Viking History: every king, raider and voyage, from the first longships to the sagas

Gudme and Lundeborg (third to sixth or seventh centuries AD)

Long before the Viking Age, the most spectacular central place yet found in Scandinavia lay in south-east Funen. Excavated in the 1980s and early 1990s, Gudme and its landing site at Lundeborg are read as a trading and production centre that flourished from the third to the sixth or seventh century. The archaeologist Lotte Hedeager argues that it was also a ceremonial centre, where bars, ingots and coins of gold became bracteates and scabbard mounts. Its great hall is unusual for both its size and its construction, and its settlement area is larger than that of any other central place known in southern Scandinavia. Gudme shows that wealth, cult and overseas contact were joined centuries before the first raid.

• Gudme means 'the home of the gods', and nearby hills carry related names: Gudbjerg, 'the hill of the god or gods', and Albjerg, 'the hill of the shrine'. Hedeager finds the evidence of sacred place names stronger here than anywhere else.
• The first gold finds at Gudme came to light in the 16th century, and the area has since produced several hoards of coins, hacksilver and some gold objects. It also holds Møllegårdsmarken, the largest Iron Age urn-field in Denmark.
• The scholar Karl Hauck argued from the images on the bracteates that an Odin cult tied to sacred kingship was established at Gudme. That is an interpretation of pictures, not a written record.

Sources: Lotte Hedeager, in Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods (Lund): Scandinavian 'central places' in a cosmological setting; Danish Journal of Archaeology (Jessen and Majland, 2021): The sovereign seeress; Wikipedia: Gudme

Gamla Uppsala (from the 3rd or 4th century AD; temple reported destroyed c. 1080 (later sources only))

Gamla Uppsala, on the Fyris plain, was a major centre of cult, trade and power from the 3rd or 4th century. Two of its three great mounds were dug in 1846 and 1874. They held cremations with rich grave goods and are taken to be royal graves of the 5th or 6th century, but the dead cannot be named. Around 1070 the German cleric Adam of Bremen described a temple there holding statues of Thor, Odin and Freyr, with sacrifices at a great festival every nine years. Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson wrote about the site later, and legend said the gods themselves lay under the mounds. The temple is said to have been destroyed by the Christian king Inge the Elder around 1080.

• Adam is the classic source and needs caution. The World History Encyclopedia notes that he and Saxo wrote from a Christian point of view and cast the temple and its rites in a negative light. It adds that his nine-year cycle has been challenged, with eight years thought more likely.
• According to Adam, people sacrificed to Thor in time of famine or plague, to Odin in time of war, and to Freyr for weddings.
• Gamla Uppsala was also the seat of the Thing of all Swedes, an assembly held in late winter alongside a great fair called Disting, and it became Sweden's archbishopric in 1164.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Temple at Uppsala; Wikipedia: Gamla Uppsala; Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops, Book IV (English text), via In Nomine Jassa

Helgö and the Buddha in Lake Mälaren (from the 4th century (one account says c. 200) to the 11th century)

Helgö, a small island in Lake Mälaren, held a trading and craft settlement generations before nearby Birka. Excavations began in the mid-1950s and uncovered a workshop area and imported objects from an astonishing range of places. The best known is a bronze Buddha, which the Swedish History Museum says was made in the Swat Valley, now in Pakistan, more than 1,500 years ago. An Irish crozier and a Coptic scoop from Egypt came from the same island. The finds show that goods were reaching the Mälaren region from very far away before the Viking Age began.

• Sources disagree on when Helgö began. The World History Encyclopedia suggests people settled there and around Birka from about AD 400, while Wikipedia says the trading town began to emerge around AD 200. The excavators found occupation from the 4th century to the 11th, according to Brent Nongbri.
• The Swedish History Museum says plainly that it does not know how the Buddha reached Helgö.
• The specialist report placed the figure near a metal workshop and suggested that a craftsman valued it for its casting. Brent Nongbri questions this: the workshop was 150 to 200 metres away, and patches on the back of the statuette suggest it had been in use for some time.

Sources: Swedish History Museum: Museum highlights; Brent Nongbri, Variant Readings: The Helgö Buddha; World History Encyclopedia: Birka; Wikipedia: Helgö

The Norse gods and the problem of the sources (Iron Age to c. 1100; written down c. 1220 to c. 1270)

The world of the one-eyed Odin, the World Tree Yggdrasil and the final battle of Ragnarök reaches us mostly through later Icelandic writing. Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda dates from about 1220 and the Poetic Edda collection from about 1270. Both are far later than the pagan age they describe, though some of the poems and the skaldic verse are thought to be older. Snorri gives the neat, complete version, but he wrote as a Christian and has to be read with care. Old Norse had no real word for religion: the nearest, síður, meant custom, and archaeology hints that people were devoted to particular gods in everyday life.

• Odin was more than a war god. The World History Encyclopedia describes him as god of poetry, the dead, runes and magic as well, and he appears in wider Germanic tradition as Woden.
• Many Eddic poems assume the listener already knows the myth, so they allude to stories without retelling them. A scholar quoted by the World History Encyclopedia calls what survives only the tips of narrative icebergs.
• In the poem Hávamál, Odin hangs for nine nights on a windy tree, wounded by a spear and offered to himself, and in the next stanza he takes up the runes.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Norse Mythology; World History Encyclopedia (E. Groeneveld): Odin; The Poetic Edda, Hávamál (H. A. Bellows translation), Sacred Texts

Farm, longhouse and thrall (c. 500 to c. 950 (Borg longhouse); farm life throughout)

The Swedish History Museum describes a society largely of free farmers, with lives set by ploughing, sowing, harvest and winter fodder. A 9th-century house at Bjärred in Skåne was 21 metres long and 6.5 wide, for a family of perhaps seven to ten, and probably some animals too. At the other extreme, the chieftain's house at Borg in Lofoten, found in 1983, was 83 metres long, built around 500 and later enlarged. Below the free farmers were thralls, whose hard labour included fencing, spreading manure and herding. Neil Price of Uppsala notes that slavery had long roots in Scandinavia before the Vikings. Norse myth reflects this world: Midgard, the world of humans, means 'the farm in the middle'.

• Borg's chieftain shared the house with some 40 to 50 people, and half of it served as a barn for horses and cows. Wikipedia reports that the seat is thought to have been abandoned around AD 950.
• Thralldom could be temporary: a free person might enter it to settle a debt or through poverty. The museum says a thrall could even rise to be the king's representative.
• The hearth was the most important feature of a house, the source of light, warmth and cooked food, while furniture was sparse: low benches, rough stools, chests and baskets.

Sources: Swedish History Museum: The Viking Age Farm in Myth and Reality; Swedish History Museum: Free and Unfree in the Viking Age; Neil Price (Uppsala), via Brewminate: The Little-Known Role of Slavery in Medieval Viking Society; History Hit: The Lofoten Islands, inside the biggest Viking house; Wikipedia: Lofotr Viking Museum

The Danevirke (earliest work c. 500 or before by carbon-14; North Rampart built 737; main phases to 968)

The Danevirke runs across the neck of the Jutland peninsula, and the Frankish annals credit King Godfred with ordering a rampart there in 808. Science tells a different story. Carbon-14 dates reported in 2013 suggest work had begun by about AD 500 or earlier, although another phase scheme starts at about 650, so the first date is not settled. The 1.5-kilometre North Rampart dates to 737, an earthwork with a strong palisade and a trench, and the Main and East Ramparts were strengthened with oak planks around the same time. The World Heritage site's managers link this expansion to Frankish campaigns against the Saxons and to Slavic Obotrites settling nearby. UNESCO lists the Danevirke together with Hedeby as a World Heritage Site.

• The Royal Frankish Annals describe Godfred's rampart of 808 as having a single gateway for wagons and horsemen, running from the Baltic to the western ocean.
• By the 10th century the town of Hedeby lay inside the Danevirke's earthworks, which controlled the borderland and the portage between the two seas.
• Later kings kept extending it: Wikipedia lists Harald Bluetooth, Canute IV and Valdemar I among those who expanded the works.

Sources: Haithabu Danewerk World Heritage: North Rampart; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Archaeological Border complex of Hedeby and the Danevirke; De Re Militari: The years 808 to 810 from the Annals of the Kingdom of the Franks; Wikipedia: Danevirke

The dark summer of 536 (536 and 540, with effects into the mid-6th century)

Volcanic eruptions in 536 and 540 began one of the coldest periods of the last 2,000 years in the northern hemisphere. A 2023 study simulates growing-season cooling of up to 3.5 °C in southern Norway, enough to make crop failure likely in its northernmost and western study areas but less so in the south-east. Archaeology there shows abandoned farms in some places and continued occupation in others. Bo Gräslund and Neil Price argued in Antiquity in 2012 that the catastrophe left its mark on Scandinavian poetry and sculpture, and the paper lists Fimbulwinter and Ragnarök among its keywords. The location of the volcano or volcanoes is still unsettled: Iceland and Ilopango in El Salvador have both been proposed, but a 2020 study dates Ilopango's great eruption about a century too early.

• How bad it was is disputed. Wikipedia reports population-loss estimates of up to 50% in Scandinavia as reasonable to archaeologists and volcanologists, but says effects varied and some areas prospered.
• The 2023 study combines climate models, pollen from bogs and excavation, and finds a mixed picture, with farm abandonment and severe social impact in some areas but not all.
• The term Late Antique Little Ice Age, for cooling from 536 to about 660, was coined only in 2016, in a Nature Geoscience paper led by Ulf Büntgen.

Sources: Antiquity (Gräslund and Price, 2012): Twilight of the gods? The 'dust veil event' of AD 536 in critical perspective; Climate of the Past (van Dijk et al., 2023): Climatic and societal impacts in Scandinavia following the 536 and 540 CE volcanic double event; Wikipedia: Late Antique Little Ice Age

Vendel, Valsgärde and the crested helmets (c. 550 to 750)

Boat graves discovered at Vendel Church in Uppland between 1881 and 1893 gave their name to the two centuries before the Vikings. Burials there and at Valsgärde and Ultuna held crested 'spectacle' helmets with animal-head crests and pressed bronze foil. Valsgärde, about three kilometres north of Gamla Uppsala, was dug by Uppsala University between 1928 and 1952 and is famous for 15 unlooted boat graves. The Swedish History Museum notes that the great Anglo-Saxon helmet from Sutton Hoo belongs to the same group. These are the helmets people often mistake for Viking ones.

• Horned Viking helmets are a modern invention, popularised from the 1800s by Wagner's operas. Viking Age texts mention helmets but never horns, and historians generally think that any horned headgear of the period was not worn regularly.
• Only one complete Viking Age helmet has survived, from Gjermundbu in Norway, according to the Swedish History Museum.
• The Valsgärde excavators recorded the position of over a thousand rivets from each boat. One large drinking glass came out of a grave in about 600 pieces.

Sources: Swedish History Museum: 3D Vendel helmets; Uppsala University, Gustavianum: Valsgärde; Wikipedia: Horned helmet

Gold-foil figures (c. 550 to c. 800)

Guldgubber, 'little old men of gold', are pieces of beaten gold usually only 1 to 2 square centimetres in area, stamped with a figure. About 3,000 are known from some 30 sites in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and at least 2,350 of them come from Sorte Muld on Bornholm. They date from the end of the Migration Age to the early Viking Age. They may have replaced the heavier gold bracteates once gold from the Byzantine Empire grew hard to obtain. Their meaning is not recorded anywhere, so every explanation is an inference from where they are found.

• At Borg in Lofoten, gold-foil plaques lay under the post where the throne is thought to have stood. Writers at the Lofotr museum interpret the embracing couple as Odin and the giantess Skade, giving the chieftain a divine ancestry.
• At Uppåkra in Scania, Lars Larsson reports gold-foil figures in the filling of re-dug posts in a house used for ceremonies, along with small gold objects and fragments of glass beakers.
• The word gullgubbe comes from a report published in 1791 by Nils Henrik Sjöborg, who heard it from villagers at Ravlunda in Scania who found them in the dunes.

Sources: Wikipedia: Gullgubber; EXARC Journal: The Jubilee Year of 2020 at Lofotr Viking Museum; Lars Larsson, in Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods (Lund): paper on Uppåkra

The sail comes north (c. 7th and 8th centuries)

The great Nydam boat of the 3rd or 4th century, 23 metres long, was driven only by oars. Dr Morten Ravn of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde says the sail appears in Scandinavia around the seventh and eighth centuries, although people there knew of it from contact with the Romans. Why they waited is unknown, and the gap between Nydam and the first pictures of ships is, in his words, one of archaeology's great questions. The Salme II ship of about 750 already had a keel for sailing. Sails meant faster travel over longer distances, including the high seas, and this made the voyages of the Viking Age possible.

• The Kvalsund ship from Norway, about 18 metres long and tree-ring dated to 780 to 800, looks like a transitional vessel. Its shape suggests it might have had a simple sail, but this is not certain.
• The Nydam boat was clinker built, with overlapping planks, the technique later used for Viking ships.
• The World History Encyclopedia traces the plank-built tradition back to the Hjortspring war canoe of about 350 BC, 19 metres long and found in Denmark.

Sources: ScienceNordic: See where the Vikings travelled (interview with Morten Ravn, Viking Ship Museum); Antiquity (Price et al., 2016): Isotopic provenancing of the Salme ship burials; World History Encyclopedia: Viking Ships; Wikipedia: Kvalsund ship

From 24 runes to 16 (7th century to the late 8th century)

Runes had been written in Scandinavia since at least the second century AD, in the 24-letter Elder Futhark. In a transition across the 7th and 8th centuries, Scandinavians cut this to the 16-letter Younger Futhark, and by the late 8th century the change was complete. Oddly, this happened while spoken Proto-Norse was gaining sounds as it became Old Norse, so one rune had to do several jobs. The new script came in long-branch and short-twig forms and was the alphabet of the Viking Age. The World History Encyclopedia stresses the runestones as written evidence from inside the period, though Frankish, English and Irish writers were recording the Vikings at the same time.

• A comb from Vimose in Denmark, dated to about AD 160, reads harja, possibly 'comb' or 'warrior'; the Hole stone from Norway, found in 2021 and dated 50 BC to AD 275, may be earlier.
• Where the script came from is debated, with Greek, Roman and northern Italic models all proposed. Norse myth has its own answer, in the Hávamál passage where Odin hangs on the tree.
• Runes were designed to be cut into wood and metal first, and most are built from vertical lines with branches running diagonally from them.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Runes; Wikipedia: Younger Futhark; The Poetic Edda, Hávamál (H. A. Bellows translation), Sacred Texts

Ribe, the early market town (plots laid out 704 to 710; workshops until the mid or later 9th century)

Tree-ring dates show that between 704 and 710 a regular system of plots was laid out along a narrow street at Ribe. The archaeologist Claus Feveile estimates at least 40 to 50 plots, kept with few changes throughout the 8th century, into the middle or later 9th. Trade contacts ran mainly to Frisia and England. The Northern Emporium project, led by Søren Sindbæk, has tightened the dating using a solar storm of 775 as a time anchor in the radiocarbon record. Its conclusion is that Middle Eastern beads arrived in numbers around 790, give or take ten years, while imports from Norway came by ship as early as 750.

• The new dates challenge a common explanation of the Viking Age. If sea trade with Norway was running by 750, Scandinavian seafaring cannot have taken off simply in response to trade with the Middle East through Russia.
• Feveile identifies a brief phase before the plots, lasting no more than five to ten years. Aoife Daly's later chapter on the oak timbers places the recorded building at Posthustorvet in the early and mid-8th century.
• Over 300 sceattas, small silver coins, have been found in Denmark, 216 of them in or around Ribe, and coins may have been struck there as early as 720.

Sources: Claus Feveile, in From One Sea to Another (Brepols): Ribe, emporia and town in the 8th and 9th century; Aarhus University via EurekAlert: New dates for Viking trade; A. Daly, in Northern Emporium Vol. 1 (Zenodo record): Dendrochronology. Oak from Ribe; Wikipedia: Ribe

Ongendus (known only from c. 710; death unknown)

Ongendus (Ungendus), linked by the Viking Ship Museum with the later name Angantyr, King of the Danes · Denmark

Around 710 the English missionary Willibrord, having made no headway with the king of Frisia, went to the Danes. Alcuin's Life of Willibrord, written about 796, calls their ruler Ongendus a savage man who nevertheless received him with honour. Willibrord judged the people unwilling to change, chose thirty boys, and baptised them on the voyage back to the Franks. Alcuin wrote nearly a century later and had every reason to paint pagans darkly. Wikipedia's account notes that Willibrord travelled safely and left freely, which sits awkwardly with the savage label.

How they came to power: Unknown. No source says how he came to power or how much of Denmark he ruled.

How it ended: Unknown. Saxo Grammaticus, writing centuries later, has an Angantyr fall in battle on Samsø in an undated legend; the year 728 and the link between the two rest on the identification reported by the Viking Ship Museum.

