The Viking Age: Scandinavian Raiders, Traders, and Settlers (c. 793–1066)

Introduction

The Viking Age was the roughly three-century period, conventionally dated from 793 to 1066, during which Scandinavian peoples — chiefly Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes — projected power across an astonishing geographical range. They sailed down the rivers of Russia to the Black Sea and Constantinople, settled Iceland and Greenland, briefly colonized North America, harried the coasts of the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, taxed the Frankish emperors, and absorbed Christianity as they were absorbed into the political and religious structures of medieval Europe. The image of the horned-helmeted raider is a nineteenth-century invention; the historical Norseman was a farmer, a sailor, a merchant, a colonist, a poet, and a lawmaker, who often took up arms not from a taste for violence but because wealth, status, and survival in early medieval Scandinavia could be won as readily abroad as at home.

The conventional limits of 793 and 1066 are convenient but somewhat artificial. The 793 attack on Lindisfarne was a shock to contemporaries, but Scandinavian raiding in the North Sea was already decades old by that date, and small-scale activity in the Baltic can be traced back even earlier. The end point of 1066 is similarly conventional: the battle of Stamford Bridge, in which the English king Harold Godwinson defeated and killed the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, took place only a few weeks before William of Normandy’s victory at Hastings. Both combatants were descendants of Viking settlers, and the real transformation was already well underway. Some historians therefore prefer to think of the Viking Age as a phase in a longer process of Scandinavian engagement with the wider world, beginning in the eighth century and continuing, in different forms, into the twelfth. For the specific question of periodization, see when did the Viking Age start and end.

This article surveys the Viking Age as a whole: the Scandinavian homeland that produced the expansion, the causes of the great outward movement, the chronology of the raids and settlements, the trading networks that linked the North Sea to the Caspian, the gradual Christianization of the North, and the political developments that ended the era. Readers who want depth on a particular subtopic should continue to the articles on the Viking society and culture, Viking raids and expansion, Viking ships and technology, and Norse mythology and religion.

Scandinavia on the Eve of the Viking Age

The Scandinavian peninsula and the islands of Denmark were home to a patchwork of small kingdoms and tribal communities. In Denmark the Danes were loosely unified under kings based at sites such as Lejre and, later, Jelling. In Norway a long line of petty kings contended for control of the fjords and mountain valleys; only slowly did royal power consolidate. In Sweden the Svear of the Mälaren valley and the Götar of the south were only intermittently joined under a single crown. In the hinterlands of each, smaller chieftains ruled over single valleys or fjord districts, and the political map of the North in the eighth century looked more like a checkerboard than a hierarchy.

The society was overwhelmingly rural. Farmers cultivated barley, rye, and oats, kept cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats, fished, and hunted in the deep forests that still covered much of the interior. Iron was extracted from bog ore and worked at the smithy that was the heart of every farmstead. Communities were bound together by kin, by the þing (assembly) where free men debated and judged, and by ties of loyalty to a chieftain or king. Slaves, captured or born into bondage, formed an underclass whose labor supported the households of the wealthy. The typical settlement was a small group of farmsteads, often fortified with a bank and ditch, clustered around a central hall. Birka, near modern Stockholm, and Hedeby, at the base of the Jutland peninsula, were already substantial trading centers by the eighth century, with hundreds of inhabitants and workshops producing combs, beads, and metalwork for export.

Norse religion, with its pantheon of gods — Odin, Thor, Freyr, Freyja, and many others — and its belief in a heroic afterlife in Valhalla, shaped the moral imagination of the age. Sacrifices were made at holy sites, both at natural features such as groves, springs, and lakes, and at constructed temples. The greatest of these was the temple at Uppsala in Sweden, described by Adam of Bremen in the eleventh century as a place where every nine years a great festival was held and where the bodies of the sacrificed were hung in a sacred grove. For a more detailed treatment of daily life, see the Viking society and culture; for the gods and the cosmology they inhabited, see the Norse mythology and religion.

