Early Middle Ages

When Did the Viking Age Start and End?

The conventional dates of the Viking Age, what events mark the boundaries, and why historians disagree on the exact period.

Question & answer

Short answer

The Viking Age is conventionally dated from 793 to 1066. The opening event is the Viking raid on the English monastery of Lindisfarne on 8 June 793. The closing event is the defeat of the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, only three weeks before the Norman conquest of England at the battle of Hastings.

The opening date: 793

The year 793 is the conventional start of the Viking Age because the attack on Lindisfarne was the first major Viking raid recorded in surviving Western sources. The contemporary English scholar Alcuin of York, writing in the aftermath, lamented the slaughter of the monks and the burning of the church, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written a few generations later, dated the beginning of the Viking raids explicitly to 793. The choice of Lindisfarne as a starting point was symbolic: it was a famous and wealthy monastery, the resting place of St Cuthbert, and the recent home of the Lindisfarne Gospels. For the details of the attack, see what was the Lindisfarne raid.

The 793 date is, however, somewhat arbitrary. Scandinavian raiding in the North Sea and the Baltic was already decades old by 793, and small-scale attacks on the coasts of England and Francia had been recorded earlier. Some historians prefer to put the beginning of the Viking Age in the 780s, when a series of small raids began to be recorded, or even earlier in the eighth century, when Scandinavian contact with the Christian and Islamic worlds was already intensifying. The 793 date is convenient because the attack on Lindisfarne was a major event recorded in multiple sources, but it marks a turning point in Western consciousness rather than a sudden change in Scandinavian behavior. For the wider context, see the Viking Age and Viking raids and expansion.

The attack on Lindisfarne was followed within fifteen years by attacks on Iona in 795 and 802, by the attack on Noirmoutier in 799, and by the great burst of Viking raiding in the 830s and 840s. By the time of the siege of Paris in 885, the Viking raiders were no longer a marginal phenomenon but a major force in European politics. The 793 attack was, in this sense, the start of a process that took about a century to unfold.

The closing date: 1066

The year 1066 is the conventional end of the Viking Age for a related reason: the battle of Stamford Bridge, in which the English king Harold Godwinson defeated and killed the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, was the last great Viking attack on the British Isles. Harald’s death at Stamford Bridge, on 25 September 1066, was the symbolic end of an era. Three weeks later, Harold was himself defeated and killed by William of Normandy at the battle of Hastings; both victors and vanquished at Stamford Bridge were descendants of Viking settlers, and the closing of the Viking age was, paradoxically, an internal event within the Viking diaspora.

Again, the 1066 date is somewhat arbitrary. The real end of the Viking Age came gradually, over the course of the eleventh century, as the Scandinavian kingdoms consolidated, accepted Christianity, and became more deeply integrated into the wider European world. Yet 1066 has remained the conventional end point, and most histories of the Viking Age use it as the closing boundary. For the English context, see who was Alfred the Great.

Why the dates matter

The conventional dates of 793 and 1066 are not just convenient markers; they also reflect a real historical turning point. The Viking Age was the period in which Scandinavian peoples, having been on the edges of the post-Roman Christian world, became a major force within it. At the beginning, in 793, the Scandinavians were pagan raiders attacking the Christian monasteries of the British Isles; at the end, in 1066, they were Christian kings who were themselves part of the European political and religious system. The Viking Age was, in a real sense, the story of how Scandinavia entered European history.

The dates are also useful because they bracket the most active period of the great Viking expansion. The settlement of Iceland, the colonization of Greenland, the brief Norse presence in North America, the establishment of the duchy of Normandy, the conversion of Scandinavia, the Cnut empire of Denmark, Norway, and England — all of these fall within the period 793 to 1066. To understand the Viking Age as a whole, it is essential to understand the periodization. For the broader picture, see the Viking society and culture and the articles linked from it.

Other possible end points

Historians have proposed several other end points for the Viking Age. Some have suggested the establishment of the duchy of Normandy in 911, when the Viking raiders became a settled Christian ruling class. Others have suggested the Christianization of Scandinavia in the eleventh century, particularly the conversion of Iceland in 1000. Some prefer the death of Cnut in 1035, which marked the end of the last great North Sea empire. Yet 1066 has remained the standard, and most scholars continue to use it as the closing boundary of the period.

The point of these alternative end dates is that the transformation of Scandinavian society was a process, not an event, and a single year can never adequately mark its end. The battles of 1066 simply made visible what had been happening for some time. The integration of the Norse into Christian Europe was, in this sense, a slow and uneven process, and 1066 was its most dramatic public moment rather than its true end.