Viking Age

Viking Age picture stone, Gotland, Sweden.
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The Viking Age (about 800–1050 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonising, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America.[1][2][3] The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period.[3] The Scandinavians of the Viking Age are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen, although few of them were Vikings in the sense of being engaged in piracy.[4]

Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the Norse people settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast and along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes in eastern Europe, where they were also known as Varangians. They also briefly settled in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to reach North America. The Norse-Gaels, Normans, Rus' people, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies. The Vikings founded several kingdoms and earldoms in Europe: the Kingdom of the Isles (Suðreyjar), Orkney (Norðreyjar), York (Jórvík) and the Danelaw (Danalǫg), Dublin (Dyflin), Normandy, and Kievan Rus' (Garðaríki). The Norse homelands were also unified into larger kingdoms during the Viking Age, and the short-lived North Sea Empire included large swathes of Scandinavia and Britain. In 1021, the Vikings achieved the feat of reaching North America—the date of which was not determined until a millennium later.[5]

Several things drove this expansion. The Vikings were drawn by the growth of wealthy towns and monasteries overseas and weak kingdoms. They may also have been pushed to leave their homeland by overpopulation, lack of good farmland, and political strife arising from the unification of Norway. The aggressive expansion of the Carolingian Empire and forced conversion of the neighbouring Saxons to Christianity may also have been a factor.[6] Sailing innovations had allowed the Vikings to sail farther and longer to begin with.

Information about the Viking Age is drawn largely from primary sources written by those the Vikings encountered, as well as archaeology, supplemented with secondary sources such as the Icelandic Sagas.

  1. ^ Mawer, Allen (1913). The Vikings. Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 095173394X. The term 'Viking' is derived from the Old Norse vík, a bay, and means 'one who haunts a bay, creek or fjord'. In the 9th and 10th centuries, it came to be used more especially of those warriors who left their homes in Scandinavia and made raids on the chief European countries. This is the narrow, and technically the only correct use of the term 'Viking', but in such expressions as 'Viking civilisation', 'the Viking Age', 'the Viking movement', 'Viking influence', the word has come to have a wider significance and is used as a concise and convenient term for describing the whole of the civilisation, activity and influence of the Scandinavian peoples, at a particular period in their history...
  2. ^ Sawyer, Peter H. (1995). Scandinavians and the English in the Viking Age. University of Cambridge. p. 3. ISBN 095173394X. Archived from the original on 23 April 2023. Retrieved 5 September 2019. The Viking period is, therefore, best defined as the period when Scandinavians played a large role in the British Isles and western Europe as raiders and conquerors. It is also the period in which Scandinavians settled in many of the areas they conquered, and in the Atlantic islands...
  3. ^ a b Jesch, Judith (1991). Women in the Viking Age. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. p. 84. ISBN 0851153607. International contact is the key to the Viking Age. In Scandinavian history, this period is distinct because large numbers of Scandinavian people left their homelands and voyaged abroad... The period is thus defined by the impact the Scandinavians had on the world around them.
  4. ^  • Haywood, John (1995). The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings. Penguin Books. p. 8. ISBN 0140513280. The term "Viking" has come to be applied to all Scandinavians of the period, but in the Viking Age itself the term víkingr applied only to someone who went í víking, that is plundering. In this sense, most Viking-age Scandinavians were not Vikings at all, but peaceful farmers and craftsmen who stayed quietly at home all their lives."
     • Haywood, John (1999). The Vikings. Sutton. p. 37. ISBN 0750921943. Archived from the original on 4 October 2023. Retrieved 3 January 2020. The term 'Viking' has come in modern times to be applied to all early medieval Scandinavians and it is directly as a result of this that the controversy has arisen. As used originally in the Viking Age itself, the word was applied only to someone who went i viking, that is someone whose occupation was piracy. The earliest use of the word predates the Viking Age by some years and it was not even used exclusively to describe Scandinavian pirates. Most Viking Age Scandinavians were not Vikings at all in this original sense of the word but were simply peaceful farmers, craftsmen and merchants."
     • Wilson, David M. (2008). The Vikings in the Isle of Man. Aarhus University Press. p. 11. ISBN 978-8779343672. Archived from the original on 4 October 2023. Retrieved 3 January 2020. The word 'Viking' did not come into general use in the English language until the middle of the nineteenth Century—at about the same time that it was introduced into serious academic literature in Scandinavia—and has since then changed its meaning and been much abused. It must, however, be accepted that the term is today used throughout the world as a descriptor of the peoples of Scandinavia in the period from the late eighth Century until the mid-eleventh Century.
     • Rogers, Clifford J., ed. (2010). "Vikings". The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195338423. Archived from the original on 23 May 2020. Retrieved 3 January 2020. "Vikings" is the usual generic term given today to all Scandinavians of the Viking Age
  5. ^ Davies, Caroline (21 October 2021). "Solar storm confirms Vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 7 November 2021. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  6. ^ Simek, Rudolf (2005) "The Emergence of the Viking Age: Circumstances and Conditions", "The Vikings first Europeans VIII – XI century – The New Discoveries of Archaeology", other, pp. 24–25