A handful of features of this homeland are essential to understanding the Viking expansion. First, Scandinavia was rich in certain resources — furs, amber, iron, walrus ivory, and, in the ninth century, an apparently abundant supply of silver — and poor in others, most notably salt, grain, and manufactured luxuries. The exchange of these resources for the silver, glass, silks, and wine of the Frankish and Byzantine worlds was a powerful incentive for trade and raiding alike. Second, the long coastline and the rivers that bite deeply into the land produced a maritime culture from earliest times. By the eighth century, the clinker-built sailing ship, light enough to be beached and flexible enough to ride out Atlantic storms, was already a mature Scandinavian technology. Third, the consolidation of royal power in Denmark and Norway produced losers — younger sons, dispossessed chieftains, and outcasts — who had every incentive to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Fourth, the development of new ship technology, especially the sailing longship, made long-distance raiding and trade suddenly much more practical. The reasons for going abroad were therefore a mixture of push and pull, and historians have come to see the Viking Age less as a sudden eruption of violence than as a complex response to opportunity.

The Opening of the Viking Age: 793–820

The Viking Age is conventionally dated from 8 June 793, when a raiding party landed on the small island of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Alcuin of York both recorded the shock of the attack on the monastery, a place renowned for the tomb of St Cuthbert and for the recently written Lindisfarne Gospels. The English writer saw the assault as a punishment for sin, a theme that would be repeated every time another church was burned or another coastal community was slaughtered. The scale of the violence at Lindisfarne — the killing of monks, the carrying off of treasures — established a pattern that raiders would repeat at monasteries throughout the British Isles and Frankia for the next century.

In the years that followed, raids struck Iona in 795 and 802, and in 799 a party attacked the rich monastery of Noirmoutier at the mouth of the Loire. The anonymous monk of Noirmoutier left a vivid account of the appearance of the raiders and the terror of the local population. In 807 a Scandinavian fleet entered the Mediterranean via the Straits of Gibraltar and attacked the Balearic Islands, an episode that foreshadowed later Viking activity in al-Andalus. By the 820s the raiding had become regular: coastal villages in Frisia and along the Seine were paying off Scandinavian warbands, and the first fortified bridges, the so-called pontes, were being thrown across the lower Seine to block Viking longships from sailing up to Paris. The first major attack on a Frankish royal center came in 820 at the mouth of the Seine. For a fuller account of this opening, see what was the Lindisfarne raid and the broader Viking raids and expansion.

The Great Raids: 830s–880s

The 830s and 840s saw Viking activity intensify dramatically. The activity was no longer a matter of single fleets appearing off a coast in summer; increasingly, raiders established winter camps, returning year after year. In 841 a fleet sailed up the Seine and sacked Rouen. In 843 Bordeaux was plundered, and Nantes on the Loire was sacked during a Christmas attack in 843 in which the bishop was killed at the altar. In 845 a fleet of 600 ships, commanded by a leader the Frankish sources call Reginherus — almost certainly the same person as the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok — sailed up the Elbe and devastated Hamburg, and in the same year a separate fleet attacked Paris for the first time.

The mid-840s also brought the first major Viking assault on the English kingdoms. In 851 a great Viking army, the micel here of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sacked Canterbury and London and was only defeated by a West Saxon levy under King Æthelwulf at the battle of Aclea. Yet the great shift came in 865, when the so-called “Great Heathen Army” landed in East Anglia. Unlike previous raiders, this force came to conquer, not merely to plunder. It took York in 866, killed the Northumbrian kings Ælla and Osberht at the battle of York, installed the puppet king Ecgberht, and then moved against Mercia. The East Anglian king Edmund was killed in 869, a martyrdom later celebrated as that of St Edmund. The army installed a Danish puppet, drove the Mercian king Burgred from his throne in 874, and only failed to conquer Wessex, which held out under Alfred the Great, who succeeded his brother as king in 871. For the Anglo-Saxon context of these campaigns, see the Anglo-Saxon England and who was Alfred the Great.

