Yet as a temporary period of trade-driven prosperity around the southern North Sea faded in the later eighth century, events around its fringes took a chaotic turn.Ī recent historical survey of the early Viking Age (Downham Reference Downham2017) reminds us that Lindisfarne was not the first, nor even necessarily the most important, of the early Viking attacks on Britain. The earliest growth of the trading town at Ribe, Denmark, for example, dates to AD 705–710 (Feveile Reference Feveile2006). Scandinavians were busily-and profitably-involved in the North Sea trading network between England, Frisia and Francia, which reached its apogee in the mid eighth century. Cultural contacts pre-date the Romans and were vigorous in the mid first millennium AD-as exemplified by similarities between the high-status ship burials at Sutton Hoo, England, and at Vendel and Valsgärde, Sweden. But to what extent was the Viking Age a ‘bolt from the blue’ or, alternatively, a symptom of existing behaviour turning violent in the context of systemic social and economic breakdown? Scandinavians were far from strangers to Western Europeans. There is no doubt that sporadic raiding captured the fears and, to some extent, the imaginations of Western European Christian writers in the 790s the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, conveyed most vividly by Alcuin's letter to Ethelred, King of Northumbria, shortly after the event (Whitelock Reference Whitelock1979: 842), is the quintessential marker for the start of this new period of danger. The Viking Age is usually considered to have ‘begun’ in the later eighth century AD, when Western European sources begin to describe and attribute raids in some detail, and to have ‘ended’ in the mid eleventh century. The widely differing social and environmental topography of Iron Age Scandinavia is often elided into a single causative background. Reference Baug, Skre, Heldal and Janssen2018) have all been given varying degrees of credence. Barrett Reference Barrett2008), advancing ship technology, opportunities for engaging in slavery, land-hunger, and commodity trading (e.g. A demographic surplus of young males (e.g. Causal factors behind this multi-national, but curiously simultaneous phenomenon, have been sought mainly within Scandinavia itself. Reference Eriksen, Pederson, Rundberget, Axelsen and Berg2015) that the evidence is far more complex, nuanced and ambiguous than could reasonably serve such a purpose. Baastrup Reference Baastrup2014 Eriksen et al. This is despite a growing awareness through current research and debate (e.g. The search for expatriate Scandinavians and their indigenous cultural traits remains an undimmed obsession for archaeologists, biologists and historians. This legacy has proved difficult to overcome.įrom 800 to around 1050 Norwegians in particular controlled and colonised the whole of the North Atlantic Especially Danes but also Norwegians and Swedes ravaged and had an impact on the political and social development of England and parts of France. The Western Viking Age is not a fiction, but, in its currently understood form, is a distorted concept, given a spurious and artificial coherence by later accounts. This stance was then continued into modern scholarship during the Scandinavian nationalist revivals of the nineteenth century. The limited contemporaneous evidence, it is argued below, has been embellished and reworked retrospectively into a ‘national conquest’ narrative by later historical and literary sources seeking to emphasise the power and lineage of medieval dynastic states.
#North sea empire flag series#
There are, however, grounds for challenging this sequence of assumptions, and for redefining the Viking Age as a sporadic, opportunistic and chaotic series of events and unforeseen cumulative impacts. Areas of Britain that have upheld the strongest Scandinavian cultural connections into modern times-notably Orkney and Shetland-are often viewed unquestioningly as the locations of the earliest and most vigorous Viking settlement. Territorial expansion is assumed to have succeeded the pattern of raiding in both time and location, and to have occurred first on the nearest and most convenient landfalls. Conventionally taken to begin with raids in the AD 790s, its causes have been sought primarily within Scandinavia, in relation to endogenous economic, political, environmental and social stresses. The Viking Age in the West is viewed in national and ethnic terms by academic and popular audiences as a ‘colonising’ migration of Scandinavians, who went on to form conquering elites or whole societies across the North Atlantic and Europe.