The Viking Age was a period of European history which began in the late eighth century with raids on Western European monasteries such as Lindisfarne in northern England and lasted in some ways down to the thirteenth century. However, the later centuries involved the emergence of a more sophisticated and settled Norse culture in places like Denmark, Norway, Iceland and England. The Viking Age proper, when the Vikings consisted of conquering bands of sea-warriors, is typically confined to the era from the 790s to about 1050. The Vikings were actually disparate groups of individuals who sailed out of Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The Danes and Northmen focused their attentions on the North Sea and Western Europe, while the Swedes were more active in Eastern Europe where they used the great rivers of the region, the Don, Dnieper and Volga, as highways down to the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The Viking migrations and conquests changed the demography of extensive parts of Europe during the Early and High Middle Ages.[1]
Viking Age chronology of events
Scandinavia, along with the islands of Denmark and the Jutland Peninsula, had remained considerably beyond the realms of Roman influence in ancient times, although writers like Pliny the Elder, Tacitus and Claudius Ptolemy discussed Scandinavia in their encyclopedias and geographies and some trade was evidently taking place between the Romans and the people of Northern Europe. These countries remained beyond the boundaries of Western European Christendom in the early medieval period. The people here developed their own unique Iron Age culture based around settlements centered on longhouses, worshipping their Nordic and Germanic gods and trading and fishing extensively around the North and Baltic Seas.[2]
Owing to a combination of factors which are still only partly understood, which may have included population expansion and pressure for land within Scandinavia itself, the people of Norway, Sweden and Denmark began launching overseas raids against places like coastal Britain and Ireland and northern France in the late eighth century. Commentators on these fearsome newcomers used different names to describe them. Some called them the Northmen, ‘men from the north’, which over time became ‘Norse’ or even ‘Norman’, while others referred to them as Vikings, a name which might derive from identification of these people as hailing from the Vikin region around Oslo Fjord in southern Norway. Much further afield in Baghdad, the Arabs began referring to the warriors who sailed down the Don, Dnieper and Volga rivers into the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, striking at Muslim settlements in the Middle East, as the Rus’, a term generally understood to derive from the Old Finnic word Ruotsi, meaning ‘Swede’.[3]
The Vikings, Rus’ and Northmen initially engaged in hit-and-run raids whereby they attacked monasteries and other settlements where they were confident gold, silver and other valuables could be found, or conducted slave-raids on civilian centers. Over time, though, they began to actually conquer large stretches of territory and colonize them. In England, the Danes, as they were increasingly called there, captured large parts of northern England around York and East Anglia north of London. In Ireland Norse settlements were established at the mouths of some rivers, while in France the Normans under their leader Rollo were eventually granted extensive lands in what is now Normandy as a bribe to get them to stop launching raids on Paris.[4]
Further to the east the impact was even more dramatic. The Rus’ largely founded new settlements along the riverine route-ways they used in Eastern Europe, which evolved into towns and cities like Kiev, Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod. From here they established great states which came to rule much of the area, particularly Kievan Rus’, and even attacked Constantinople, the greatest city in the world at the time and one which the Rus’ called ‘Miklagard’, ‘the Great City’.[5]
Over time the Vikings, like all warrior societies, settled down and became less warlike, eventually transforming from soldiers into traders and farmers as they acquired lands of their own. For instance, in the first half of the eleventh century King Cnut the Great ruled over a North Sea empire which covered much of Denmark, Norway and England.[6] Further to the north-west Iceland became the center of Norse learning and many of the Viking sagas and Norse legends such as the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda were compiled by scholars like Snorri Sturluson here during the High Middle Ages.[7] The Normans, however, were the most important of all the transformed Viking people. Beginning in the eleventh century they became land warriors as heavily armored knights who conquered southern Italy and Sicily, then England, and finally led the Crusades to the Holy Land in the mid-1090s.[8]
Extent of migration during Viking Age
The migration of the Viking Age was very broad, though unfortunately it is also very difficult to assess in any kind of scientific fashion owing to the lack of documentary records. Archaeological evidence and new scientific methods employed by archaeologists have begun to transform our understanding in recent decades. For instance, archaeological studies of the Great Viking Army’s camp at Repton in northern England, where they wintered in 873/4, has indicated that there were thousands of Danes and Norse here in the mid-870s and these were just one major war party of Vikings active in Britain and Ireland at the time. Over a period of decades tens of thousands of Norse settlers arrived to regions like this and similar patterns were seen down the rivers of Eastern Europe.[9]
Demographic impact of the Viking Age
The Viking migrations changed the demography of large parts of Europe. Russia is known as such today because the level of Norse settlement here in the Early and High Middle Ages led people to conceive of it as ‘the land of the Rus’’.[10] The Northmen who occupied the lands lying at the lower stretches of the River Seine in the early tenth century were so numerous that this region became known as Normandy, effectively meaning the ‘land of the Normans’, or ‘land of the Northmen’.[11] In Ireland, Viking settlers established or expanded most of the country’s largest cities, notably Dublin and Waterford which were founded by Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries. Finally, Iceland was broadly uninhabited prior to the Viking Age and its emergence as part of European culture and society came about entirely owing to Norse expansion.[12]
Explore more about the Viking Age
- Vikings at World History Encyclopedia
- World’s largest-ever DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian at University of Cambridge
- The history of the Vikings in England at English Heritage
References
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/vikings-history
- ↑ https://www.scandinavianarchaeology.com/the-birth-of-a-new-age-the-iron-age/
- ↑ Cat Jarman, River Kings: The Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads (London, 2021).
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/exploration/vikings-history
- ↑ https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-varangians-prince-oleg
- ↑ https://www.bl.uk/people/cnut
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Edda/
- ↑ https://www.historyextra.com/period/norman/normans-throughout-europe-where-else-went-sicily-crusades/
- ↑ https://www.historyextra.com/period/viking/viking-heathen-great-army-what-when-size-how-big-how-defeated/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-varangians-prince-oleg
- ↑ https://www.durhamworldheritagesite.com/learn/history/normans/founding-normandy
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1310/the-vikings-in-iceland/