• Wikipedia argues that Ungendus may not be a name at all but a Latin form meaning 'one to be anointed', a title for a king without Christian anointing. That is one reading, not a settled one.
• A translator's note on the Fordham text reports an old identification of Ongendus with Ongentheow in Beowulf, which should be treated as speculation.
• The Viking Ship Museum connects this king with Samsø, where the Kanhave Canal was dug in about 726, but no source directly links him to its building.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Alcuin, The Life of Willibrord; Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde: The Kanhave Canal, Samsø; Wikipedia: Ongendus

The Kanhave Canal (dug in 726; used during the 700s)

In 726 a canal was cut across the narrowest part of Samsø, linking Stavns Fjord in the east to the sea in the west. It was about 500 metres long and 11 to 14 metres wide, with sides lined with planks held in place by driven posts. More than 11,000 cubic metres of sand were moved. The Viking Ship Museum reads it as a military harbour and shortcut for light warships, with traces of ship maintenance and no sign of trade. A project of this scale implies a ruler able to command labour long before the Viking Age, although no source names him.

• Lex.dk says the timber was felled in 726. The Viking Ship Museum gives the same construction year but a slightly wider range for its dated planks, 724 to 729.
• The canal did not quite reach the sea on the west side, so ships had to be hauled over land for the last stretch, according to the Viking Ship Museum.
• It was used only during the 700s, then fell into disrepair and silted up. Stavns Fjord, at its eastern end, would have made a natural gathering place for a fleet.

Sources: Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde: The Kanhave Canal, Samsø; Lex.dk (Danish national encyclopedia): Kanhavekanalen; Wikipedia: Ribe

The Salme ship burials (c. 750 (Wikipedia: c. 700 to 750))

Workers at Salme on the island of Saaremaa found the first ship in 2008, and the second in 2010. Salme I, about 11.5 metres long and probably rowed, held seven men; Salme II, about 17 metres long with a keel for sailing, held 34 stacked in layers. The men of the larger ship died violently around 750, and both crews were buried with fine weapons, gaming pieces and animals. Isotopes and sword types point to the Stockholm-Mälaren region as their probable homeland. The find shows Scandinavian crews dying far across the Baltic before the traditional start of the Viking Age.

• What they were doing there is disputed. The 2016 Antiquity paper favours a diplomatic mission protected by elite warriors, reasoning that dogs, hawks and 326 gaming pieces would be odd baggage for a raid. Wikipedia simply describes them as warriors killed in battle.
• Medieval Histories argues that if local people had ambushed them, the swords and valuables would probably have been looted and survivors could hardly have buried the dead in peace. That is an inference, and it points away from a local attack.
• Two decapitated hawks were among the grave goods, along with three antler dice.

Sources: Antiquity (Price, Peets, Allmäe, Maldre and Oras, 2016): Isotopic provenancing of the Salme ship burials in Pre-Viking Age Estonia; Medieval Histories: Salme ship burials in pre-Viking Estonia; Wikipedia: Salme ships

Birka (founded c. 750 to 800; abandoned c. 975)

Birka stood on Björkö in Lake Mälaren, which in the Viking Age opened to the Baltic like a bay. It grew up near the royal residence at Hovgården on the island of Adelsö, and kings probably had a hand in its founding. Wikipedia gives a population of 500 to 1,000, and archaeologists have counted roughly 3,000 graves, of which 1,100 have been excavated. Swedish traders brought furs, silks and other luxuries back from the rivers of Russia and sold them on to merchants from Hedeby and western Europe. It was abandoned around 975, about the time Sigtuna was founded some 35 kilometres away.

• The founding date varies by source. Wikipedia gives about 750, the World History Encyclopedia a date between about 750 and 800, while UNESCO's summary speaks of occupation in the 9th and 10th centuries.
• The name may mean 'marketplace', or may be linked to the Old Norse word for birch. The World History Encyclopedia reports both ideas.
• UNESCO lists Birka and Hovgården together as a World Heritage Site, noting that St Ansgar founded the first Christian congregation in Sweden there in 831. Rimbert's Life of Anskar calls it a port of the Swedes and says many captive Christians were held there.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Rimbert, Life of Anskar (C. H. Robinson translation); UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Birka and Hovgården; World History Encyclopedia: Birka; Wikipedia: Birka

Staraya Ladoga (first buildings no later than 753 by tree-ring dating)

Tree-ring dating shows that the first buildings at Ladoga, in north-west Russia, went up no later than 753, which is a latest date and not a founding year. Natalia Grigoreva reports Scandinavian, Slavonic and Finnic finds in its layers. Wikipedia describes a Scandinavian settlement from the mid-8th century, called Aldeigjuborg by the Norse, with Eastern Slavs the main population by about the 760s or 770s. It became a stop on routes that ran to the southern shores of the Caspian and on to Baghdad. The oldest dirhams found in European Russia came from Ladoga, the earliest dated to 786 or 787. By the 800s, the World History Encyclopedia says, Swedish Vikings had navigated the rivers of Russia and Ukraine as far as Byzantium and the Abbasid Caliphate.

• Writers on the Rus divide into 'Normanists', who accept a Norse origin for the Rurik dynasty, and 'Anti-Normanists', who argue for a Slavic origin. The World History Encyclopedia says the Norse view is now generally accepted.
• The Primary Chronicle, which tells of Rurik and his brothers, was probably completed about 1113 at Kyiv, centuries after Ladoga's founding, and its earliest surviving manuscript dates from 1377. Grigoreva cites the Hypatian Codex for Rurik reaching Ladoga in 862, and calls him legendary.
• The Annals of St-Bertin record the Rus at the court of Louis the Pious in 839, in a mission from Constantinople, and say they were Swedes. Who they really were remains unsettled.

Sources: Natalia V. Grigoreva, ISKOS 24: Some Results of the Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Archaeological Sites of Staraya Ladoga; Natalja V. Grigorjeva, in The Global North (Arc Humanities, 2021): Archaeological Evidence for Staraya Lagoda as an Early Scandinavian Emporium; Wikipedia: Staraya Ladoga; World History Encyclopedia: Kievan Rus; World History Encyclopedia: Birka

Portland and the reeve (c. 789 (entered under 787 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle))

Three ships reached the coast of Wessex in the reign of King Beorhtric. Modern accounts place the landing at Portland in Dorset, though Ingram's text of the Chronicle names no place. The local reeve rode down to send the crews to the king's town, not knowing who they were, and they killed him. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle files this under the year 787 but says only that it happened in his days, and modern accounts usually date it to 789. Ingram's text calls them Northmen from a land of robbers and then Danish men; a modern translation quoted on Wikipedia has them from Hordaland. In Ingram's 1823 translation, the entry ends: "These were the first ships of the Danish men that sought the land of the English nation."

• Æthelweard's Latin version of the Chronicle, written nearly 200 years after the event, is the first to name the reeve, Beaduheard, and places him at Dorchester. His name means 'battle-hard'.
• Æthelweard says the reeve took them for merchants and not raiders, and Medievalists.net repeats that he thought them traders.
• The word Viking itself is debated. Britannica calls its origin uncertain, and Judith Jesch of Nottingham says a víkingr was a person who went on expeditions, usually abroad by sea in a group, while víking was the activity.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Eighth Century (Ingram translation); Wikipedia: Beaduheard; Medievalists.net: England and the Vikings; Britannica: What is the origin of the word Viking?; Judith Jesch (University of Nottingham), via HeritageDaily: What does the word Viking really mean?

The sack of Lindisfarne (793 (usually given as 8 June); a second Northumbrian raid followed in 794)

In 793 raiders landed on Lindisfarne, the tidal island monastery off Northumbria founded by St Aidan in 635. They killed monks, took others captive and plundered the church. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle surrounds the attack with omens of fiery dragons and whirlwinds, which it says were followed by famine. In Ingram's 1823 translation it speaks of "the harrowing inroads of heathen men". The next year raiders struck the monastery at the mouth of the Wear, but some of their leaders were killed, their ships were wrecked by storms, and survivors were killed on the shore.

• The date is a small puzzle. Ingram's text of the Chronicle gives the sixth day before the ides of January, but modern accounts give 8 June.
• Alcuin of York, writing from the Frankish realm, asked what safety the churches of Britain could have if St Cuthbert would not defend his own, and suggested the victims' sins may have brought it on them.
• Alcuin also rebuked the Northumbrians for imitating pagan fashions in hair and beards. MancHistorian reads this as a sign of contact with Scandinavians before the raid.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Eighth Century (Ingram translation); Schoolshistory.org.uk: Alcuin's letter to the Bishop of Lindisfarne; MancHistorian: The Viking Attack at Lindisfarne, Primary Sources; Medievalists.net: England and the Vikings; Wikipedia: Viking raid on Lindisfarne

Iona and the first raids on Ireland (795 to 825)

The Annals of Ulster record heathens burning Rechru and laying waste Skye in 795, which modern accounts treat as the first raids on the islands off Ireland. Iona, the monastery of St Columba, was hit in 795 according to the Annals of Inisfallen, burned in 802, and lost 68 of its community in 806. Blathmac son of Flann was killed there in 825. The raids reached around Ireland in the following decades: Inis Pátraic was burned in 798, Inis Muiredaig in 807, and Bangor was plundered in 823 and 824. Irish forces fought back too, and the annals record defeats of the raiders by the Ulaid in 811 and by the men of Umall in 812.

• How far Iona was abandoned is debated. Wikipedia says survivors fled to Kells after the massacre, but Historic Environment Scotland records only that some relics were taken for safekeeping to Dunkeld and Kells in the early 9th century.
• The Book of Kells was probably made on Iona, according to Historic Environment Scotland, and later reached Kells in Ireland. The exact route and date are not recorded.
• The annals under 824 record Étgal of Skellig being carried off by the heathens and dying soon after of hunger and thirst.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, translated by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; Historic Environment Scotland: Iona Abbey, history; Live Science (T. Metcalfe, 2024): Book of Kells; Wikipedia: Martyrs of Iona

Ansgar (801 to 3 February 865; at Birka c. 829 to 831)

Ansgar (Anskar), Apostle of the North, Missionary and archbishop · Hamburg-Bremen, Denmark and Sweden

Ansgar was born in 801 near Amiens (Wikipedia's infobox says Corbie) and became a monk at Corbie. He went first to Denmark with Harald Klak, then around 829 to Sweden when King Björn asked for missionaries. Pirates took the party's ships and gifts on the way, and they reached Birka on foot and by boat. There the king let them preach, and the town's prefect, Herigar, was baptised and built a church. His biographer and successor Rimbert is our main source, and an openly admiring one, so his account has to be read as a work of praise.

How they rose: A monk from Corbie, he was chosen by Louis the Pious for the northern missions and, after his return from Birka, made archbishop of the new see of Hamburg.

How they died: He died at Bremen on 3 February 865; Rimbert says he suffered for months with dysentery.

• Returning to Sweden in the early 850s, Ansgar is said to have faced a king who cast lots to decide whether the mission could stay. The lots allowed it, and an assembly agreed after debate.
• His mission depended on royal favour. Horik I allowed a church at Schleswig, but a headman called Hovi later persuaded a new king to close it for a time.
• His successor Rimbert, who wrote the Life, later gave up church vessels and his own horse to ransom Christians captured by the Northmen, according to the introduction to the Fordham text.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Rimbert, Life of Anskar (C. H. Robinson translation); World History Encyclopedia: Birka; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Birka and Hovgården; Wikipedia: Ansgar

Godfred (reigned at least 804 to 810)

Godfred (Gudfred, Godofredus), king of the Danes, King of the Danes · Denmark

Godfred is the earliest Danish ruler known in any depth from writers of his own time, but those writers were hostile Franks; no clear trace of him survives in the sagas. In 804 he brought his fleet and cavalry to Sliesthorp on the Saxon border but avoided meeting Charlemagne in person. In 808 he attacked the Abodrites, Frankish allies, took tribute from two-thirds of them and hanged one of their leaders, though he lost his nephew Reginold in the fighting. He destroyed the trading place of Reric, moved its merchants (usually taken to mean to Hedeby, though the annals do not say where), and ordered a rampart across the isthmus. In 810 a fleet of 200 ships from the north ravaged Frisia and took 100 pounds of silver in tribute.

How they came to power: His parentage is unknown, though he may have been closely related to Sigfred, who ruled the Danes before him.

How it ended: Killed in 810 by someone from his own retinue, according to the Royal Frankish Annals, just as Charlemagne was gathering an army against him. His nephew Hemming succeeded him and made peace.

• In the 808 entry, the annals call him insane, which tells us as much about the writer as about the king. Their picture of him comes entirely from the Frankish side.
• The 810 annal notes that Godfred himself stayed at home while the fleet raided Frisia. Thrasco of the Abodrites was killed the year after his defeat, by Godfred's men, at Reric.
• Scholars have long debated whether he launched the so-called Birka or Hedeby coinage. Medieval Histories reports a 2018 hoard of 252 coins from Ribe, dated about 800 to 820, as possible evidence for minting there, not as settled fact.

Sources: De Re Militari: The years 808 to 810 from the Annals of the Kingdom of the Franks; Medieval Histories: Sigfred and Godfred 804-810; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Viking Raids on Paris; Wikipedia: Gudfred

Hedeby (first mentioned 804; merchants moved there 808; destroyed 1066)

Hedeby lay at the head of the narrow Schlei inlet, where goods could cross the neck of Jutland between the Baltic and the North Sea. It is usually taken to be first mentioned in 804, as Sliesthorp in the Frankish annals, although Medieval Histories places Sliesthorp near the future town and dates Hedeby's founding to about 808. In 808 Godfred moved the merchants of Reric, usually taken to mean to the harbour there, though the annals do not name it. UNESCO calls it one of the largest and most important of the new trading towns of northern and western Europe for more than three centuries. Rimbert's Life of Ansgar, Ohthere of Hålogaland and Adam of Bremen all mention it. King Horik I later let Ansgar build a church there, though most inhabitants seem to have stayed pagan until the 11th century.

• Its name in the first records is uncertain and varies: the annals say Sliesthorp and later writers Sliaswich or Haithabu. Medieval Histories places Reric near Strömkendorf, north of Wismar, while the World History Encyclopedia suggests Rostock.
• Around 965 the traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, also called al-Turtushi, described a very large town at the end of the world's ocean and found the singing of its people less than beautiful.
• Harald Hardrada burned the town around 1050, and Wikipedia and the World History Encyclopedia both record its final sack by Slavs in 1066, after which it was abandoned in favour of Schleswig.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Archaeological Border complex of Hedeby and the Danevirke; De Re Militari: The years 808 to 810 from the Annals of the Kingdom of the Franks; World History Encyclopedia: Hedeby; Medieval Histories: Sigfred and Godfred 804-810; Wikipedia: Hedeby

Harald Klak (reigned c. 812 to 814 and 819 to 827; died c. 852)

Harald 'Klak' Halfdansson (Heriold in Frankish sources), King in Jutland · Denmark and Frisia

Harald Klak was a rival to the sons of Godfred for the Danish throne. Driven out by them, he turned to the Frankish court, and Louis the Pious helped him back into a shared kingship in 819. On 24 June 826 he was baptised with his wife and companions at St Alban's near Mainz, then returned home through Frisia with rich gifts. The Frankish court gave him the county of Rüstringen, so that he would have a refuge if he lost Denmark. Ansgar went with him as a missionary. His baptism was mainly politics, and the World History Encyclopedia judges that his contribution to Denmark's conversion was minor.

How they came to power: He emerged in the fighting after Godfred's death, ruling part of Denmark from about 812 until the sons of Godfred drove him out. A Frankish-backed return in 819 made him co-king with two of them.

How it ended: Expelled for good around 827 by the sons of Godfred. He is thought to have died around 852, and the details are not recorded.

• Ermoldus Nigellus wrote of 100 ships with the Danish king, a figure the Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim researchers call exaggerated.
• Sources differ on where exactly the conversion took place: the annals name St Alban's in Mainz, while the Annals of Xanten connect the same visit to an assembly at Ingelheim.
• Historian Simon Coupland, cited by Wikipedia, notes that sheltering a pagan exile was not new, since Charlemagne had made similar alliances before.

Sources: Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim: Symposium on Northern and Central Europe in the Early Middle Ages; Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Rimbert, Life of Anskar (C. H. Robinson translation); World History Encyclopedia: Harald Bluetooth and the Conversion of Denmark; Wikipedia: Harald Klak

Captives and the slave trade (Annals of Ulster record captives from 821; trade continues long after)

The Annals of Ulster record raiders carrying off a great number of women from Étar, near Dublin, in 821, and many similar seizures follow. Written sources show captives taken in raids being sold across Europe, to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world. At Hedeby, Rimbert is said to have seen a large group of Christians in chains and ransomed a nun for his horse, and Birka too had many captives. The Swedish History Museum suggests some of the great numbers of Islamic dirhams found in Scandinavia may reflect this trade. Scale is unknown, and one estimate cited by History puts slaves as high as 10 percent of the population.