Across the Channel, the Frankish kingdoms were suffering almost as badly. The political fragmentation of the Frankish empire after the death of Louis the Pious in 840 left the western kingdoms chronically weak. In 885 a huge Viking force besieged Paris, defended by Count Odo. The city’s defense became one of the most celebrated episodes in the early history of the city, and was later celebrated in verse by Abbo of Saint-Germain, who was inside the city during the siege. Emperor Charles the Fat, the successor of the Charlemagne, paid the besiegers a huge bribe to withdraw — a decision that destroyed his reputation and led to his deposition in 888. The Vikings had discovered that the best Frankish response to a siege was sometimes a payment, and the practice of danegeld — money paid to buy off an army — became a regular feature of ninth- and tenth-century politics. In the 880s and 890s Frankish kings began to grant Viking leaders land in exchange for peace, a policy that would eventually produce the duchy of Normandy in 911, when the Frankish king Charles the Simple granted land around Rouen to the Norwegian-born leader Rollo in return for baptism and a feudal oath.

The Frankish response to the Vikings is itself a useful measure of the pressures on the late-Carolingian world. The building of fortified bridges across the Seine and other rivers, the maintenance of mobile field armies, the construction of new castles in the interior, and the regular payment of tribute all show a state under acute and continuous strain. The Vikings were not the only problem — Magyar raids were also pressing in from the east, and Saracen raiders from al-Andalus were active in the Mediterranean — but they were the most persistent. The eventual emergence of a more localized, castellated, and feudo-royal response in the late ninth and tenth centuries laid the foundations for the territorial principalities of the high Middle Ages.

The cause of this sudden intensification is debated. Climate historians have linked the worst years of the raids to a period of colder, stormier weather in northern Europe, which would have damaged harvests and made the sea both more dangerous and more attractive as a source of subsistence. The discovery of a massive supply of silver in the Abbasid caliphate in the 830s and its gradual movement northward via the rivers of Russia and the Baltic created a lure of bullion that is visibly reflected in the enormous hoards of dirhams found in Scandinavian graves of the period. The political fragmentation of the Frankish empire after the death of Louis the Pious in 840 and the weakness of the English kingdoms in the 860s also mattered. The Viking armies were an opportunistic response to a system that had no good answer to mobile, amphibious raiders.

Settlement and the Danelaw

Raiding was only one face of the Viking expansion; permanent settlement was another. Across much of lowland England, eastern Scotland, and the Irish Sea region, Scandinavian settlers created a hybrid culture. The Danelaw — the region of eastern and northern England that was ruled by Scandinavian law — is the most famous example. By the terms of the treaty of Wedmore in 878, the Viking leader Guthrum and his army accepted baptism and withdrew from Wessex in exchange for recognition of their rule over the lands they already held. The Five Boroughs of the East Midlands — Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, and Stamford — became the urban centers of an English Danelaw in which Scandinavian place-names, personal names, and legal customs lived alongside the older English patterns. For a description of these place-names and how they can be recognized, see the Viking raids and expansion article.

The archaeology of the Danelaw is dense and revealing. The standard tenement layout of the east Midlands towns, with their long narrow plots, is a Scandinavian inheritance. The distinctive jewelry styles of tenth-century Yorkshire show both Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian motifs, and many of the personal names recorded in the great Domesday survey of 1086 still carry Scandinavian elements. Scandinavian loanwords entered English: they, them, their, law, window, egg, knife, leg, skull, anger, husband, and many other everyday words are all of Norse origin. Several English dialects, particularly in the East Midlands and Yorkshire, retain Scandinavian features in grammar and vocabulary. The Danelaw was not a separate kingdom for long, but it permanently changed the regions it touched.

