Vikings Is Based On History... This *beep* Is all Made up By Some AUthor

Swords were rare, only the high status warriors had them, which is alsoo why we find them in burials like the sutton hoo site in england.the axe and spears were much more common. The spear was the main human weapon of war from stone age till gunpowder was invented. In a shield wall you work as a team, each mans shield covers a part of his body and also the man to his left. Watch the early part of the first battle in 300 or the training utyhred gives to the man after alfred acceprs him. You actually kinda form an interlocking layer if protectiin with the men around you in a shield wall.

Migration era swords(viking era swords) are different than the gladius. They are a good deal longer, having been based on the gladius' longer calvary brother the spatha. The longest infantry gladiia are about 32 inches from pommel(the bottom part of the hilt) to the tio of the blade. The longest spatha were about 39 inches. migration period swords are spatha with a hit adapted to styles of hilts wwhich are classified by pommel type, trilobed, lobed or cockelshell. The sword used on history channels vikings are a good represe tation. This sword wood further evolve to the one handed knightly sword you seen in robin hood films and then would have an offshoot branches during the late middle ages leading to longswords(aka bastard sword) and true two handers, neither of which are as heavy as depicted in tv and videogames, european swords even at their heaviest did not excede 15 pounds. Migration era swords would have weighed 3-4 pounds, crusader swords about the same, longswords of the 100 years war era would have weighed as low as 4 pounds for smaller earlier ones and as much as 7 pounds. The big renaisance 6 foot zweihanders would have weigh 6 or seven pounds to around 14 for battlefield swords and up to 20 or even more for heavily decorated ceremonial swords.

Shields would be surprisingly strong as it was made with layered oak plywood and nearly all had a leather facing glued to the business side that would help maintain the shape againts slashes. They were also rimmed with iron around the edges for use as both a weapon and to protect against cuts that hit the rim of the shield. Yest they would break eventually though.

Here is a link to albion swords website that gives the specs and prices of there next generation line. These are expensive functional reproductions but they are often based on real artifacts and show the evolution of the european sword from the around 150 b.c to 1600 a.d. they have several different types of gladius, several viking era swords, a nice group of single handed knightly swords a ton of longswords and about 5 of the big two handed swords from the early renaissance.
http://www.albion-swords.com/swords/albion/swords-albion-mark-nextgen.htm

Language groups. Certain languages shown enough similarity to be grouped together.

English,latin, spanish, german,farisi,hindi are all memebers of the indo european language group. they all have a origin in what philogists call proto indo european, the language that developed somewhere in centrsl russia(humans having walked out of africa and settled all over the world already). These tribes settled an area the stretched from india to ireland After living central russia.the languages they spoke diverged from each other a good deal but groups that settled near each other had more similarites then differences Forming subgroups. All language in a group have similarities but the subgroups even more so.

from indo european you get the indo-aryan subgroup Sanskrit(the oldest extant),farisi, pashto, urdi,hindi,tajik etc

The romance language group latin(oldest of this group still in use), ancient estrucean, spanish, catalian, portugese, french, romanianian,

For the germaninc group you have old norse, old english,modern english, frisian, danish,norwegian,dutch, swedish, german etc

Slavic you get russian, bulgarian, polish,the other eastern european languages.

The other language groups are broken up like this too. Take the afro asiatic group from north africa and the middle east, hebrew,arabic,ancient phoenician would be the semeitc subgroup which chews(then ancient ethiopean language) and ancient egytpian would be the africa branch of the the larger group.