• Hard evidence is rare, and the Swedish History Museum notes that simple ropes rarely survive. Ben Raffield of Uppsala points to iron collars and shackles from Dublin, Birka and Hedeby, arguing that their urban setting near harbours suits people more than animals.
• Poul Holm's abstract calls slave-taking part of warfare but never the prime motive for raiding, used for ransom and tribute (History, by contrast, says the desire for slaves might have been one of the main reasons), and that the trade through Dublin grew most in the 11th century, when Irish kings sold their own prisoners of war.
• Neil Price of Uppsala says no purpose-built slave markets are known. He sees small, frequent sales, of one or two people at a time.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, translated by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; Swedish History Museum: Free and Unfree in the Viking Age; History (S. Pruitt): What We Know About Vikings and Slavery; Poul Holm, Peritia 1986, abstract via Medievalists.net: The Slave Trade of Dublin; Neil Price (Uppsala), via Brewminate: The Little-Known Role of Slavery in Medieval Viking Society

Dorestad (first attacked 834; last attack recorded 863)

Dorestad, in Frisia, flourished from the 7th century to the mid-9th as a toll station, harbour and Frankish mint. Simon Coupland writes that Vikings attacked it repeatedly in the late 830s, apparently at the instigation of Louis the Pious's rebellious son Lothar. On his accession Lothar rewarded the Danes responsible, Harald and Rorik, with Dorestad and the surrounding area. The Annals of St Bertin has Danish pirates masters of almost all Frisia in 846, and in 850 Rorik seized the port by force and was recognised as its lord. Only two attacks are recorded in his time, in 857 and 863, and by the 860s the town had faded as a major trading place.

• Sources disagree on how often it was hit. Wikipedia says in one place that it was raided only once, in 834, and in another that attacks ran from 834 to 863, while Coupland describes repeated attacks in the late 830s and two more under Rorik.
• The raids may not explain its end. Coupland argues that the port suffered from losing Baltic trade as Arab silver flooded into the Baltic, that silting hindered the harbour, and that by the attack of 863 it was already dead, according to Richard Hodges's review.
• The mint's end is disputed. Wikipedia says it shut when Rorik (Hroerekr) took control, but Coupland's coin study argues that it ran until at least 850 and perhaps as late as 860, later than the excavators proposed.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of St Bertin and related texts; Simon Coupland, Jaarboek voor Munt- en Penningkunde 75 (1988): Dorestad in the Ninth Century, the Numismatic Evidence; The Medieval Review 11.10.16 (R. Hodges): review of Dorestad in an International Framework; Wikipedia: Dorestad

The Oseberg ship burial (834 by tree-ring dating; excavated 1904 to 1905)

In 834, two women were laid in a burial chamber on a ship in a mound at Oseberg in Vestfold. The oak ship is 21.58 metres long, with 15 pairs of oar holes and decoration in a gripping-beast style. Although robbers took the precious metals long ago, the excavation of 1904 to 1905 by Gabriel Gustafson and Haakon Shetelig recovered four sleighs (Sky History says three), a carved cart, beds and chests, and the bones of horses, dogs and cattle (counts vary between accounts). It is one of the richest finds of Viking Age everyday life. Tree-ring work published by Niels Bonde and Arne Emil Christensen in 1993 gave a date exact nearly to the year, replacing older dating by carving style.

• Who the women were is unknown. The idea that the chief woman was Queen Åsa, grandmother of Harald Fairhair, is a popular suggestion only, and it has been challenged.
• Sources disagree on their ages, giving the older one as about 80 or 70 to 80 and the younger as about 50 to 55. Sky History asks whether the younger could have been a sacrificed slave, and a 2007 exhumation was meant to test whether they were related, but Wikipedia reports there was not enough DNA to tell.
• A full-sized reconstruction launched in 2012 sailed the open sea in 2014, reaching 10 knots and showing the ship was not just a funeral barge.

Sources: Antiquity (Bonde and Christensen, 1993): Dendrochronological dating of the Viking Age ship burials at Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune; Princeton University, Making the Viking Age: Rare and Peculiar, The Oseberg Ship; Sky History: History of the Oseberg Viking burial ship; NBC News / Reuters (2007): Viking women unearthed for DNA study; Wikipedia: Oseberg ship

Turgesius (fl. c. 840s; drowned 845)

Turgéis (Thorgest or Thorgils; the Norse form is uncertain), Viking leader · Ireland

Turgesius is a case study in how legend grows. The Annals of Ulster say only that under 845 there was a camp of foreigners on Lough Ree under Tuirgéis, plundering Connacht and Mide and burning Clonmacnoise and other monasteries, and that Máel Sechnaill captured him and drowned him in Loch Uair (Lough Owel). Later writers made far more of him. Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh has him seize power over all the foreigners, and Gerald of Wales names him among the first conquerors of Ireland. Modern historians treat these later stories with caution.

How they rose: Unknown. The Annals of Ulster first mention him in 845, while later sources give him a great fleet in the 830s.

How they died: Captured by Máel Sechnaill in 845 and drowned in Lough Owel, according to the Annals of Ulster.

• Wikipedia says the Annals of Ulster are the sole reliable record of him. Store norske leksikon reports the capture and drowning with the word 'allegedly'.
• John O'Donovan and Charles Haliday each tried to identify him with Ragnar Lothbrok, but that idea is not generally accepted.
• Máel Sechnaill's victory came alongside others. The annals record the Irish killing a jarl called Tomrair in 848, and several other Viking defeats that year.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, translated by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; Store norske leksikon: Turgeis; Wikipedia: Turgesius

The founding of Dublin (naval camp recorded 841; Norse expelled 902)

The Annals of Ulster record 60 ships on the Liffey in 837 and, in 841, a naval camp at Duiblinn from which the raiders plundered Leinster and the Uí Néill. Duiblinn means the Black Pool, and the camp probably stood near it, though the exact site is still debated. It was one of several longphorts, naval camps that let raiders stay through the winter. Rival fleets of 'dark' and 'fair' foreigners fought for the coast in 851 and 852. In 853 Amlaíb, called son of the king of Lochlann, arrived and the foreigners of Ireland submitted to him, and with Ímar and Auisle he made Dublin a base for wider campaigns.

• Linzi Simpson's dig at South Great George's Street found warrior burials on the rim of the pool. Radiocarbon put three of the four between about 670 and 882, and isotopes suggest two grew up in Scandinavia and two in a colony in Scotland, raising the question of whether Vikings were there before 841.
• Kilmainham-Islandbridge is the largest Viking burial complex of its type in western Europe outside Scandinavia, according to Stephen Harrison, with at least 59 graves recorded between the late 18th century and 1934.
• Dublin City's archaeological archive describes the longphort as a slaving and trading base. Snorri's Saga of Harald Fairhair has a king of Dublin named Thorgils, a son of Harald placed decades too late; equating him with Turgesius is a later inference, and the Annals of Ulster do not have Turgesius ruling there.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, translated by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; The Irish Times (A. King, 2014): The Vikings beneath modern Dublin; Dublin City Council Archaeological Archive: South Great George's Street / Stephen Street excavation; Wikipedia: Early Scandinavian Dublin

Nantes to Seville (843 to November 844)

In 843 Northmen sacked Nantes, killing the bishop, and then built houses on an island for the winter, as if to stay. In 844 raiders went up the Garonne as far as Toulouse and on to Spain. Arabic and Latin writers then follow a fleet down the coast past Lisbon, up the Guadalquivir and to Seville, which they took by storm on 1 or 3 October. The emir Abd ar-Rahman II sent an army under his chief minister Isa ibn Shuhayd, which defeated them on 11 or 17 November. Seville was then given walls and a naval arsenal, and later raids were beaten off. The Annals of St Bertin names no Seville: it says only that those who went farther into Spain fought the Saracens and withdrew beaten.

• Numbers vary, and none should be trusted far: Wikipedia's early Muslim figures are 80 ships and 16,000 men. Ann Christys doubts how much can be said for certain beyond the raids on Lisbon and Seville, and a review of her book calls many Latin and Arabic narratives late and inaccurate.
• The story that the emir then sent the poet al-Ghazal as envoy to a Viking court has been questioned. The key evidence is a 13th-century account, which has been shown neither clearly to concern Vikings nor probably even to have happened, according to Wikipedia.
• The raids were tied up in Frankish politics. Simon Coupland, citing Nithard among others, writes that Vikings attacked Dorestad in the late 830s apparently at the instigation of Lothar, one of the feuding sons of Louis the Pious.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of St Bertin and related texts; Nordicum-Mediterraneum 11.1 (J. Þ. Þór, 2016): review of Ann Christys, Vikings in the South; Wikipedia: Viking raid on Seville; Wikipedia: Vikings in Iberia; Simon Coupland, Jaarboek voor Munt- en Penningkunde 75 (1988): Dorestad in the Ninth Century, the Numismatic Evidence

The burning of Hamburg (845)

In 845 pirates surrounded Hamburg, in the words of Rimbert, while its count was away. Archbishop Ansgar first planned to hold out, then escaped with the relics as the town fell. The raiders stayed a night and a day and a night, burned the church and monastery, and left. The Annals of St Bertin says Euric, king of the Northmen, sailed up the Elbe with 600 vessels against Louis the German and was beaten by the Saxons, without naming Hamburg. Modern accounts take him to be Horik, son of Godfred, and connect the two events, and the size of the fleet should be taken with caution.

• Horik's long reign, from 813 to his violent death in 854, was marked by raids on the Carolingian Empire, according to Wikipedia.
• The World History Encyclopedia says Horik later offered to release the captives of 845 and recover the loot, after envoys warned him of Louis the German's anger.
• He later made terms with Ansgar and allowed a church at Schleswig, so the king who burned Hamburg also became a patron of the same missionary.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Rimbert, Life of Anskar (C. H. Robinson translation); Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of St Bertin and related texts; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Viking Raids on Paris; Wikipedia: Horik I

The siege of Paris, 845 (from late March 845)

A fleet of 120 ships under a chieftain called Reginherus came up the Seine in March 845. Charles the Bald split his army on the two banks, and the Vikings beat the smaller force and hanged 111 prisoners. They reached Paris at Easter and found that most people had fled with their valuables. Charles then bought them off for 7,000 livres, and, by one account, it took two months to raise the money. Paying set a precedent, though Simon Coupland counts just three royal tributes in the next 37 years.

• The World History Encyclopedia says Reginherus is known only for this raid, while Wikipedia adds an earlier land grant at Turholt in Flanders from Charles. He is often tentatively identified with the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok, but historians dispute it.
• According to the World History Encyclopedia, sickness struck the raiders, and Frankish writers claimed it as St Germain's vengeance. Reginherus is said to have told Horik that a dead saint gave the only resistance he met.
• The money is differently described: the Fordham text says 7,000 livres, while the World History Encyclopedia says 7,000 pounds in gold and silver.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of St Bertin and related texts; World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Viking Raids on Paris; Wikipedia: Siege of Paris (845)

Ragnar Lothbrok (legend set in the 9th century; written sources from the 12th and 13th centuries)

Ragnarr Loðbrók, 'Hairy-breeches', Legendary Viking king · Scandinavia (historicity disputed)

Ragnar's story reaches us in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, in Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, and in a 12th-century death-song, Krákumál, all written centuries after he is supposed to have lived. They tell of a dragon killed in boiled shaggy breeches, wives including Lagertha and Aslaug, and a doomed invasion of England with just two ships. Historians generally treat most of this as fiction. The World History Encyclopedia says no one historical person matches his alleged deeds, and lists possible inspirations including the Reginherus of Paris in 845, Horik I and Reginfrid. His supposed sons Ivar, Björn and others are on firmer ground, though their link to him is the weak point.

How they rose: Unknown, if he existed at all. The sagas call him the son of a King Sigurd Ring of Denmark or Sweden, and Saxo makes him a Danish king; neither can be confirmed.

How they died: Legend says King Ælla of Northumbria threw him into a snake-pit, and his sons came for revenge. Nothing contemporary supports it, and the 'blood eagle' linked to his sons' revenge is later legend, much debated by modern scholars. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has Ælla die in battle at York in 867, with no such torture.

• Hilda Ellis Davidson wrote in 1979 that some scholars accept part of his story as based on fact, while most modern opinion, as Wikipedia reports it, regards the tales as fiction.
• Krákumál's language belongs to the 12th century, not the 9th, so it cannot be Ragnar's own, whatever it claims.
• The Vikings TV show uses the Paris siege for its Ragnar. The World History Encyclopedia points out that the real chieftain there was much weaker than the character.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Ragnar Lothbrok; Project Gutenberg: Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Books I-IX; Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of St Bertin and related texts; Wikipedia: Ragnar Lodbrok

The first winters in England (850 or 851 (Thanet); 854 to 856 by source (Sheppey))

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under 851, says the heathens stayed over winter in Thanet for the first time. The same year 350 ships entered the Thames, stormed Canterbury and London, and routed the king of the Mercians before Ethelwulf of Wessex beat them at Aclea, a site not yet identified. King Athelstan and Alderman Elchere also won at sea off Sandwich, taking nine ships. Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards, studying the later Great Army camp, call these early winters apparently isolated episodes on coastal sites. In 865 the army on Thanet made peace with Kent for money, then broke it and ravaged eastern Kent.

• The year varies by source. The Kent Archaeological Society gives 850/851 for Thanet, Hadley and Richards give 850, and the Chronicle's entry is under 851.
• The exact location of the Thanet camp is still unknown, according to the Kent Archaeological Society.
• Ingram's Chronicle files the first winter on Sheppey under 854, while Kent's heritage record gives 855/856. That record notes that the Chronicle says nothing of a fortress on Sheppey in 855. It suggests the island's position gave protection enough.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ninth Century (Ingram translation); Kent Archaeological Society: Where did the Vikings overwinter in Thanet?; Kent Historic Environment Record: Viking camp on Sheppey; The Antiquaries Journal (Hadley and Richards, Cambridge): The Winter Camp of the Viking Great Army, AD 872-3, Torksey

The Mediterranean voyage (859 to c. 862)

The Annals of St Bertin record that in 859 Danish pirates, after a long sea voyage between Spain and Africa, entered the Rhône, plundered cities and monasteries as far as Valence, and based themselves on the Camargue. From there they went on to Italy and took Pisa and other cities. Arabic histories, written down in the 11th century, also describe raids on Iberia. Later writers named the leaders and added colourful tales: Dudo of Saint-Quentin, who wrote between about 994 and 1015, names Hastein, and William of Jumièges, around 1070, adds Björn Ironside. How much of this is true is hotly disputed, and the scholar Ann Christys treats it as a single band with limited success.

• Hastein's capture of Luna is legend. Dudo of Saint-Quentin, writing well over a century later, has him mistake Luna for Rome, feign death and be carried inside on a bier, then leap up among the mourners. Wikipedia notes that its truth is much debated.
• Wikipedia, drawing on recent scholarship, says that naming Hastein and Björn as the raiders of Nekor rests on modern guesswork from unreliable medieval sources.
• Later accounts, reported on Wikipedia's page on Hastein, give a fleet of 62 ships, a figure to treat with caution. The Annals of St Bertin confirm the winter camp on the Camargue but name no leaders and give no ship count.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Annals of St Bertin and related texts; Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Dudo of St Quentin, Gesta Normannorum (F. Lifshitz translation); Wikipedia: Vikings in Iberia; Wikipedia: Hastein; Wikipedia: Björn Ironside

The Rus attack on Constantinople (18 June to c. 4 August 860)

On 18 June 860 a fleet of about 200 vessels sailed into the Bosporus, while Emperor Michael III and much of the army were fighting the Arabs. The attackers plundered the suburbs and nearby islands but could not take the walls. Patriarch Photius preached two homilies on the attack, describing the sudden terror. He called them a distant, barbarous people without a leader, and Demetrios Constantelos treats this as partly rhetoric. By 4 August, when he thanked heaven for the city's deliverance, they had gone.

• The Primary Chronicle, written centuries later, names Askold and Dir as leaders, apparently because its authors believed these men held Kyiv in 866. Photius's sermons give no reason for the retreat.
• Demetrios Constantelos notes that other Byzantine writers, including Niketas the Paphlagonian and Theophanes Continuatus, confirm the basic facts of the attack.
• Photius later wrote, in an encyclical of 867, that some of the Rus who had attacked had now accepted Christianity.

Sources: Demetrios J. Constantelos, Theologia: Greek Missionary Background of Christianization of Russia; World History Encyclopedia: Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Siege of Constantinople (860)

Ivar the Boneless (active c. 865 to 870 in England; Ímar of Dublin died 873)

Ívarr hinn beinlausi; 'Hingwar' to English writers; perhaps Ímar of Dublin, Viking leader · England and possibly Dublin

Ivar is really two figures who may or may not be one man. English sources give a leader called Hingwar or Inguar among the commanders of the Great Army, and one annal in the Chronicle names Hingwar and Hubba as the killers of King Edmund. Irish annals, written at the time, follow a Viking called Ímar, active around Dublin and the Irish Sea from the 850s until his death in 873 (World History Encyclopedia says from 853; the Annals of Ulster first name him in 857). Sagas written down some 300 to 400 years later turn Ivar into a son of Ragnar Lothbrok, ruler of York and a brilliant strategist. World History Encyclopedia warns that the identification of these men with one another has serious problems, even though it is often assumed.