Settlement was even more striking in the Atlantic. Around 870, having refused to submit to the Norwegian king Harald Fairhair, the chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson led his family and dependents to a new island, which he named Iceland. Within sixty years most of the habitable land had been taken, and by 930 the Icelandic settlers had established the Althing, one of the earliest parliaments in Europe. From Iceland the next move was west: Greenland was settled by Eirik the Red around 985, and within a few years of the Greenland settlement his son the Leif Erikson had reached a land he called Vinland — generally identified with L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the first documented European settlement in the Americas. The Vinland settlement failed within a few years, probably because of conflict with the indigenous inhabitants it called the Skrælingar, but its memory lived on in the Icelandic sagas. For the wider story, see who discovered America before Columbus.

The North Sea islands — the Orkneys, Shetland, the Hebrides, the Faroes, and Man — fell into Scandinavian hands, often after a violent conquest. The Orkney and Shetland earldom, which traced its descent to the Norse earls of the ninth century, lasted until 1468. The Norse colony in Greenland survived for several centuries before its mysterious disappearance in the fifteenth century, probably the combined result of climate change, soil erosion, and the loss of contact with Norway. Iceland, by contrast, has been continuously inhabited since the ninth century, and its medieval literature is one of the great cultural legacies of the Viking Age. The Isle of Man in particular has a rich Scandinavian heritage visible in its tenth- and eleventh-century crosses and in the language of its place-names. Dublin, founded as a Viking settlement around 841, became the most important trading town in the Irish Sea, with slave-trading links that reached as far as the markets of the Islamic world.

The Eastern Expansion: The Rus and the Rivers to Byzantium

While Danes and Norwegians moved west and south, Swedes moved east. The earliest Russian chronicles describe Varangians — Scandinavians — crossing the Baltic, sailing up the rivers of present-day Russia, and establishing principalities at Novgorod, Kiev, and elsewhere. The name “Rus” itself, which would eventually give its name to Russia, appears to be of Scandinavian origin, perhaps derived from a Finnish word for “rowers” or from the Old Norse word for “men who row.” The Rus were warriors, traders, and, according to the chronicle tradition, the founders of a polity that stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea by the tenth century. The Primary Chronicle, composed at Kiev in the early twelfth century, famously described how the Slavic and Finno-Ugric peoples, tired of disorder, sent across the Baltic to invite the Varangians to come and rule them.

The Dnieper, the Volga, and the Don opened the rivers of Russia to the Black Sea, the Caspian, and beyond. The Rus traded furs, slaves, honey, wax, and amber for the silver dirhams of the Abbasid caliphate and for the manufactured goods of Byzantium. The route from the Baltic to Byzantium passed down the Dnieper, with its seven major rapids each requiring a portage. The Rus carried their ships overland around the falls, attacked the local steppe peoples, and emerged at the Black Sea. The sheer volume of Islamic silver hoards found in Scandinavia — well over a hundred thousand coins, the great majority of them minted in the Islamic world — is a direct measure of the importance of this trade. Equally important was the access the rivers gave to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. In 860 a Rus fleet attacked Constantinople itself, an assault that so shocked the Byzantines that Patriarch Photius preached a famous sermon on the meaning of the attack and credited the Virgin Mary with the city’s deliverance. The most dramatic single episode came in 907, when, according to the Primary Chronicle, Prince Oleg of Kiev led two thousand boats against Constantinople and forced the Byzantine emperor to sign a favorable trade treaty. There were later Rus attacks in 911, 941, and 1043, the last a curious throwback to the older style of large-scale raiding.

By the tenth century many Rus princes had accepted Byzantine Christianity. The conversion of Vladimir of Kiev in 988 marked the formal entry of the Rus into the Orthodox Christian world and oriented Kievan Rus culturally toward Byzantium for centuries. Viking mercenaries, the Varangian Guard, also served the Byzantine emperors directly from the late tenth century. The guard became one of the elite units of the imperial army, and a contingent of Rus warriors would defend the emperors of Constantinople for centuries. The story of Harald Hardrada, who served in the Varangian Guard before returning to Norway and becoming its king, is one of the most famous examples of the long career of a Viking warrior. For more on Byzantium in this period, see the Byzantine Empire.

