Vikings

It was an event that shook the Christian world to its core. So traumatic was its destruction that historians have agreed it should mark the official beginning of the Viking Age, even though it was not the first violence the British Isles experienced at the hands of the Vikings. The anglo-saxon chronicle records ‘terrible portents’ to the events at Lindisfarne in 793 A.D. Located on Holy Island in the far north of England, it is written that the monastery saw powerful storms on the eve of the Vikings’ arrival. Who attacked Lindisfarne? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes, “793. Here terrible portents…

A contentious issue that has long plagued both the study of Vikings and the place of Vikings in popular culture is the proper, accepted usage of the word Viking itself. Language matters, and how a person uses language greatly affects their worldview and how they perceive people, objects, and concepts. It is no surprise, then, that there are a growing number of people who are dismayed by today’s liberal use of the word Viking to describe a great number of things that it originally did not. Here I will attempt to clarify the origins of the word Viking, its usage…

One would not be remiss for thinking that the elderly were few and far between during the Viking Age. Historical estimates for the average life expectancy in Dark Ages Europe are extremely low, something around 30 years, and so the issue of the elderly and how they were treated at the time has somewhat been ignored. Recent scholarship, however, has discounted the concept of average life expectancy because it was heavily skewed by child mortality rates. We’ve since learned that once an individual made it to adulthood, they stood a fair chance of making it to their golden years. So…

The Icelandic Sagas are a large body of literature written during the medieval period about the history of Iceland and the families who lived there in the 9th, 10th, and 11th century.

As I explained in my previous blog about the difference between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Vikings, we know the most about the Danes because of the breadth of primary sources written about them by Frankish and English Chroniclers. Archeologically speaking, the Scandinavian culture of the time was distinct and fairly homogenous, although it diverged into distinct groups by the end of the Viking Age. Yet for all we know about the Danes, there is far less information on their Swedish cousins called the Rus who, despite how little we know about them at the outset of the Viking Age, left…

Why do we think of the Vikings as one people? Here I explore the differences between the three broad groups of Vikings.

Ultimately, Spain experienced less of the brunt of the Viking Age than other areas such as Ireland, Britain, and France. But they did experience a fair share, and both the Christian kingdoms and Muslim territories in Iberia suffered terrible wounds from the raids.

Did the Vikings conduct human sacrifice? It is a sensational claim. Not only does it make for an intriguing field of study, but it also makes fantastic television.

A common item paraded by reenactors all over the world is the Raven Flag (or Raven Banner), which is thought to have been a common part of Viking armies.

Revisionist history has a way simultaneously shattering old paradigms and creating new ones.