How they rose: Unknown in any detail. He appears in English sources as an established leader of the army that landed in 865, and the claim that he was Ragnar's son rests on later legend.

How they died: The Annals of Ulster record the death of Ímar in 873, calling him king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain. An entry in the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, about a king it names Gothfraid and who may be the same man, blames a sudden, horrible disease, while the English writer Æthelweard places Ivar's death in 870. If they were one man, the dates do not agree.

• The nickname has no agreed meaning. Some sagas say he was born with a skeletal condition caused by a curse, because Ragnar ignored Aslaug's advice to wait three nights before consummating their marriage; others hint at impotence.
• Ímar's descendants, the Uí Ímair, became a dynasty that dominated the Irish Sea and at times ruled in both Dublin and York.
• The suggestion that he was buried in the great mound at Repton, where a workman found a mass of skeletons in 1686, is an unproved proposal, not an identification.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, tr. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; Project Gutenberg: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. Ingram and Giles; World History Encyclopedia (Emma Groeneveld): Ivar the Boneless; Wikipedia: Ivar the Boneless

The Great Army lands in England (865 to 878)

In 865 a Viking force much bigger than the old raiding bands landed in East Anglia, took horses from the locals in return for peace, and spent the winter there. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which files the landing under 866 in Ingram's edition, calls it "a large heathen army" (Ingram, 1823). Over the next ten years it took York, killed the kings of Northumbria and East Anglia, drove Burgred of Mercia overseas and invaded Wessex again and again. In 874 to 875 it split: Halfdan led one part north to the Tyne, while Guthrum, Oskytel and Anwend took the other to Cambridge and then against Alfred. Many of its men never went home, and the campaign turned into settlement.

• Nobody knows how big it was, and historians disagree sharply. Pete Sawyer argued for no more than about 1,000 men, working from ship capacity, while Richard Abels is reported to have suggested more than 5,000 fighters at the start.
• At Ashdown in January 871 the West Saxons under King Ethelred and his brother Alfred beat a Danish force led by two kings, Bagsac and Halfdan. Bagsac was killed, along with several earls the Chronicle names.
• The Chronicle says that in 876 Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians, "so that they became afterwards their harrowers and plowers" (Ingram, 1823). It is one of the clearest early records of a Viking army turning into farmers.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ninth Century; Project Gutenberg: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. Ingram and Giles; BBC History (Edward James): Overview: The Vikings, 800 to 1066; Wikipedia: Great Heathen Army

York falls and Jórvík begins (taken 866; battle March 867; Viking kings until 954)

The Great Army took York in November 866, during a Northumbrian civil war. In the battle for the city on 21 March 867 both Northumbrian leaders, Ælla and Osberht, were killed; the Annals of Ulster also record Ælla's death in the battle at York. Halfdan is treated as the first Viking king of York from about 875 to 876, and kings of Scandinavian and Irish Sea descent held the city off and on until 954. The town grew rich on craft and long-distance trade, and coin evidence suggests its Viking rulers were striking their own coins by about 895. The excavations at Coppergate in 1976 to 1981 show its daily life in unusual detail.

• The York Archaeological Trust dug more than 1,000 square metres at Coppergate from 1976 to 1981. Waterlogged, airless soil preserved organic remains and left Viking timbers standing to about 2 metres in places.
• Finds from the site point to trade links stretching far beyond the North Sea, including a silk cap, a counterfeit of a Samarkand coin and amber from the Baltic.
• Two iron coin dies, for St Peter and Æthelstan pennies, were recovered at Coppergate, a sign of minting at or near the site. One is in the name of an English king, so they do not tie the street to the Viking kings alone.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, tr. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ninth Century; Current Archaeology: Coppergate memories: remembering York's revolutionary Viking dig; Wikipedia: Scandinavian York; Historic England (report 48/1992): Analysis of the St Peter penny and Aethelstan penny coin dies from Coppergate, York

The sons of Ragnar and the blood eagle: legend against evidence (events of 867 to 870; the legends took shape centuries later)

The record of the killings is short: Ælla of Northumbria fell in battle at York in 867, and the Chronicle says King Edmund of East Anglia fought the Danes and was killed in the winter of 869 to 870. Later Norse tradition turned this into a revenge saga, in which Ælla throws Ragnar Lothbrok into a snake pit and Ragnar's sons invade England to avenge him. Their vengeance includes the blood eagle, a rite in which the victim's back is cut open and his ribs and lungs pulled out. World History Encyclopedia notes that, as far as is known, nothing outside the Ragnar legends connects the invasion with revenge for a father.

• Whether the blood eagle ever happened is still debated. Roberta Frank argued in 1984 that saga writers misread skaldic verse about enemies left face-down on the field for eagles, while Alfred Smyth had defended it as real human sacrifice to Odin and Ronald Hutton called it almost certainly a Christian myth.
• A 2022 paper in Speculum by Luke John Murphy and colleagues found that the rite as described was anatomically possible, though the victim would probably have died early. Keele University's account stresses that the team could not say whether it was ever really performed.
• The earliest verse usually cited for Ælla's death is Sigvatr Þórðarson's 11th-century Knútsdrápa, and its wording is cryptic and disputed.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ninth Century; Keele University: Disturbing Viking ritual could have really happened, say researchers; World History Encyclopedia (Emma Groeneveld): Ragnar Lothbrok; Wikipedia: Blood eagle

Alfred the Great (reigned 871 to 26 October 899)

Ælfrēd, king of the West Saxons, later of the Anglo-Saxons, House of Wessex · Wessex

Alfred became king of Wessex in 871, in the middle of the Viking invasion, and bought peace at first. In early 878 a surprise Danish attack from Chippenham left him hiding in the marshes at Athelney, but he rallied the shires and defeated Guthrum at Edington that spring. He then rebuilt the defences of his kingdom, with a system of about 30 garrisoned forts called burhs (a surviving list of 33 may include later additions), placed so that garrisons could support one another within a day's march and paid for through a reformed tax on the produce of the land. He enlarged the fleet and sponsored a revival of learning in English. When new Viking armies returned in the 890s they failed to break Wessex, and he left the only independent English kingdom.

How they came to power: He was the youngest of five sons of King Æthelwulf, and three older brothers ruled before him. He fought beside the last of them, King Ethelred, at Ashdown in 871 and took the throne when Ethelred died that year.

How it ended: He died on 26 October 899 and was succeeded by his son Edward the Elder. His daughter Æthelflæd and his son carried the war into the Danelaw.

• The story of Alfred burning the cakes is not in Asser. It comes from the later Life of St Neot, and is generally treated as legend.
• Alfred is often called the father of the British navy, but that is a Victorian label: he enlarged and reformed the fleet rather than founding it.
• Most of what we know comes from sources he himself encouraged. Edward James notes that he had the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle compiled, and that Asser wrote his Life on the model of Einhard's life of Charlemagne, so this is close to royal propaganda.

Sources: Project Gutenberg: Asser's Life of King Alfred, tr. Albert S. Cook (1906); Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ninth Century; BBC History (Edward James): Overview: The Vikings, 800 to 1066; World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Alfred the Great; Britannica: Alfred

The winter camp at Repton (winter 873 to 874)

In the winter of 873 to 874 the Great Army camped at Repton in Derbyshire, a royal and church centre of Mercia with a double monastery. From there it drove King Burgred of Mercia overseas; the Chronicle says he went to Rome and stayed until his death. Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle excavated the site, finding a large defensive ditch and graves with Scandinavian goods. Under a low mound they found a charnel deposit holding the jumbled remains of at least 264 people, which they linked to the army. For years radiocarbon dates seemed to contradict them, until a 2018 study showed that the error came from the marine diet of the people themselves.

• Bristol and Oxford researchers led by Catrine Jarman explained in Antiquity in 2018 that people who eat a lot of seafood take up older carbon, making their bones date too early. Once corrected, the Repton bones fit a single date in the late ninth century.
• About 80 per cent of the charnel remains were men, mostly aged 18 to 45, and about 20 per cent were women.
• Coins from the site had already pointed to the years 872 to 875, before the new radiocarbon work confirmed the same window.

Sources: Antiquity (Jarman, Biddle, Higham and Bronk Ramsey, 2018): The Viking Great Army in England: new dates from the Repton charnel; EurekAlert (University of Bristol): press release on the Repton charnel dating; Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Ninth Century

Ingólfr Arnarson (settled, by tradition, in 874; death date unknown)

Ingólfr Arnarson, by tradition the first permanent Norse settler of Iceland, Settler · Reykjavík, Iceland

Iceland's medieval histories name Ingólfr, a Norwegian, as its first permanent settler, and date his arrival to 874. The Book of Settlements tells how he threw his high-seat pillars into the sea and vowed to live wherever they came ashore. Two of his slaves, Vifil and Karli, are said to have found them in the third winter, at the place where he settled at Reykjavík. These stories were written down two to three centuries after the events, and modern scholars treat their details as unreliable. Archaeology adds a complication: some Reykjavík dwellings lie below a volcanic layer dated to the 870s (871 or 877, depending on the ice core), which may mean that people came earlier.

How they rose: According to the Book of Settlements he left Norway with his foster-brother Hjörleifr. Whether anything else about his standing there is true cannot be checked.

How they died: Unknown. The Book of Settlements gives no date, and says only that some held he was buried at Ingolf's Fell, where he spent a winter.

• The saga-history says that Hjörleifr made his Irish slaves pull the plough, and that they killed him; Ingólfr hunted them down in the Westman Islands. It is a vivid early mention of Irish slaves in Iceland.
• Ingólfr was not the first to reach the island. Naddoddr, Garðar Svavarsson and Hrafna-Flóki are said to have come before him, and Ari the Learned reports Irish monks there too. Archaeology offers only tentative support, such as sediments and carved crosses at caves on the Seljaland farm.
• Written sources favour Norway, but genetic studies show the settlers came from Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland. Many of the Irish and Scots probably arrived as slaves.

Sources: Internet Archive: The Book of the Settlement of Iceland, tr. T. Ellwood (1898); Thingvellir National Park: History; Wikipedia: Settlement of Iceland

Guthrum (led the southern army from 874; king in East Anglia c. 880 to 890)

Guthrum, baptised Æthelstan, king of the East Angles, Viking king · East Anglia

Guthrum first appears as one of three Danish kings who took part of the Great Army to Cambridge in 874 to 875. He then tried to destroy Wessex, seizing Wareham and Exeter and breaking his oaths at least once. In the midwinter of 878 his army stole into Chippenham and overran much of the kingdom. After Edington that spring he surrendered, and came with 30 chosen men to Aller, where Alfred stood sponsor at his baptism. He later settled in East Anglia and ruled it until he died.

How they came to power: His origins are not reliably recorded. He emerges as a leader in the Chronicle's annal for 875, with Oskytel and Anwend.

How it ended: He died in 890, by the Chronicle's date. The Chronicle gives his baptismal name, Athelstan, and calls him king of the Northern men. The 12th-century Annals of St Neots say he was buried at Hadleigh in Suffolk.

• At Wareham, Asser has the Danes swear on relics, while the Chronicle has them swear on a holy ring or bracelet. Both say that the oath was soon broken.
• His treaty with Alfred set a border along the Thames, the Lea and Watling Street, and made an Englishman and a Dane worth the same price if killed.
• He minted coins under his Christian name, a sign that he wanted to be seen as a Christian king by his English subjects.

Sources: Project Gutenberg: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. Ingram and Giles; Project Gutenberg: Asser's Life of King Alfred, tr. Albert S. Cook (1906); Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Alfred and Guthrum's Peace; Wikipedia: Guthrum

Athelney, Edington and the baptism at Aller (January to about June 878)

Just after Twelfth Night in 878, the Danish army came to Chippenham and overran Wessex, and many people fled overseas or submitted. Alfred retreated to Athelney in the Somerset marshes and built a fort there around Easter. In May he called out the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire at Egbert's Stone, and beat the Danes at the place Asser calls Ethandun and the Chronicle Eðandun (Heddington in Ingram's 1823 version), then besieged the survivors in their stronghold for two weeks. The surrender was unusual: Guthrum accepted baptism at Aller about three weeks later, and his chrism-loosing was held at Wedmore on the eighth day. The army left Chippenham for Cirencester the next year.

• Most historians place the battle at Edington near Westbury in Wiltshire, a manor that Alfred left to his wife, but alternatives such as Edington in Somerset have been argued.
• Asser's Life is the fullest account, but its earliest known manuscript, from about 1000, was destroyed in a fire in 1731, and a few scholars have called the work a forgery, though it is now almost universally accepted as genuine. Modern editions rely on transcriptions made before the fire.
• The Chronicle's language for the Danish advance is bleak: they "rode over the land of the West-Saxons; where they settled" (Ingram, 1823).

Sources: Project Gutenberg: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. Ingram and Giles; Project Gutenberg: Asser's Life of King Alfred, tr. Albert S. Cook (1906); Wikipedia: Battle of Edington; Wikipedia: Asser

The great siege of Paris (late November 885 to October 886)

In November 885 a Viking fleet under Sigfred came up the Seine to Paris, whose fortified bridges blocked the way, and asked for tribute or, in another account, free passage upriver. Count Odo and Bishop Gozlin refused, and defended the Île de la Cité with a small garrison. The attackers failed against tower and walls, sent burning ships against a bridge, and killed the 12 defenders of an isolated tower after floods brought down a bridge in early 886. Sigfred left in April, but others stayed on, and Gozlin died during the pestilence inside the walls. Emperor Charles the Fat finally arrived in October and, instead of fighting, promised 700 pounds of silver, handed over the next spring, and allowed the army to plunder rebellious Burgundy.

• The fullest eyewitness account is by the monk Abbo of Saint-Germain, in a Latin poem. Asser also reported the siege in his Life of Alfred. Abbo's 700 ships, which some writers turn into 30,000 to 40,000 men, are treated by historians as a great exaggeration; some suggest around 300 ships.
• Charles's payment wrecked his reputation. When he died in 888 the West Franks chose Odo as king, the first non-Carolingian to hold the title.
• Abbo names Sigfred as the leader, but other sources place Rollo at the siege, and his role is uncertain. Vikings had already attacked Paris in 845, under a leader the Franks called Reginherus.

Sources: Project Gutenberg: Asser's Life of King Alfred, tr. Albert S. Cook (1906); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Viking Raids on Paris; Warfare History Network: The Viking Siege of Paris, 885; Wikipedia: Siege of Paris (885–886)

The Danelaw (peace with Alfred c. 880s; Viking rule ended 954; the term was not used for a region until the 11th century)

After 878 the settled armies held much of northern and eastern England. A treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, whose exact date is unknown but which is probably from around 886, fixed a border up the Thames and Lea to Bedford, along the Ouse and on to Watling Street. North and east of the line lay the area later called the Danelaw, its Midland centres being the Five Boroughs of Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln. The English reconquered the south of it in the 910s under Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd, and the last Viking king lost York in 954. The term, Old English Dena lagu, was not used for a region until the 11th century, so no one living there in Alfred's time is likely to have called it that.

• The treaty valued an Englishman and a Dane alike at eight half-marks of pure gold, except the ceorl on rented land and Danish freedmen, set at 200 shillings, and required every buyer of slaves, horses and oxen to have someone to vouch for the sale.
• How many Danes actually settled is disputed. Place-names ending in -by and -thorp are thick on the ground, but a 2000 genetic survey could not easily separate Danish from Anglo-Saxon ancestry, whereas a 2020 study found signs of a large influx.
• Between 30 and 50 per cent of the rural population in the region were later listed as sokemen, freer than most peasants. Many scholars link this to the settlement of Danish soldiers, though the link is a matter of argument.

Sources: Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Alfred and Guthrum's Peace; BBC History (Edward James): Overview: The Vikings, 800 to 1066; World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians; Wikipedia: Danelaw

The Gokstad ship burial (built c. 890; buried c. 900; dug up in 1880)

Around 900 a powerful man was buried in a ship in the King's Mound at Gokstad near Sandefjord, in eastern Norway. The oak ship was probably built about 890 in the Oslofjord region. It is about 23 metres long and 5 metres wide, clinker-built with 16 oar holes on each side, and it could have carried up to 67 people and reached perhaps 11 knots under sail. Its museum calls it the world's largest preserved Viking ship, though the Roskilde 6 ship, found in Denmark in the 1990s, is longer at about 37 metres. It was seaworthy enough for the open sea and capable of carrying settlers and stock as well as warriors. Farmers digging for treasure found it in 1880, and Nicolay Nicolaysen led the excavation that year.