The Rus principalities also developed a distinctive material culture. The great kurgans, or burial mounds, of the Rus aristocracy at sites like Gnëzdovo near Smolensk reveal a warrior elite buried with Scandinavian weapons, dress pins, and amulets, alongside Slavic and Baltic goods. By the eleventh century, however, the Rus had become thoroughly Slavic in language, and the Scandinavian origins of the dynasty were increasingly a matter of legend. The famous Primary Chronicle account of the invitation to the Varangians, written down in the early twelfth century, is a foundation myth that already belonged to a Christian Slavic kingdom, not to the Viking-age chiefdoms that had crossed the Baltic three centuries earlier. Kiev at its eleventh-century peak, under Yaroslav the Wise, was one of the largest cities in Europe, a center of church building, manuscript production, and diplomacy, with marriage alliances reaching the royal houses of France, Norway, Hungary, and Byzantium.

The Consolidation of Kings: Denmark, Norway, Sweden

Inside Scandinavia the Viking Age was also the period in which the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden took recognizable shape. The Jelling stones in Denmark, raised by King Gorm and his son Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century, mark the consolidation of a Danish monarchy that controlled much of southern Scandinavia. Harald Bluetooth, who accepted baptism around 965, was responsible for the construction of the great ring forts of Trelleborg, Fyrkat, and Aggersborg, as well as the bridge across the Great Belt. His son Swein Forkbeard extended Danish power into England and became, briefly, king of England in 1013–1014. Cnut, the son of Swein, ruled Denmark, Norway, and England in a North Sea empire from 1016 to 1035. For the English side of Cnut’s reign, see the Anglo-Saxon England.

In Norway Harald Fairhair is credited by later sagas with the unification of the country after the battle of Hafrsfjord, traditionally dated to 872, though the historical reality was messier and slower. His descendants contested the throne in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Olaf Tryggvason, who came to the throne in 995, launched a campaign of Christianization that ended with his death at the battle of Svolder in 1000. Olaf Haraldsson, later St Olaf, completed the work, reigning from 1015 to 1028 and becoming Norway’s patron saint. The Olaf saga and the accounts of his miracles helped make the Norwegian church a force in its own right. The conversion of Norway, like that of Denmark, was a top-down process driven by kings who saw Christianity as a tool of statecraft and a means of binding themselves to the Latin Christian west.

In Sweden the king of the Svear gradually extended his authority over the Götar and other peoples, and the country began to take the political shape it would retain for centuries. The introduction of Christianity in Sweden was slower than in Denmark and Norway, and was completed only in the twelfth century. The great thing-steads of the Svear at Gamla Uppsala remained pagan centers well into the eleventh century. Sweden’s relative lateness in Christianizing is one reason why the runestone tradition, with its pagan-style memorial formulae and the heavy use of pre-Christian imagery, survived in Sweden long after it had died out in Denmark and Norway.

The Conversion of the North

The Christianization of Scandinavia is one of the most important long-term consequences of the Viking Age. The process was uneven, gradual, and often politically driven. Missionaries from Germany, England, and Francia traveled north, often at the invitation of kings who saw baptism as a way to bind their kingdoms more closely to the Latin Christian world and to obtain the political support of more powerful Christian neighbors. The missionaries were often as much diplomats and political advisors as evangelists. Ansgar, the “Apostle of the North,” worked in Denmark and Sweden in the ninth century, though the church he founded was destroyed by a pagan reaction in the 880s.

The first Scandinavian king to be baptized was Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, around 965, an act celebrated on the great Jelling stone, which bears both a pagan-style memorial to the king’s parents and a Christian inscription announcing that Harald “won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.” The conversions of Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson in Norway and of Olof Skötkonung in Sweden followed in the next generation. By the mid-eleventh century the whole of Scandinavia was formally Christian, although the old gods continued to be venerated in the countryside for some time after. Runestones in Sweden and Denmark, raised in the tenth and eleventh centuries, often carry Christian symbols and prayers even when they were also clearly designed to commemorate a pagan-style family lineage. For the religious beliefs being supplanted, see the Norse mythology and religion.

