translated “chariot” is reið (related to English “ride”). Normally that means something like “the act of riding” [on horseback], but that doesn’t make any sense in context. How certain the “chariot” translation is, I don’t know, but it does seem to refer to some type of vehicle. (It’s analagous to calling your car “my ride” I guess). Freyja was supposed to drive a cat-drawn chariot, but I’m not sure if the same Norse word is used. I can’t find any Norse texts that use the word reið in the sense of a vehicle outside of a mythological context. It’s times like this I wish I had access to a really good Norse dictionary.
Why is the theme from Mr. Ed running through my noggin?
“A Norse Is A Norse,
Of Course, Of Course…”
It was witnessed by the Romans that a cart was used to haul around symbols, or idols of Nerthus. I believe the cart was pulled by oxen, or maybe the slaves that tended it- (who were later drowned). It seems that maybe the chariot was sort of a “cart” of honour, used by important people or religious figures, not necessarily an every-day-use kind of thing. Apparently only gods and rich folk enjoyed the pleasure.
Well, by then, they were driving Volvos, of course.
[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Chariots, as well as other cultural artifacts, do not appear out of thin air.
If Thor had a chariot, then in all likelyhood, there were chariots. And the idea that there were fewer roads after “the beginning of time” seems unlikely.
[/QUOTE]
Certainly there were…and the Norse would have known about them. After all, the Romans used the things, if for nothing else for victory parades for their emperors…which seems a good rough analogy to Thor with his goats (even a bit of irony considering the goat part, though no idea if there is a connection).
Are you saying that because of sagas with Thor riding a chariot that means the Norse or Vikings used them as well? I know that pre-Norse folks in Britain used chariots, so I suppose it’s possible, but to me it’s more likely that they simply knew about the things, and perhaps associated them with power and prestige, so had Thor riding about in them (weren’t the goats magical, so that he could eat them every night yet they were always back with him pulling his cart the next day, or am I mixing my myths?)
A revived zombie thread, but the topic itself hasn’t been time-critical for the last 1200 years, so I’ll carry on:
Wouldn’t we logically expect more-or-less every major Eurasian Iron Age culture to have had chariots at some point in its distant background, since chariot conquerors swept up effectively all of the desirable lands – dominating, killing or marginalizing pretty much everyone else for 500 years? Certainly the Vikings did not use chariots during the heyday of their raids on England, but it doesn’t seem implausible they’d have a long racial memory associating chariots with rulership, either their own or that of their oppressors.
MOD NOTE:
Just to alert people, this was a thead from 2004, until it was revived yesterday (10-Mar-2013) by FreyaCat in post #13. That’s OK, we don’t mind resurrected threads in this forum, but I do want people posting to be aware that it’s an old, old thread.
How much has ancient Norwegian chariot scholarship advanced in 10 years?
European or African Norwegian chariot scholarship?
The Celts used chariots extensively both in battle and for just getting around. The Celts for the most part predated the Vikings, of course, but not by so much that the Viking’s ancestors (that is, their North Germanic ancestors, before they migrated North) wouldn’t have known about them.
Chariots also play a role in Irish mythology, as well as Norse, which the Vikings would have known when they occupied Dublin, if not from other sources.
There’s a rather famous bronze chariot figure depicting the Sun Chariot, from around 1400 bc, that was found in a Denmark bog, but very little is known about it definitively. It might be some sort of proto-Norse idea, or possibly Celtic (the Celtic sky god, Taranis, also used a chariot and threw lightning bolts). Basically, sun chariots are a common Indo-European idea.
Anyway, Vikings would certainly have heard about chariots, but as sea raiders, cavalry wasn’t their focus.