• The grave had been looted in antiquity, so weapons and precious metal are missing. What remained included three small boats, a sledge, a tent, gaming pieces and enough shields to equip the entire ship.
• The man's identity is unknown. He was aged about 40 to 50 and strongly built; a claim from the 1920s that he was a named king of the sagas has not been proved.
• A replica called Viking sailed from Bergen to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, showing that the design could cross the Atlantic.

Sources: Museum of the Viking Age (Oslo): The Gokstad Ship: Fast, Sturdy and Built for the Open Sea; Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo: Gokstad revitalised; Wikipedia: Gokstad ship; Wikipedia: Viking Ship Museum (Roskilde)

Dublin lost and the Cuerdale Hoard (Dublin lost in 902; hoard buried c. 905 to 910; found 1840)

In 902 the Annals of Ulster report that the heathens were driven from Ireland, thrown out of the fortress of Áth Cliath (Dublin) by Máel Finnia of Brega and Cerball of Leinster, and that they abandoned many of their ships. Soon afterwards someone buried a lead chest of silver beside the River Ribble at Cuerdale in Lancashire, then the main route between York and the Irish Sea. Workmen repairing the embankment found it on 15 May 1840: around 8,600 items and some 40 kilograms, described by Gareth Williams and Leslie Webster as the greatest Viking silver treasure found outside Russia, though the Spillings Hoard, found on Gotland in 1999, is heavier at 67 kilograms. Coins date the burial to about 905 to 910. In 917 the same annals have grandsons of Ímar, Sitriuc and Ragnall, back in Irish waters with fleets, Sitriuc landing on the Leinster coast.

• The war-chest idea, which Gareth Williams and Leslie Webster report, is only a theory. It rests on the Irish Norse character of much of the bullion and on new coins from York.
• The coins come from Viking England, Alfred's Wessex and abroad, including the Islamic world, Byzantium, the Papacy and the Carolingian empire. It is a snapshot of silver moving across the Viking world.
• The labourers were allowed to keep one coin each. The rest was declared Treasure Trove and scattered among more than 170 recipients, though the British Museum took the largest share.

Sources: CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, tr. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; BBC History (Gareth Williams and Leslie Webster): The Cuerdale Hoard; Wikipedia: Cuerdale Hoard; Wikipedia: Spillings Hoard

Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (ruled Mercia 911 to 12 June 918)

Æthelflæd, Myrcna hlædige, House of Wessex · Mercia

Æthelflæd was Alfred's eldest daughter, married in the 880s to Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians, to bind Mercia to Wessex. As Æthelred's health failed, from about 902, she took over much of the government, and after he died in 911 she ruled alone. She fortified Mercia with burhs at places including Bridgnorth, Tamworth, Stafford, Warwick, Chirbury and Runcorn. In 917 her army took Derby, one of the Five Boroughs, and in 918 Leicester surrendered without a fight. The leading men of York were preparing to submit to her when she died.

How they came to power: She had political power through her marriage and her husband's long illness. After his death in 911 she succeeded as sole ruler, described by the historian Ian Walker as the only case of a female ruler of a kingdom in Anglo-Saxon history, though the Chronicle's Sexburga may be another.

How it ended: She died at Tamworth on 12 June 918 and was buried, the Chronicle says, in the east porch of St Peter's church at Gloucester. Her daughter Ælfwynn briefly succeeded her, until Edward the Elder took direct control of Mercia later that year.

• The Chronicle says she died twelve days before midsummer; West Saxon annals largely ignore her, while Mercian and Irish sources praise her. Irish annals call her queen of the Saxons.
• An Irish account tells of a Norwegian named Ingimund who came from Ireland, was granted land near Chester and then tried to seize the city, and of her part in its defence. World History Encyclopedia puts his arrival in 907; Wikipedia's account puts the settlement about 902 to 903 and the attack about 907.
• Historians still debate whether Mercia stayed effectively independent in her time or was already a junior partner of Wessex.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Tenth Century; World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians; Wikipedia: Æthelflæd

Rollo (granted land c. 911; died between 928 and 933)

Rollo, baptised Robert; identified by later sagas with Hrólfr the Walker (Göngu-Hrólfr), Viking chieftain, founder of Normandy · Rouen

After Vikings under Rollo were defeated at Chartres in 911, King Charles the Simple struck a bargain with him, by tradition at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. Rollo received land around the lower Seine, and in return he agreed to stop raiding, swear allegiance, be baptised and defend the river. Dudo of Saint-Quentin dates this to 911, but the earliest record is a charter of 918 that refers to land granted to the Normans of the Seine, namely to Rollo and his companions. He was never called duke of Normandy in his own lifetime; that title came to his great-grandson Richard II. From this grant came the Normans, whose descendant William would conquer England in 1066.

How they came to power: Nearly all the story comes from Dudo, commissioned about 994 by Rollo's grandson Richard I and finishing about 1015, and he is not impartial. Dudo makes him a Danish aristocrat, while Snorri's Heimskringla, written in the 13th century, makes him Rolf Ganger, a Norwegian outlawed by Harald Fairhair. The argument over his origin is not settled.

How it ended: He appears for the last time in the chronicle of Flodoard in 928 and was dead by 933, when his son William Longsword received a further land grant. He seems to have retired before dying, probably of natural causes.

• Dudo tells how Rollo, told to kiss the king's foot in homage, had a warrior do it instead, who lifted it and tipped the king over. The story rests on Dudo and should be read as legend, not record.
• An entry for 876 in Ingram's Chronicle says "Rolla penetrated Normandy with his army" (Ingram, 1823) and reigned fifty winters, a date far earlier than the grant of 911.
• A 2016 opening of the supposed tombs of his descendants Richard I and II, which might have tested his origin by DNA, found remains that belonged to neither man.

Sources: Project Gutenberg: Heimskringla, Snorri Sturluson, tr. Samuel Laing; Project Gutenberg: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. Ingram and Giles; World History Encyclopedia (Emma Groeneveld): Rollo of Normandy; Wikipedia: Rollo

The Althing at Thingvellir (founded c. 930; met at Thingvellir until 1798)

Around 930 the settlers of Iceland set up a general assembly, the Althing, at Thingvellir ("Assembly Plains") beside the river Öxará. For two weeks each summer people from across the island gathered there to set laws and settle disputes. It had a Law Council, courts and a Lawspeaker, and its heart was the Law Rock (Lögberg). The arrangement had no king: Iceland stayed a commonwealth until 1262. The land, says the 12th-century Book of Icelanders, had been forfeited after its owner was condemned for killing a slave or freedman. The site remained in use until 1798.

• UNESCO, which listed Thingvellir, describes the laws made there as a covenant between free men. What survives on the ground includes fragments of around 50 booths of turf and stone that housed those attending.
• The Althing was also a social event. The national park notes that some travelled to resolve legal cases and others came for business.
• Written law followed conversion: the park's history says that after 1000 laws were among the first things written down, to prevent disagreements.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Þingvellir National Park; ICOMOS evaluation for UNESCO: Thingvellir (Iceland), No 1152; Thingvellir National Park: History

The Battle of Brunanburh (autumn 937)

In 937 Olaf Guthfrithson, the Viking king of Dublin, allied with Constantine II of Scotland and Owain of Strathclyde against King Athelstan of England. The armies met at a place the English called Brunanburh, and after a full day's fighting the invaders broke and fled. Olaf escaped by ship to Dublin and Constantine went home, while the English dead included two of Athelstan's cousins. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the battle in a famous poem instead of ordinary prose, listing five kings and seven earls among the dead. The victory did not end the matter, as Edward James notes, and the Viking threat went on.

• The Annals of Ulster, an Irish record, record it as a terrible and grievous slaughter, in which several thousand Norsemen and many Saxons fell.
• No one knows where it was. More than forty sites have been proposed; Bromborough on the Wirral is usually preferred, but it is not proved.
• Historians differ on what it achieved. Alfred Smyth called it the greatest single battle in Anglo-Saxon history before Hastings, while Alex Woolf calls it a pyrrhic victory.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Tenth Century; CELT (University College Cork): The Annals of Ulster, tr. Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill; BBC History (Edward James): Overview: The Vikings, 800 to 1066; Wikipedia: Battle of Brunanburh; Britannica: Battle of Brunanburh

Erik Bloodaxe (king at York 947 to 948 and 952 to 954)

Eiríkr blóðøx Haraldsson, King of York · Northumbria (and, in the sagas, Norway)

Erik was twice made king at York, in 947 and 952, as the Northumbrians played off the kings of England against Scandinavian and Dublin rivals. King Eadred raided Northumbria in response in 948, and the Northumbrians gave Erik up. They took him back in 952 after driving out Olaf, only to expel him for good in 954: "This year the Northumbrians expelled Eric" (Ingram, 1823). His reign ended Scandinavian kingship in York. About 31 of his York coins were known by 2009, one type showing a sword.

How they came to power: The Chronicle calls him simply Eric, the son of Harold. The sagas, written in the 12th and 13th centuries, make him a son of Harald Fairhair who had ruled Norway before his exile; Egil's Saga shows him at York with Queen Gunnhild.

How it ended: He probably died around 954 at Stainmore, where the sources say he was betrayed by Earl Osulf and killed by Maccus. Sagas speak of a battle, but modern scholars generally favour assassination in exile.

• Clare Downham has argued that Norse writers merged two different Erics, one Norwegian and one at York. Most historians since W. G. Collingwood in 1901 have treated them as a single man, and the debate is open.
• In Egil's Saga, Egil Skallagrimsson comes before Erik at York and is given one night; in the morning he recites a praise poem, the Head-ransom, and is let go. It is a story set down centuries later.
• The Life of St Cathróe, much closer to his own time, says that his wife was a relative of the saint, which conflicts with the sagas' Gunnhild.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Tenth Century; Icelandic Saga Database: Egil's Saga, tr. W. C. Green (1893); Wikipedia: Eric Bloodaxe

Staraya Ladoga: the gateway to the east (founded c. 753; devastated c. 865)

Staraya Ladoga, on the river route between the Baltic and the Russian interior, is the earliest known centre of Norse activity in the east. Tree-ring dating points to a foundation around 753, and Scandinavian settlement there is generally placed in the mid-8th century. The Norse knew it as Aldeigjuborg. It controlled access to the Volkhov River, one of the main routes between the Baltic and the Russian interior. One version of the Rus chronicle, the Hypatian Codex, makes it Rurik's first seat in 862, though the Laurentian text gives Novgorod instead.

• The oldest dirhams found in European Russia came from Ladoga, the earliest dated to 786 or 787, showing that Islamic silver was reaching the north by then.
• The Rus first appear in a written source in 839, when the Annals of Saint-Bertin record a Rus mission at the court of Louis the Pious, less than a century after Ladoga began.
• Excavations and finds there include Viking-age burial mounds and 11th-century Scandinavian Christian graves. Local tradition points to a large tumulus as Rurik's grave, but it has not been proved.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Staraya Ladoga

Dirhams, furs and slaves: the silver road (from c. 786 to the late 10th century)

From the late 8th century Islamic silver dirhams flowed north along the Russian rivers into the Baltic. The largest concentration of hoards lies on the island of Gotland, where the Spillings Hoard, found on 16 July 1999, held 14,295 coins, about 14,200 of them dirhams, in two caches weighing 67 kilograms in all. What paid for all this silver is still argued over. Furs have long been proposed as the main goods going south, but recent work, including the volume Viking-Age Trade, puts the emphasis on slaves. The evidence from the time is blunt on the point that people were part of the cargo.

• The Primary Chronicle has Prince Sviatoslav list what comes from Rus: furs, wax, honey and slaves.
• Ibn Fadlan's Rus trader on the Volga prays before a carved post, telling it how many girls and how many sables he has brought to sell.
• A chapter in Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea Region traces a later Volga trade in northern slaves back to the Viking Age eastern route, and notes how these networks shaped the later Slavic states and the spread of Christianity.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies (James E. Montgomery, 2000): Ibn Faḍlān and the Rūsiyyah; Cambridge University Press: Medieval Trade in Female Slaves from the North along the Volga; Publisher description: Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland (Routledge, 2021); Wikipedia: Spillings Hoard

The Faroes: the first stepping stone (Dicuil writes in 825; Norse settlers in the early 9th century)

The Faroes lie about midway between Norway and Iceland, and were the first step in the Norse move across the Atlantic. Writing in 825, the Irish monk Dicuil reported that hermits had lived for about a century on unnamed northern islands, until Norse pirates drove them out and left only sheep and seabirds. Old Norse-speaking settlers are usually dated to the early 9th century, though some excavations pointed to about 850. The older view has many of them coming from Norse communities around the Irish Sea and the Scottish isles with Gaelic slaves, but Wikipedia reports that a 2024 study challenges it. Tradition names Grímur Kamban as the first permanent settler, and the Faereyinga saga says many Norwegians came to escape Harald Fairhair.

• Dicuil never names the islands, and linking his hermits with the Faroes has long been an inference.
• Mike Church and Símun Arge published burnt barley grains in peat ash at Á Sondum on Sandoy in 2013, in two phases, dated to the 4th to 6th and the 6th to 8th centuries: people were there 300 to 500 years before the Vikings.
• A 2021 lake-sediment study led by Lorelei Curtin found sheep DNA appearing about 500. The islands had no mammals before, so people must have brought them, though nobody knows who they were; the authors suggest Celts from Scotland or Ireland.

Sources: University of Aberdeen: The Vikings were not the first colonizers of the Faroe Islands; Medievalists.net (Kevin Krajick, Lamont-Doherty): The Faroe Islands were settled in the sixth century; Wikipedia: Faroe Islands

The Rus attack Constantinople (18 June to 4 August 860)

At sunset on 18 June 860 a fleet of Rus ships came out of the Black Sea and fell on Constantinople, while Emperor Michael III was away fighting the Abbasids and the navy was elsewhere. They plundered the suburbs and the Princes' Islands but no source has them taking the city itself, and they withdrew by early August. Patriarch Photius preached sermons on the attack, which are the earliest Greek source to use the name Rus for an unknown people, and he likened it to a thunderbolt. His August sermon gives thanks for the rescue but does not explain why they left. Later tradition credits a veil of the Virgin dipped in the sea, which raised a storm, but this is not in the earliest records.

• Sources disagree on numbers. Greek writers and the Laurentian text of the Primary Chronicle give about 200 ships, and John the Deacon 360. Some modern accounts quote 2,000 for the Chronicle, but the translation cited here says two hundred.
• The Primary Chronicle misdates the raid to 866 and pins it on Askold and Dir of Kyiv. The Nikon Chronicle then treated the two dates as two separate raids, an error historians now reject.
• World History Encyclopedia notes that the raid does not fit the rest of the Chronicle's narrative. The Chronicle was compiled about 250 years after the attack.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Siege of Constantinople (860)

Rurik (by tradition ruled 862 to 879)

Hrœrekr, in Slavic Riurik, traditional founder of the Rus dynasty, Rurikid dynasty · Novgorod

According to the Primary Chronicle, compiled around 1113, Slav and Finnic tribes threw out their Varangian overlords, fell to fighting among themselves, and then went overseas to invite Rurik and his brothers Sineus and Truvor to rule them. The Chronicle gives the date as 862, and places Rurik at Novgorod, Sineus at Beloozero and Truvor at Izborsk. Even his historicity is debated. Most historians link the Rus with Scandinavia, an argument known as Normanism, and the name is a form of Old Norse Hrœrekr. Anti-Normanists argue for a Slavic origin for the dynasty, though the Scandinavian case is generally held to be the stronger.

How they came to power: The invitation story is the only account of how he came to power, and it was written down some 250 years later. Some scholars have tried to identify him with Rorik of Dorestad, a Viking known from Frankish sources, but others object.

How it ended: The Chronicle says he died in 879, leaving his kinsman Oleg as regent for his young son Igor. Nothing else is recorded.

• The Chronicle says that after two years Sineus and Truvor died and Rurik took sole authority, assigning towns such as Polotsk and Rostov to his followers.
• The dynasty named after him ruled Rus and later the Tsardom of Russia until 1598.
• The Chronicle itself lists the Rus alongside Swedes, Normans (Norwegians), English and Gotlanders as kinds of Varangians, which is a main plank of the Normanist case.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Rurik

Oleg of Kyiv (took Kyiv c. 882; died c. 912 by the Chronicle (others say later))

Helgi; Oleg the Wise, or the Prophet, Rurikid regent · Novgorod and Kyiv

After Rurik's death Oleg took power as regent for the child Igor. The Chronicle says that about 882 he marched south with Varangians, Slavs, Chuds, Merians and Krivichians, seized Smolensk and Lyubech, and came to Kyiv, where he hid his men in boats, tricked out the rulers Askold and Dir and had them killed. This is commonly treated as the founding of the Kyiv state. In 907, the Chronicle claims, he attacked Constantinople, and the Rus swore by their weapons and by the gods Perun and Volos. In 911 his envoys made a formal treaty with the emperors Leo and Alexander.

How they came to power: He was a kinsman of Rurik and took charge of his realm as regent for Rurik's young son Igor in 879, according to the Chronicle.