The conversion of Iceland, completed at the Althing in 1000, is one of the most dramatic single incidents in the Christianization of the North. According to the Icelandic sagas, the chieftain Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, who had been charged with the decision, lay wrapped in a cloak for a day and a night before announcing that the country would be Christian, though pagans could continue to worship the old gods in private. The decision, almost certainly driven as much by political and economic considerations as by theological conviction, kept Iceland connected to the wider Christian world. For the broader European context, see christianization of Europe.

The Scandinavian church that emerged in the Viking Age was a relatively modest institution by European standards. Bishops were often appointed by kings and closely tied to the royal court. Monasteries were few, and the great monastic expansion of the high Middle Ages would come later, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the Cistercians and other reforming orders. The first cathedral in Scandinavia was the cathedral of Roskilde in Denmark, founded in the tenth century. The archbishoprics of Lund (1103), Trondheim (1152), and Uppsala (1164) all date from the century after the Viking Age. Yet the conversion of the North was durable. By the end of the Viking Age, the great pagan shrines had been destroyed or absorbed, and the laws, calendars, and moral vocabulary of Scandinavia were Christian through and through.

The first literary products of the Scandinavian church also began to appear in the Viking Age. The law codes of the Norwegian and Danish kings, the historical works of Ari Þorgilsson in Iceland, and the Latin lives of the Norwegian and Danish royal saints belong to this transitional moment, in which pagan oral tradition was being recorded in a Christian literary culture. The famous Icelandic sagas would mostly be written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but their subject matter and many of the people and events they describe belong to the Viking Age. The conversion thus produced, almost as a by-product, the textual and archival record that later generations would draw on to write the history of the period.

The End of the Viking Age: 1013–1066

The conventional end of the Viking Age is 1066, the year in which the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, in alliance with the English earl Tostig, invaded northern England and was defeated and killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge. That battle took place only three weeks before the Norman victory at Hastings. Both the invader at Stamford Bridge and the victor at Hastings were descendants of Viking settlers: Harald Hardrada through the Norwegian royal line, and William of Normandy through Rollo, the founder of the Norman dynasty. The Viking diaspora, having been absorbed into the cultures of England, Normandy, and Sicily, was now indistinguishable from the rest of Christian Europe. Within fifty years, Normans of Viking descent were also conquering southern Italy and Sicily, founding the kingdom of Sicily, and trading across the Mediterranean. The descendants of Viking settlers were now founding kingdoms on the southern frontier of Latin Christendom, just as their great-grandfathers had founded them in the North Sea and the Atlantic.

The political transformation inside Scandinavia was also decisive. By the mid-eleventh century the Scandinavian kings were Christian monarchs with standing armies, royal fleets, taxation systems, and churches. They had more to lose than to gain from raiding Christian neighbors, who were also, in many cases, their kin and allies. The Cnut of Denmark and England who died in 1035 was a ruler on the European model, not a sea-king of the older type. The conversion had done its cultural work; the consolidation of royal power had done its political work; and the economic lure that had once drawn Scandinavians to the silver of the east was now available at home, partly through the trade in Baltic grain, timber, and furs that Danish and German merchants had come to control. The Cnut of the 1020s and 1030s traveled with a literate chancery, minted coin in the English style, and patronized the English church in much the same way as his West Saxon predecessors. The Viking-Age monarchy, in other words, had completed its transformation into a medieval Christian kingship.

The very disappearance of the raiders is itself evidence of how thoroughly the Viking Age ended. The Scandinavian kingdoms turned their backs on the sea and began to look inward, building cathedrals, founding monasteries, and gradually drawing themselves into the Latin Christian commonwealth that was taking shape in the rest of Europe.

It is worth noting, however, that the political and military collapse of Scandinavian raiding did not mean that Scandinavian seafaring ended. The Norse colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroes continued to be active maritime societies. Danish and Norwegian kings continued to maintain royal fleets. The Hanseatic League, which would dominate northern European trade from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, was founded largely on the trade networks that Scandinavian merchants had first opened. The Viking Age ended; the Viking world did not.

Viking Art, Language, and Legacy

Although Viking political power collapsed quickly, the cultural inheritance of the Viking Age was long-lasting. The Norse language gave English its they, its law, its skull, its window (through Old Norse vindauga, “wind-eye”), and hundreds of other everyday words. The Danelaw left a deep place-name imprint on eastern and northern England, and the Scandinavian system of juries and law-giving influenced the development of English common law. The Norse colonies in Iceland produced a body of literature in the vernacular — the Eddas and the sagas — of extraordinary richness, works that have been read continuously from the medieval period to the present. The runestone tradition, with its distinctive visual style of interlaced serpents and runic inscriptions, gave the North a distinctive visual culture that fused pagan and Christian motifs. For the artistry of this period, see early medieval art and architecture.

The Viking cities of Dublin, York, Kiev, and Novgorod remained important centers of trade and culture long after the Viking political presence in each had passed. The laws of the Icelandic Althing remained in force for centuries. The Norse settlements of Greenland and Iceland survive to this day, and the brief Norse presence at L’Anse aux Meadows is a UNESCO World Heritage site — the only confirmed pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas. In Normandy, the descendants of Rollo produced a dynasty that conquered England in 1066 and remade the English state. The Normans of southern Italy and Sicily, similarly descended from Viking settlers, built a sophisticated kingdom that fused Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and Arab cultures. The Viking diaspora, in other words, did not end; it was simply transformed.

The Viking Age in Historical Memory

The Viking Age has had a complicated afterlife in European memory. In the nineteenth century the Vikings were reinvented as heroic ancestors of the Scandinavian nations; in the twentieth century their image was sometimes turned to political purposes, with the horned-helmeted warrior used as a symbol of supposed northern racial virtues. Modern historians, working with archaeology, saga literature, runic inscriptions, and Frankish, English, and Byzantine written sources, have produced a more nuanced picture. They see the Viking Age not as a sudden outbreak of violence but as a complex phenomenon in which Scandinavian farmers, traders, and soldiers responded to opportunity abroad as their societies consolidated at home. The horned-helmeted warrior is a Victorian fantasy; the actual Vikings were far more interesting, and far less romantic, than the stereotype suggests. For the definitive answer to that question, see did Vikings wear helmets with horns.

Conclusion

The Viking Age was one of the most consequential periods of early medieval Europe. In three centuries Scandinavian sailors, soldiers, settlers, and traders ranged from Constantinople to Newfoundland, established new polities in the North Atlantic and the Russian steppe, brought back a flood of silver, helped shape the English language and English law, and ended as Christian kings whose capitals and cathedrals would define the high Middle Ages. To understand the Viking Age is to understand a moment in which the boundaries of Europe were redrawn by people who were both within and outside the post-Roman Christian world. The Norse who set out from the fjords in the 790s would, in a few generations, found kingdoms in England, France, Sicily, and Russia. Their longships gave them a reach unmatched by any contemporary people; their willingness to leave home made the North Sea and the Baltic into the center of an early medieval world system.

The Viking Age is also, perhaps more than any other period of the early Middle Ages, a reminder that historical periods do not begin and end cleanly. The Norse who set out in the late eighth century were the heirs of an earlier Scandinavian world, and the Christian kings of the eleventh century were the ancestors of the high medieval Scandinavians of the twelfth. What changed between 793 and 1066 was not the people themselves but their place in the wider European order. Once raiders from beyond the pale, they had become rulers, founders, and saints inside it.

Related articles

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• Viking raids and expansion
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