How it ended: The Chronicle dates his death to 912, but the Novgorod First Chronicle says 922, and a Khazar-era letter naming a Rus leader 'Helgu' still active in the 940s has led some historians to a later date. A legend says that he died from a snakebite on touching the skull of the horse that was prophesied to kill him.

• The 911 treaty names Oleg's envoys, among them Karl, Ingjald, Farulf, Vermund, Hrollaf, Gunnar and Harold. They are recognisably Scandinavian names, in a diplomatic document from the Rus side.
• Historians disagree about the treaty. Vladimir Shikanov argues that the Chronicle disguises a Rus defeat as a victory, while Vladimir Pashuto sees it as truly beneficial to Rus.
• After the treaty the Chronicle has Emperor Leo showing the envoys the riches of the churches and palace, including the relics of the Passion: the crown, the nails and the purple robe.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Oleg of Novgorod

Ibn Fadlan and the Rus on the Volga (embassy 921 to 922)

Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, Abbasid envoy · Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars

In 921 Caliph al-Muqtadir sent an embassy from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars, with Ibn Fadlan as secretary and religious adviser. It reached the Bulgar capital in May 922. There he met the Rus, whom he describes as very tall, always armed with axe, sword and knife, covered in dark-green designs from the fingernails (or, in James Montgomery's translation, the toes) to the neck, and dirty in their habits. His famous passage describes a chieftain's funeral: the body buried for ten days while his clothes were made, a slave woman, presented in the text as a volunteer, who died with him, an old woman he calls the Angel of Death, and the ship set on fire. Many scholars take his Rus to be Scandinavians or Volga Vikings, perhaps with Finnish and Slavic crews, but Montgomery argues for a multiplicity of identities and warns against assuming that.

How they rose: He was a member of the caliph's court, and his role in the embassy was to teach Islamic law to the Bulgars. We know almost nothing else about him outside his own account.

How they died: Unknown. The surviving manuscript of his report is incomplete.

• A Rus man told him, through an interpreter, that Arabs were foolish, because they put those they love in the ground to be eaten by worms, while the Rus burned them to reach paradise at once.
• For centuries his account was known only from excerpts quoted by the geographer Yaqut. A fuller text was found in Mashhad, Iran, in 1923.
• His report was the basis for Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead and the film The 13th Warrior, which added a great deal to it.

Sources: Viking Answer Lady: Risala: Ibn Fadlan's Account of the Rus (Smyser translation); Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive (University of Utah): Ibn Fadlan, The Risala: By the River Volga, 922; Wikipedia: Ahmad ibn Fadlan; Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies (James E. Montgomery, 2000): Ibn Faḍlān and the Rūsiyyah

Olga of Kyiv (regent from 945 to c. 957 or the 960s; died 969)

Helga; baptised Helena; Saint Olga, Rurikid regent · Kyiv

When the Drevlians killed her husband Igor in 945, after he came back to squeeze them for more tribute, Olga took power for her small son Sviatoslav. The Primary Chronicle gives her a set of gruesome revenges: the first envoys buried alive, a second group burned in a bathhouse, a funeral feast that ended in massacre, and the city of Iskorosten set alight by birds carrying burning sulphur. These stories were written about 150 years after her death. World History Encyclopedia counts them among the Chronicle's more mythical sections, though they may echo a real crushing of the Drevlians. She is also credited with reforming tribute collection. She visited Constantinople in the 950s and became a Christian, taking the name Helena.

How they came to power: She was Igor's widow, and ruled because her son was too young. Her origins are uncertain, but her name is the Old Norse Helga.

How it ended: She died on 11 July 969, after a Pecheneg siege of Kyiv. She asked for a Christian burial without the pagan funeral feast. Later she was made a saint.

• The three sources for her Constantinople visit disagree. De Ceremoniis describes her formal reception but no baptism, Skylitzes reports a baptism, and the Chronicle adds a marriage proposal by the emperor that Francis Butler considers literary embroidery. Some place the baptism in Kyiv around 955 and others at Constantinople around 957.
• In 959 she sent envoys to Otto I of Germany asking for a bishop and priests. The bishop Adalbert came about 961 and returned within about a year without success.
• She failed to convert her son: the Chronicle has Sviatoslav refuse baptism. Her grandson Vladimir later did what she could not.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Olga of Kiev; Britannica: St. Olga

Sviatoslav I (prince from 945; active ruler c. 963 to 972)

Sviatoslav Igorevich, Prince of Kyiv, Rurikid dynasty · Kyiv

Sviatoslav was the son of Igor and Olga, and the Chronicle has him throw the first spear at the Drevlians as a child, the throw hardly getting past his horse. Grown up, he destroyed the Khazar state, including its cities of Sarkel and Atil, and pushed Rus power into the Volga valley and the steppe. Hired by Byzantium to attack Bulgaria, he then kept his conquests, telling his mother he would rather live on the Danube than in Kyiv. A 65-day siege at Dorostolon in 971 forced him to make terms and agree to withdraw. He remained pagan all his life.

How they came to power: He succeeded on Igor's death in 945, when he was a small child, with Olga governing for him. He took over in person during the 960s.

How it ended: Pechenegs ambushed and killed him in 972 at the Dnieper rapids on his way home. The Chronicle says Prince Kurya had his skull made into a gold-covered drinking cup.

• The Chronicle's list of what he wanted on the Danube is an unusually useful picture of trade: gold, silks, wine and fruit from Greece, silver and horses from Hungary and Bohemia, and furs, wax, honey and slaves from Rus.
• His Slavic name shows how quickly the dynasty had changed. Rurik, Oleg and Olga have Norse names, but his is Slavic.
• The fight over his inheritance ended with the deaths of his sons Oleg and Yaropolk, and left a third son, Vladimir, as sole ruler.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Sviatoslav I; Britannica: Svyatoslav I

Down the Dnieper: the road to Constantinople (described in the 10th century)

Emperor Constantine VII (reigned 913 to 959, sole ruler from 945) wrote for his son a precise account of how the Rus reached Constantinople. Slav tributaries cut the dugout boats in winter and sold them at Kyiv, where the Rus fitted them out. In June the convoy gathered at Vitichev and went down the Dnieper past a chain of rapids. At the big fourth barrage they posted guards against the Pechenegs and took the slaves in chains overland for six miles while dragging and carrying their boats. Further on they stopped to sacrifice on the island of St Gregory, beneath a giant oak.

• Constantine gives the rapids both Rus and Slavonic names, such as Essoupi, Oulvorsi and Aeifor, and scholars such as Elsa Melin have studied what these names reveal about the Rus language.
• On the island the Rus sacrificed live cocks and pegged arrows in the ground around the oak, along with bread and meat.
• He also describes the winter: from November the Rus chiefs left Kyiv on the poliudia, or rounds, living off their Slav tributaries until the ice melted in April.

Sources: Daniel C. Waugh (University of Washington): Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, tr. Jenkins; Lund University record: Melin, The Names of the Dnieper Rapids; Wikipedia: Dnieper Rapids

Vladimir the Great (ruled c. 978 or 980 to 15 July 1015)

Volodimer Sviatoslavich; baptised Basil; Saint Vladimir, Rurikid dynasty · Kyiv

After fleeing abroad during the war between his brothers, Vladimir raised a Varangian army and returned to take Kyiv. He first set up images of six gods on a hill in Kyiv, among them Perun. In 988, the Chronicle says, he marched on the Greek city of Kherson and besieged it. He was baptised there and took the name Basil, and married Anna, sister of Emperor Basil II. He brought the new faith back to Kyiv, and Rus turned towards Byzantium.

How they came to power: He was a younger son of Sviatoslav and came to sole power in the wars that followed his father's death. Sources date his capture of Kyiv to either 978 or 980.

How it ended: He died at Berestove on 15 July 1015, probably of old age, while preparing to move against his son Yaroslav.

• The Chronicle tells how he sent envoys to examine Islam, Judaism, Latin Christianity and the Greek church, and the envoys came back most impressed by the churches of Constantinople. The story is literary, but it shows how the later Rus understood the choice.
• He sent about 6,000 men to help Basil II against the rebel Bardas Phokas, and this force is usually taken as the start of the Varangian Guard.
• The World History Encyclopedia dates the marriage pact with Basil to about 987 and the troops to about 988, so the conversion was a matter of alliance as well as of belief.

Sources: The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, tr. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor (MGH Bibliothek PDF); World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Varangian Guard; Wikipedia: Vladimir the Great; Britannica: Vladimir I

Erik the Red (c. 950 to c. 1003 (Britannica: c. 951 to c. 1000); exile c. 982; colony from c. 985)

Eiríkr rauði Þorvaldsson, Explorer · Greenland

According to the sagas, Erik was born in Rogaland in Norway and came to Iceland with his father, who had been banished for manslaughter. Around 982, outlawed from Iceland for three years after killings in a feud, he sailed west to look for land that a man named Gunnbjorn had seen, and explored the south-west coast of Greenland. He returned around 985 with colonists; 25 ships are said to have set out (35 in Reeves's and Beamish's texts) and only 14 to have arrived. Two settlements grew up, an Eastern near modern Qaqortoq and a Western near Nuuk, and he built his own farm at Brattahlíð. UNESCO now lists the Kujataa landscape in the south as the earliest introduction of farming to the Arctic.

How they rose: His father had been banished from Norway for manslaughter, and Erik himself was outlawed. His prominence came from leading the colony in Greenland.

How they died: He died around 1003 in an epidemic, the sagas say. One modern account blames immigrants who arrived in 1002.

• He gave Greenland its name, the saga says, because "men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name" (Sephton, 1880).
• The sagas say that his wife Thjodhild became a Christian and built a church, while Erik stayed pagan.
• Nearly everything about him comes from Icelandic writings set down long after his time, chiefly the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, written in the 13th century, about 200 years later. The colony itself lasted until the 15th century.

Sources: Icelandic Saga Database: The Saga of Erik the Red, tr. J. Sephton (1880); UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Kujataa Greenland: Norse and Inuit Farming at the Edge of the Ice Cap; World History Encyclopedia (Emma Groeneveld): Leif Erikson; Wikipedia: Erik the Red; Britannica: Erik the Red

The Varangian Guard (formally constituted c. 988; Norse-dominated until the late 11th century)

Around 988 Emperor Basil II, facing rebels led by Bardas Phokas, received about 6,000 Rus Vikings from Vladimir of Kyiv as part of a marriage deal. He kept them as his personal guard. Rus men had already served Byzantium under earlier treaties, so 988 is the presumed start of the formal unit, not a recorded founding. Its members were known for double-bladed battle-axes and heavy swords, and Michael Psellos describes them with shields and a single-edged heavy iron weapon on the shoulder, usually taken to be the axe. Pay was famous: according to Snorri's Heimskringla, a 13th-century saga, guardsmen could take as much gold as they could carry from the treasury when an emperor died. The most famous of them, Harald Hardrada, spent about a decade there before going home to rule Norway.

• Runestones in Sweden, known as the Greece runestones, commemorate men who died in or served in the east. Medieval Västergötland law barred inheritance for anyone staying in 'Greece', in an attempt to stop the drain of men.
• Runic inscriptions at Hagia Sophia and on the Piraeus Lion are often attributed to these men, though this is probable rather than certain.
• Later the guard's character changed: after 1066 many Anglo-Saxons came, and by the 13th century the guard was largely English.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Varangian Guard; World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark): Kievan Rus; Wikipedia: Varangian Guard; Fordham Medieval Sourcebook: Michael Psellus, Chronographia, Book 1, tr. E. R. A. Sewter; Britannica: Basil II

Leif Erikson (born c. 970 to 980; voyage c. 1000; died between 1019 and 1025)

Leifr Eiríksson, 'Leif the Lucky', Explorer · Greenland and Vinland

Leif, a son of Erik the Red, was probably born in Iceland about 970 to 980 and grew up in Greenland. The sagas tell how he sailed to lands they call Helluland (stone-slab land), Markland (forest land) and Vinland (wine land), where they found wild grapes. The two main sagas disagree about how it happened. The Saga of Erik the Red has Leif finding the new land by accident on his way home from Norway, while the Saga of the Greenlanders gives the first sighting to Bjarni Herjólfsson, blown off course, and has Leif follow up. Both were written in 13th-century Iceland, about 200 years later.

How they rose: He was born to prominence as the son of Greenland's founder. The sagas add that he served King Olaf Tryggvason, who sent him to preach Christianity, but archaeology suggests that Greenlanders were already Christian, so the mission is doubtful.

How they died: He was last mentioned alive in 1019, and his son had become chieftain by 1025, so he died between those years.

• Exactly where the lands were is debated. World History Encyclopedia suggests Helluland was northern Labrador or Baffin Island, Markland central Labrador, and Vinland the area from the Strait of Belle Isle to the Gulf of St Lawrence.
• The saga says he won the name Leif the Lucky for rescuing shipwrecked men on the voyage.
• A 2021 Nature paper dated wood cut by metal tools at L'Anse aux Meadows to 1021, possibly within his lifetime, though this does not show that he himself was there.

Sources: Icelandic Saga Database: The Saga of Erik the Red, tr. J. Sephton (1880); The Norse Discovery of America (Norroena Society, 1906; Reeves and others, tr.); Nature (Kuitems et al., 2021): Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021; World History Encyclopedia (Emma Groeneveld): Leif Erikson; Britannica: Leif Eriksson

Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir (born c. 980; died c. 1050 (modern estimates; the sagas give no dates))

Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, Voyager · Iceland, Greenland and Vinland

Gudrid was an Icelander, probably born around 980 at Laugarbrekka on Snæfellsnes, and she appears in both Vinland sagas. She came to Greenland and married Erik's son Thorstein, who soon died of a fever; the two sagas disagree about her marriages, and one gives her an earlier husband. She then married the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni, and sailed with him on the expedition to settle Vinland. According to the sagas their son Snorri was born there, the first child of Europeans known to have been born in the Americas outside Greenland. They returned to Iceland after a few years.

How they rose: She gained prominence by marriage into Erik's family and then to the wealthy Karlsefni. In the Saga of Erik the Red she also stands out at Herjolfsnes in Greenland, where as a Christian she agrees to sing the ritual song for the seeress Thorbjorg.

How they died: After Karlsefni died she ran the farm with Snorri. The saga says she then made a pilgrimage south, which modern accounts take to mean Rome, came home, took the veil and became an anchorite at the church that Snorri built at Glaumbær. The date of her death is not recorded; c. 1050 is a modern estimate.

• Thorbjorg foretells a good match in Greenland and a large family for her. The scene comes from a saga written in Christian Iceland, over 200 years later.
• The saga says Snorri was three when the family left Vinland. The Flatey Book version gives Karlsefni's party as sixty men and five women, with all kinds of cattle.
• Her statue by Ásmundur Sveinsson, made for the 1939 New York World's Fair, stands at Glaumbær, with copies in Laugarbrekka, Ottawa and the Vatican.

Sources: Icelandic Saga Database: The Saga of Erik the Red, tr. J. Sephton (1880); The Norse Discovery of America (Norroena Society, 1906; Reeves and others, tr.); Wikipedia: Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir

Freydís Eiríksdóttir (early 11th century by the sagas; no exact dates survive, and the years used to place her on this timeline (1005 to 1015) are approximate placeholders)

Freydís, daughter of Erik the Red, Voyager · Greenland and Vinland

Freydís is known only from the two Vinland sagas, written in Iceland about two centuries later, and they tell very different stories. In the Saga of Erik the Red she travels on Karlsefni's expedition, and is slowed by illness in Sephton's translation, or by pregnancy in others, when the Norse are attacked and start to flee. She picks up a dead man's sword and strikes it against her breast, and the attackers turn and run. In the Saga of the Greenlanders she makes a bargain with the brothers Helgi and Finnbogi to sail to Vinland and share the profits, brings extra men, and then persuades her husband to kill the brothers and their men. When the men refuse to kill the five women, she kills them herself with an axe.

How they rose: Her fame rests only on these stories. The sagas agree that she was a daughter of Erik the Red, one making her Leif's full sister and the other his half-sister.

How they died: Unknown. The Saga of the Greenlanders says that Leif forced a confession about the killings from three of her men, but would not punish her, and predicted that her descendants would prosper little.

• The saga's phrasing in Sephton's translation is that she "let down her sark and struck her breast with the naked sword" (Sephton, 1880).
• The two portraits differ so much that they cannot both be simple history: one is heroic, the other a crime story.
• No reliable source records her birth or death. The c. 965 birth date sometimes given comes from a modern reference work, not from the sagas.

Sources: Icelandic Saga Database: The Saga of Erik the Red, tr. J. Sephton (1880); The Norse Discovery of America (Norroena Society, 1906; Reeves and others, tr.); Wikipedia: Freydís Eiríksdóttir

L'Anse aux Meadows (active in 1021; found 1960)

In 1960 a local man, George Decker, showed Helge Ingstad a group of grassy mounds at the northern tip of Newfoundland. Helge and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad dug the site from 1961 to 1968. They found eight buildings of sod on wooden frames, like those of Greenland and Iceland, with an iron smithy and about 800 Norse objects, including a bronze pin, a bone needle and part of a spindle. It is the only confirmed Norse site in North America outside Greenland, and UNESCO listed it in 1978. A 2021 Nature paper pinned the Norse activity to 1021 by finding the radiocarbon spike of 993 in wood cut by them.

• The dating team offers 1021 as a fixed marker of Norse presence, not as the date of first arrival. They call it the first known point at which humans encircled the globe.
• Butternuts found at the site do not grow naturally that far north, which suggests that the Norse travelled further south than this camp.
• Whether this is the sagas' Leifsbúðir, Hóp or Straumfjord is disputed, and it may have been a temporary base rather than a settlement. The buildings could have held about 30 to 160 people.

Sources: Nature (Kuitems et al., 2021): Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021; Parks Canada: L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site; Wikipedia: L'Anse aux Meadows; Britannica: L'Anse aux Meadows

Ingvar the Far-Travelled (expedition c. 1036 to 1041 by the usual dating, which is disputed)

Yngvarr víðförli, Expedition leader · Sweden to Serkland

Ingvar led a Swedish expedition east in about 1036 to 1041, towards a place the stones call Serkland, the land of the Saracens. The usual view, defended by Jonathan Shepard, takes it by the Russian rivers to the Caspian region; E. A. Mel'nikova argued for Byzantium in 1043, and A. Thulin for the Caspian in the early 1030s. About 26 runestones (Shepard's firm core is about 22), most of them around Lake Mälaren, name men who went with him. On the Gripsholm stone, Tola commemorates her son Harald, Ingvar's brother: they went far for gold, fed the eagle in the east, and died in the south in Serkland. None of the stones mentions a survivor.

How they rose: His origins are uncertain. Theories make him a son of a Varangian named Eymundr, or link him to King Emund the Old, and the saga tells a story of royal connections that cannot be confirmed.

How they died: Icelandic annals place his death under 1041. The saga, a romantic tale, says that most of the ships were lost, and Mats Larsson suggests combat and disease together caused the losses.

• Yngvars saga víðförla, three Icelandic annals and the runestones are the main Scandinavian sources. The saga is probably a translation of a late 12th-century Latin work, with its earliest manuscript from about the early 15th century; the stones were raised soon after the disaster.
• The Georgian Chronicles record a Viking visit in 1040, and the party has been linked to the Battle of Sasireti in 1042, though the place meant by Serkland is disputed.
• The Gripsholm inscription ends in verse. It shows how a family used a runestone to honour men who never came home.

Sources: Runstenar.se: Sö 179, An Ingvar runestone at Gripsholm Castle; Saga-Book of the Viking Society 21 (Jonathan Shepard, 1984-85): Yngvarr's expedition to the East and a Russian inscribed stone cross; Wikipedia: Ingvar the Far-Travelled; Internet Archive: The Saga of Yngvar the Traveller, tr. Peter Tunstall (2005); Wikipedia: Ingvar runestones

The skalds: poets at the courts of kings (first known skald in the first half of the 800s; the tradition continued long after the Viking Age)

Skaldic poetry was the Old Norse art of praising kings, in metres far more ornate than the anonymous Eddic poems and packed with kennings, riddling names that needed a knowledge of the myths to decode. More than 5,500 verses survive in over 700 manuscripts, many only as fragments quoted in sagas and in Snorri Sturluson's handbook, the Prose Edda. The earliest skald with surviving verse is the Norwegian Bragi Boddason, of the first half of the ninth century, and in the Viking Age most known skalds served Norwegian kings and were increasingly Icelanders. Because court poems are older than the sagas that quote them, historians lean on them, though dating them is hard and Store norske leksikon rates Hallfred's poems on Olaf Tryggvason above the sagas' own stories.

• Heimskringla, written about two centuries later, says that before Stiklestad in 1030 King Olaf placed his skalds inside the shield wall, so they would not have to rely on others' reports of the fight.
• After the conversion, the subject of long skaldic poems usually shifted from myth to history and praise of the patron.
• Harald Hardrada composed verse himself; Lee Hollander judged him the one Norwegian king with a decided talent for it.

Sources: Wikipedia: Skald; Project Gutenberg: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, translated by Samuel Laing (1844); Store norske leksikon: Olav Tryggvason; Wikipedia: Harald Hardrada

Harald Fairhair (traditional reign c. 872 to c. 932; Store norske leksikon gives c. 865 to 930-933)

Haraldr hárfagri (Harald Halfdansson), House of Fairhair · Norway

Whether Harald Fairhair really unified Norway is debated. Norwegian tradition makes him the first king of all Norway, the winner of a great sea battle at Hafrsfjord, near Stavanger, against rival kings and chiefs. Almost all the detail comes from Icelandic and Norwegian writing of the 1100s and later, above all Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla of about 1230. The only sources close to his own time are two court poems, Glymdrápa and Haraldskvæði, and even their date is argued over. Store norske leksikon sums up the current view: there is wide agreement that his kingdom's core lay in the south-west and rested on control of the coastal trade route, while its reach is disputed, and Britannica gives him probably only nominal authority beyond the western coast. Peter Sawyer began casting doubt on the traditional account in 1976, and later revisionists have suggested he may not have existed at all; Sverrir Jakobsson ties the legend to twelfth-century succession disputes, while Claus Krag and Hans Jacob Orning accept that Harald existed but distrust the sagas.

How they came to power: By saga tradition he inherited a small kingdom as a boy and fought his way through his rivals, ending at Hafrsfjord. Sagas disagree on whether he took power aged 10, 16 or 20.

How it ended: Heimskringla, written about three centuries later, says he died on a sickbed in Rogaland and was buried at Haugar, near modern Haugesund; the year is usually put at 930 to 933. No contemporary record confirms it.

• The sagas explain his nickname by a vow not to cut his hair or beard until all Norway was his; Haraldskvæði, in its most reliable manuscripts, does not call him 'fairhair' at all.
• Later Norse dating put Hafrsfjord in 872 (Ari's surviving book gives neither the battle nor the year), but the historian Halvdan Koht argued from generations of descent that it was nearer 900. Store norske leksikon now places it only somewhere in the late 800s, and Britannica says modern historians put it 10 to 20 years after 872. The poems also suggest Harald was the one attacked, by enemies from the east.
• Neither the traveller Ohthere's account of about 890 nor Adam of Bremen's history of about 1075 names any king of all Norway in this period.

Sources: Store norske leksikon: Harald Hårfagre; Store norske leksikon: slaget i Hafrsfjord; Project Gutenberg: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, translated by Samuel Laing (1844); Wikipedia: Harald Fairhair; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Harald I

Gorm the Old (first recorded 936; died probably winter 958/959 (some sources say 963 or 964))

Gormr gamli, House of Gorm · Jelling, Denmark

Gorm is traditionally counted as the first king in the line of Danish kings, based at Jelling in central Jutland. He first appears in 936, when Archbishop Unni of Hamburg-Bremen visited him, and he raised the older Jelling stone for his wife Thyra. Because his son later boasted of having 'won' all Denmark, Gorm may have ruled only Jutland. Adam of Bremen, writing about 1075, suggests the kingdom was divided before his time and that his father Harthacnut came from 'Northmannia', but Harthacnut himself is semi-legendary. Timber from the burial chamber in the northern Jelling mound was felled in 958, the main reason for dating Gorm's death to that winter.

How they came to power: Unknown in detail. Later accounts say he took part of the kingdom from a ruler named Gnupa by force; no contemporary source explains how he gained power.

How it ended: Probably natural, around 958. The tree-ring date fits this but does not prove whose chamber it was.

• Both Jelling stones name Denmark: tanmarkar on his small stone and tanmaurk on Harald's large one.
• Some researchers think Harald moved his father's body from the mound into the first wooden church at Jelling, identifying a skeleton found there as Gorm; the theory is still debated.
• Saxo, writing long after, credited Thyra with building the Danevirke, but excavations since 2010 show its first phase is centuries older than she was.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Jelling Mounds, Runic Stones and Church; World History Encyclopedia: Harald Bluetooth & the Conversion of Denmark; Wikipedia: Gorm the Old; Wikipedia: Jelling stones

The runestone boom (most raised c. 950 to 1100)

There are about 3,000 runestones in Scandinavia, and most date to about 950 to 1100; Sweden has by far the most, between 1,700 and 2,500 depending on the definition, with as many as 1,196 inscriptions in stone in Uppland. They were usually brightly painted when new. The Swedish History Museum notes that most were raised in the eleventh century and that many are clearly Christian, with crosses and prayers. They were commissioned from specialist workshops by those who could afford them. In Denmark, Lisbeth Imer dates the majority to the two generations after the conversion, about 970 to 1020/25, and a study of Västergötland finds the fashion flourishing there from the late 900s to the mid-1000s. The museum describes this society as still primarily oral, which makes these public inscriptions especially valuable.

• Sometime between 1050 and 1080 a woman named Unna raised a stone for her son Östen, whose death in white garments shows he had been baptised.
• Laser scanning shows several hands on single stones, so a signature such as Visäte's probably stands for a master with craftsmen and apprentices.
• Denmark has about 250 runestones, Norway about 50 and Iceland none; outlying examples range from the Isle of Man to Berezan on the Black Sea.

Sources: Swedish History Museum: Unna's stone; Wikipedia: Runestone; Lisbeth M. Imer, Danish Journal of Archaeology (2014): The Danish runestones, when and where?; Lund Archaeological Review: The Late Viking Age Runestones of Västergötland

The Jelling stones and mounds (raised c. 958 to c. 985; conversion dated to about 960 to 965)

At Jelling in central Jutland two flat-topped mounds, 70 metres across and up to 11 metres high, stand either side of a church, with two runestones between them. The smaller stone was raised by Gorm for his wife Thyra. The larger, set exactly midway between the mounds by their son Harald, says he won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian, and it carries the earliest image of Christ in Scandinavia. The church stands on the site of at least three wooden predecessors, all destroyed by fire. Excavations from 2006 revealed a vast palisade around the monument and traces of a large stone ship setting, of unknown size.

• UNESCO inscribed the site in 1994. The large stone's popular Danish nickname, Denmark's baptismal certificate, was coined by the art historian Rudolf Broby-Johansen in the 1930s.
• The small stone has stood where it is only since about 1630, and its original position is not known.
• Both mounds were built of carefully stacked turf laid with the grass side down.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Jelling Mounds, Runic Stones and Church; Wikipedia: Jelling stones; World History Encyclopedia: Harald Bluetooth & the Conversion of Denmark

Harald Bluetooth (king of Denmark c. 958 to c. 986; overlord in Norway c. 970 to c. 985)

Haraldr blátǫnn Gormsson, House of Gorm · Denmark and Norway

Harald, son of Gorm, turned a Jutland lordship into a realm and made Christianity its official religion, then announced both on the great stone at Jelling. Widukind of Corvey, writing about 970, says he converted after a cleric named Poppo carried hot iron unharmed; Adam of Bremen, a century later, says Otto I forced him after a defeat; historians suspect Adam's story served Hamburg-Bremen's claims over the Danish church. He attacked Saxony in 973, lost Hedeby and the Danevirke to Otto II in 974, and regained ground in 983. His reign also saw the ring fortresses of about 970 to 980 and the Ravning bridge of about 979 to 980, some 760 metres long.

How they came to power: He succeeded Gorm around 958 and spread his power with war and alliances; UNESCO describes a realm reaching from northern Germany to southern Sweden and Norway.

How it ended: His son Sweyn rebelled and took the throne around 986. Harald probably died soon after from wounds, in exile; Adam of Bremen says among the Slavs at Jumne, or Jomsborg, and that his body was brought back to Roskilde.

• The 1997 Bluetooth wireless standard took his name, on the analogy of uniting devices as he united the Danes; its logo combines runes for H and B.
• Archaeology suggests he moved his parents' remains and removed stones from the ship setting around the mounds, possibly as a sign of his change of faith.
• He gradually shifted his centre to Roskilde. The Ravning bridge needed about 1,200 oak posts.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Harald Bluetooth & the Conversion of Denmark; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Jelling Mounds, Runic Stones and Church; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Viking-Age Ring Fortresses; Wikipedia: Harald Bluetooth

The ring fortresses (built c. 970 to 980; functioned only a short time)

Aggersborg, Fyrkat, Nonnebakken, Trelleborg and Borgring were built on one precise, scalable geometric plan, each with a circular rampart, four gates near the cardinal points, axial streets and, usually, rows of longhouses arranged in quarters. UNESCO, which listed them in 2023, reads them as the mark of strong royal power under Harald Bluetooth, placed near the main land and sea routes of Jutland, Funen and Zealand. Their function can only be inferred, and they were in use only briefly. They belong to a wider burst of royal building that included work on the Danevirke, the old earthwork across the base of Jutland, which Otto II took in 974.

• Trelleborg, west of Slagelse, is believed to have been ordered in the year 980 and may have commanded traffic in the Great Belt; the whole fort may have housed about 1,300 people.
• Aggersborg, Fyrkat and Trelleborg are the only ones to have been fully excavated; the tree-ring date for Trelleborg's timber is the autumn of 980.
• Trelleborg is the best preserved of the group, and its finds are shared between the local museum and the National Museum in Copenhagen.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Viking-Age Ring Fortresses; World History Encyclopedia: Harald Bluetooth & the Conversion of Denmark; Wikipedia: Trelleborg (Slagelse); Wikipedia: Harald Bluetooth

Sweyn Forkbeard (king of Denmark c. 986 to 1014; king of England December 1013 to 3 February 1014)

Sveinn tjúguskegg (Swein Haraldsson), House of Gorm · Denmark and England

Sweyn seized Denmark from Harald Bluetooth around 986, fought off a Swedish invasion, shared a raid on England with Olaf Tryggvason in 994, and then helped destroy Olaf around 1000. In 1002 King Æthelred, fearing plots, ordered all Danes in England killed on St Brice's Day, 13 November; Sweyn returned in force in 1003. In 1013 he landed at Sandwich, sailed up the Trent to Gainsborough, and took the submission of the north and then the rest, until Æthelred fled to Normandy. The main narrative source, Adam of Bremen, was hostile to him, and Peter Sawyer and Niels Lund reject Adam's story that he abandoned Christianity and spent fourteen years in exile.

How they came to power: He overthrew his father around 986 and drove him into exile, and kept up pro-Christian policies; historians differ on whether from belief or calculation.

How it ended: He died at Gainsborough on 3 February 1014, 'at Candlemas' in Ingram's 1823 Chronicle, and the fleet chose his son Cnut as king.

• Post-Conquest writers say Sweyn came back to avenge the massacre. William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1100s, names his sister Gunhilde among the dead, but he is the only source for her, and 21st-century historians doubt the story; the Chronicle does not mention it.
• A mass grave of 37 men found at St John's College, Oxford, in 2008 was first linked to the massacre; Oxford researchers then argued from chemistry that they were more likely Scandinavian raiders captured and executed.
• Æthelred's own charter says Danes fleeing at Oxford took refuge in St Frideswide's church, and that their pursuers set fire to it.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); World History Encyclopedia: The Danish Conquest of England; Wikipedia: Sweyn Forkbeard; Archaeology Magazine: Vengeance on the Vikings (2013); ScienceDaily, from the University of Oxford: Skeletons found at mass burial site in Oxford could be 10th-century Viking raiders

Maldon and the Danegeld (Battle of Maldon 991; payments recorded from 991 to 1041)

In 991 a Viking fleet sacked Ipswich and killed Ealdorman Byrhtnoth at Maldon in Essex, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says tribute was then paid for the first time on the advice of Archbishop Sigeric: 10,000 pounds. Ingram's text of the Chronicle then records 16,000 pounds in 994, 24,000 in 1002, 30,000 in 1007 and 48,000 in 1012. Cnut's settlement in 1018 took 72,000 pounds from England, plus 10,500 from London. By one modern reckoning the expeditions carried home more than 100 tonnes of silver in all.

• At the time the payment was called gafol, 'tribute'; the term Danegeld does not appear until the late eleventh century.
• Swedish runestones boast of it: the stone at Orkesta (U 344) says Ulf of Borresta took payment in England three times, under Toste, Thorkell the Tall and Cnut.
• A 325-line Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon, survives without its beginning or end, and has Byrhtnoth angrily refuse a Viking messenger's offer of peace for tribute.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tenth century (Ingram's translation); Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); Wikipedia: Danegeld; Wikipedia: The Battle of Maldon; World History Encyclopedia: The Danish Conquest of England

Olaf Tryggvason (king c. 995 to 1000; born in the 960s; died 9 September 999 or 1000)

Óláfr Tryggvason, House of Fairhair (by saga claim) · Norway

Olaf raided England alongside Sweyn Forkbeard in 994, then made peace: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says he was brought with pomp to King Æthelred at Andover and promised never to come back in hostility, a promise it notes he kept. He then took the Norwegian kingship and pressed Christianity on Norway and Iceland. The Chronicle is contemporary, but the dramatic stories of his youth and fall come from sagas of the 1190s and later, some two centuries after him; Store norske leksikon says the uncertainty is so great that his real importance is almost impossible to judge. Christianity was already fairly widespread in parts of Norway before him. He was killed in a sea fight against a coalition including Sweyn, at a place the sources cannot agree on.

How they came to power: A raider in western Europe, he won fame and silver in England and, according to the sagas, was accepted as king in Norway around 995, when Earl Hakon's rule collapsed.

How it ended: Killed in battle in 999 or 1000. Saxo Grammaticus says he jumped overboard in full armour rather than be taken; Hallfred's memorial poem already alludes to rumours that he survived.

• Only one type of his coin is known, in four specimens, imitating a coin of Æthelred.
• Icelandic sources put his last battle near an otherwise unknown island called Svolder; Adam of Bremen puts it in the Øresund. The sagas date to about two centuries later, and modern historians treat the accounts as literature.
• The tradition that he founded Trondheim in 997 comes from the sagas, and the sagas also claim he was Harald Fairhair's great-grandson.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tenth century (Ingram's translation); Store norske leksikon: Olav Tryggvason; Project Gutenberg: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, translated by Samuel Laing (1844); Wikipedia: Olaf Tryggvason; Wikipedia: Battle of Svolder

Iceland votes for Christianity (999 or 1000)

Missionaries reached Iceland from 980 with little success, and King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway raised the pressure until Christians and pagans faced each other at the Althing, close to fighting. The law-speaker Thorgeir, a pagan, was asked to decide for both sides. By the traditional account he lay under a covering for a day and a night (Njal's Saga, written about three centuries later, has him lie a day under a cloak), then ruled that all should be baptised under one law, because divided laws meant divided peace. The earliest account is Ari the Learned's Book of the Icelanders, written over a century later by a writer who cites first-hand witnesses. Robert Ferguson, among others, sees the half-hearted acceptance as a contributor to the feuds of the Sturlung age.

• The sources disagree on the terms. Ari, as summarised by modern writers, says exposing infants, eating horseflesh and private pagan worship were all still allowed; Dasent's translation of Njal's Saga has Thorgeir ban exposure and horseflesh on pain of outlawry if proved openly, but call them blameless if done by stealth.
• Njal's Saga says Hall of Side paid Thorgeir three marks of silver to speak the law, and has him warn that 'a sundering of the laws' would mean 'a sundering of the peace' (Dasent, 1861).
• The first missionary was an Icelander, Thorvald Kodransson, who came with a Saxon bishop named Fridrek, killed two critics and left in 986.

Sources: Icelandic Saga Database: The Story of Burnt Njal, translated by G. W. Dasent (1861); Wikipedia: Christianization of Iceland; World History Encyclopedia: The Vikings in Iceland

Uppsala and the last pagan kingdom (described by Adam of Bremen c. 1070; said to be destroyed around the 1080s)

Sweden's King Olof Skötkonung accepted Christianity around 1000, but when Adam of Bremen wrote about 1070 the new faith was still contending with the old there. Our main witness is a hostile one: Adam, a German Christian cleric, described a golden temple at Uppsala with statues of Thor, Odin and Freyr, and a festival every nine years at which nine males of every kind of creature were sacrificed and hung in a sacred grove, partly on the word of a 72-year-old Christian witness. The World History Encyclopedia says he wrote from a Christian point of view and cast the temple and its rites in a negative light, and Henrik Janson argues that Uppsala served Adam as a way of displaying the lines of conflict in the investiture controversy. Sune Lindqvist found postholes beneath the church at Gamla Uppsala in 1926, though Rudolf Simek notes they may belong to an earlier burnt temple and that reconstructions may overstate its size. Later medieval sources say King Inge the Elder destroyed the temple around the 1080s, but no contemporary source is known to confirm it.

• Adam says those already Christian had to buy themselves out of the festival.
• He assigns Thor to famine and plague, Odin to war, and Freyr to marriages.
• The three large Royal Mounds were excavated in the 1800s and proved to be royal burials, but the remains, some cremated, could not be identified.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Temple at Uppsala; Wikipedia: Temple at Uppsala; Wikipedia: Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum; World History Encyclopedia: Harald Bluetooth & the Conversion of Denmark

The Battle of Clontarf (23 April 1014 (the day is argued over; the year is not))

In 1014 Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, marched on Dublin during the Leinster revolt against him, led with Máel Mórda, king of Leinster, by the Norse king Sitric Silkbeard. Njal's Saga, written long after, has Sitric recruit Earl Sigurd of Orkney and Brodir of Man; the near-contemporary Annals of Ulster confirm both among the dead and record a valiant battle, with 1,000 mail-clad men among the enemy. The Dublin and Leinster forces were destroyed, but Brian, his son Murchad and his grandson were killed too. The later picture of a national war to drive out the Vikings comes above all from Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh, perhaps of the 1070s or 1080s, whose florid account of Brian's reign became the archetype for later legends. The Annals show Irish kings dying on both sides, and Sitric kept his throne until he abdicated in 1036.

• The Good Friday date is not in the earlier Annals of Inisfallen or Annals of Ulster, and History Ireland notes some think it a later invention to liken Brian to Christ, though the chronicler Marianus Scottus, who died in 1082, also gives it.
• The Annals of Ulster say about 6,000 of the enemy were killed or drowned and that Brian was carried to Armagh and waked for twelve nights.
• The Annals of Ulster already name 'Brotor who slew Brian'. Njal's Saga, written long after, adds the Icelandic version: Brodir kills Brian in his shield-ring, then is disembowelled round a tree, and calls 'Now let man tell man that Brodir felled Brian' (Dasent, 1861).

Sources: CELT, University College Cork: The Annals of Ulster, English translation; History Ireland: When was it fought?; Irish Historical Studies: Stylistic contrast and narrative function in Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib; Icelandic Saga Database: The Story of Burnt Njal, translated by G. W. Dasent (1861); Wikipedia: Sigtrygg Silkbeard

Olaf Haraldsson (St Olaf) (king 1015 to 1028; killed 29 July 1030)

Óláfr Haraldsson, Óláfr helgi, House of Fairhair (by saga claim) · Norway

Olaf raided for years in the Baltic and came to England in 1009 with Thorkell the Tall, then was baptised at Rouen around 1013-1014. He returned to Norway in 1015, beat Earl Svein and other chiefs at the sea fight of Nesjar on 25 March 1016, and ruled for about ten quiet years, continuing the unification of the country and the spread of Christianity. Cnut drove him out in 1028. He came back in 1030 and was killed at Stiklestad by an army of his own subjects, with leading chieftains against him; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says bluntly he was slain by his own people and afterwards canonised. Most of the detail comes from thirteenth-century sagas, above all Snorri, written about two centuries later, so the contemporary Chronicle and court poems are the firmer ground.

How they came to power: A veteran raider with English silver, he landed in Norway in 1015 and made himself king by winning Nesjar and then the acclaim of the Trøndelag assembly.

How it ended: Killed at Stiklestad on 29 July 1030 (Laing's edition also notes a tradition of 31 August), trying to win back his throne.

• Bishop Grimketel proclaimed him a saint at Nidaros about a year after the battle; Pope Alexander III confirmed it in 1164, and Nidaros Cathedral was built over the burial site.
• He became 'Norway's eternal king', and Olav the most popular Norwegian men's name in the centuries before the Reformation.
• Heimskringla's account of his death has three wounds, from Thorstein, Thorer Hund and perhaps Kalf Arnason, but admits that 'all are not agreed' on the last (Laing, 1844).

Sources: Store norske leksikon: Olav den hellige; Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); Project Gutenberg: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, translated by Samuel Laing (1844); Wikipedia: Olaf Haraldsson

Cnut the Great (king of England 1016 to 1035; of Denmark 1018 to 1035; of Norway 1028 to 1035)

Knútr inn ríki (Cnut Sweynsson), House of Gorm · England, Denmark and Norway

Sweyn's son Cnut fought Æthelred and then Edmund Ironside until he beat Edmund at Assandun on 18 October 1016; Edmund died weeks later and Cnut was undisputed king of England. In 1017 he married Æthelred's widow Emma of Normandy, who kept her title. He took Denmark in 1018 after his brother Harald, fought a Norwegian and Swedish coalition at the Holy River in 1026, a battle whose details the sources dispute, and in 1028 sailed to Norway with fifty ships and drove out King Olaf. The result, often called the North Sea Empire, did not last: Magnus took Norway at Cnut's death, and Danish kings ruled England only until 1042. In Rome in 1027 he attended Conrad II's coronation and won reduced tolls for English pilgrims.

How they came to power: Chosen king by the fleet when Sweyn died in 1014, he was driven out by Æthelred, returned in 1015, crossed the Thames with 160 ships in 1016 according to the Chronicle, and conquered England that year.

How it ended: He died on 12 November 1035, at Shaftesbury, and was buried at the Old Minster, Winchester. His bones are now in Winchester Cathedral.

• The Chronicle says that in 1018 Danes and English were reconciled at Oxford under Edgar's law, and that he kept forty ships after paying the army off with 82,500 pounds in all.
• In a letter home after Rome, he called himself king of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and some of the Swedes.
• Norman Cantor called him the most effective king in Anglo-Saxon history; the story of Cnut and the tide, by contrast, is a legend.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Cnut the Great; Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); World History Encyclopedia: The Danish Conquest of England; Wikipedia: Cnut; Wikipedia: Danegeld

Harald Hardrada (king of Norway 1046 (Store norske leksikon says 1045) to 1066; born c. 1015)

Haraldr harðráði (Harald Sigurdsson), House of Fairhair (by saga claim) · Norway

At about fifteen Harald fought for his half-brother Olaf at Stiklestad, then went into exile in the east, a career told in the East and West era. He came back rich around 1045 to 1046, shared power with his nephew Magnus and took sole rule when Magnus died in 1047. His twenty years in Norway were hard on opponents but relatively stable, though his silver coinage was drastically debased in the 1050s; he fought for the Danish crown against Sweyn Estridsson until he gave up the claim in 1064. In 1066 he joined Earl Tostig and invaded England, beat two English earls at Fulford, and was killed at Stamford Bridge. Adam of Bremen likened him to a thunderbolt of the north.

How they came to power: He returned with a fortune from Byzantium and, by later accounts, traded a share of it for co-rule with Magnus the Good, and then inherited the whole kingdom at Magnus's death in 1047.

How it ended: Killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066, hit in the throat by an arrow according to later accounts.

• His nickname, harðráði, is translated variously as 'hard ruler', 'hard in counsel' or 'tyrant'.
• King Harold is said, in Snorri's saga written long after the event, to have offered him seven feet of English ground.
• The English Chronicle's Ingram text calls him 'Harald the Fair-hair'd', though he is not the earlier Harald Fairhair.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Battle of Stamford Bridge; Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); Store norske leksikon: Harald Hardråde; World History Encyclopedia: Twelve Great Viking Leaders; Wikipedia: Harald Hardrada

The Battle of Stamford Bridge (25 September 1066)

Edward the Confessor's death in January 1066 left England open to several claimants. Harald Hardrada, with some 300 ships according to the Chronicle and with Tostig, brother of the English king Harold, landed in Yorkshire and beat two earls at Fulford on 20 September. Harold reached Tadcaster on the Sunday and came through York on the Monday, catching the Norwegians unprepared at Stamford Bridge, where they were waiting for hostages. Hardrada and Tostig both died and the Norwegian army was ruined. Nineteen days later, on 14 October, Harold was dead too, at Hastings.

• The survivors went home in 24 ships, the Chronicle says, after swearing lasting friendship to England.
• One Chronicle text says a lone Norwegian held the bridge until a man came beneath it and stabbed him under his mail. Henry of Huntingdon, writing later, adds the battle-axe and more than 40 dead.
• The Chronicle calls the two fights Fulford and Stamford Bridge 'general battles' fought within five nights.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); World History Encyclopedia: Battle of Stamford Bridge; Wikipedia: Battle of Stamford Bridge

When did the Viking Age end? (conventionally 1066; other markers include 1086, 1103, 1171, 1263 and 1266)

Historians often close the Viking Age with Harald Hardrada's death at Stamford Bridge in 1066, but the date is a convention, and other countries use other markers. Danish fleets still came to England after that, and in 1085 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports the alarm when King Cnut IV of Denmark prepared to invade, with Robert of Flanders, and William the Conqueror brought a huge army over to meet him. Magnus Barefoot of Norway campaigned in the Isles and Ireland until he was killed in an Ulster ambush on 24 August 1103. Ireland's marker is often the Anglo-Norman capture of Dublin in 1171, and Scotland's is the Battle of Largs in 1263.

• Cnut IV's invasion never reached England. He was killed in St Alban's priory at Odense on 10 July 1086 and was later venerated as a saint.
• Magnus Barefoot is called the last Norwegian king to fall in battle abroad, and in some respects the final Viking king.
• The Treaty of Perth of 2 July 1266 ended Norwegian rule in the Hebrides and the Isle of Man, passing them to Alexander III of Scotland, three years after Largs.

Sources: Avalon Project (Yale Law School): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, eleventh century (Ingram's translation); World History Encyclopedia: Twelve Great Viking Leaders; Wikipedia: Viking Age; Wikipedia: Canute IV of Denmark; Wikipedia: Magnus Barefoot

The sagas are written down (Ari's book, early 1100s; family sagas mostly 1200s and 1300s; Flateyjarbók c. 1390)

Almost everything popularly known about Viking heroes comes from Icelandic prose written long after the fact. Ari Thorgilsson's Book of the Icelanders dates from the early twelfth century, the Book of Settlements perhaps from as early, though its oldest versions date from the thirteenth and fourteenth, and the family sagas were mostly recorded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, by writers who are largely unknown. They are valued sources for medieval Scandinavian society and pre-Christian religion, but they were written by Christians about a pagan past. Historians therefore set them against archaeology and contemporary annals: Store norske leksikon warns that saga accounts of Harald Fairhair and Olaf Tryggvason must be used with caution. Sigurður Nordal sorted the sagas by date of writing, from early history to later works such as Njal's Saga of about 1280 to 1300 that favour style and storytelling, though his scheme has been severely criticised.

• Egil's Saga has been attributed by some scholars to Snorri Sturluson, a descendant of its hero, but this remains uncertain.
• Key texts survive only late or not at all: Flateyjarbók dates from about 1390, and two early lives of Olaf Tryggvason, Latin works of the 1190s, are lost.
• The standard modern edition is the Íslenzk fornrit series of the Old Icelandic Text Society.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sagas of Icelanders; Icelandic Saga Database: The Story of Burnt Njal, translated by G. W. Dasent (1861); World History Encyclopedia: The Vikings in Iceland; Store norske leksikon: Harald Hårfagre; Wikipedia: Olaf Tryggvason

The Lewis chessmen (made c. 1150 to 1200 (National Museums Scotland says late 12th or early 13th century); found 1831)

Discovered on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in 1831, the hoard held 78 chess pieces, 14 tablemen and a belt buckle, nearly all of walrus ivory, with a few pieces of whale tooth. They come from at least four sets, perhaps five, and are commonly believed to have been made in Trondheim, Norway, while some scholars suggest Iceland or the Hebrides. Lewis then lay inside the Norse sphere, which the Treaty of Perth ended only in 1266. They are usually thought to have reached the island as a merchant's goods, though Caldwell, Hall and Wilkinson (2009) suggest the sets, from one workshop, may have been made for use on Lewis. Today 82 pieces belong to the British Museum and 11 to National Museums Scotland, with six of the British Museum's pieces lent to Museum nan Eilean on Lewis.

• The find spot is disputed: most accounts say Uig Bay, but David Caldwell and colleagues at National Museums Scotland prefer Mealista, about 6 miles south. The finder is named only from 1863, as Malcolm MacLeod.
• Pawns stand 3.5 to 5.8 cm and other pieces 7 to 10.2 cm, and four of the warders are shown as berserkers biting their shields.
• A newly identified warder, the equivalent of a rook, sold for £735,000 in July 2019, and four major pieces and many pawns are still missing.

Sources: National Museums Scotland: The story of the Lewis chess pieces; Wikipedia: Lewis chessmen; The Scotsman: Lewis Chessmen pieces returned to Uig; Wikipedia: Treaty of Perth; David Caldwell, Mark Hall and Caroline Wilkinson, Medieval Archaeology 53 (2009), abstract via Medievalists.net: The Lewis Hoard of Gaming Pieces

Snorri Sturluson (1179 to 23 September 1241)

Snorri Sturluson, of the Sturlungar, Lawspeaker, poet and historian · Reykholt, Iceland

Snorri was born at Hvammur into the powerful Sturlung family and raised from childhood at Oddi by Jón Loftsson, a relative of the Norwegian kings. Twice lawspeaker of the Althing, he grew rich at Reykholt and dealt with King Haakon IV and Earl Skuli of Norway. He is commonly credited with the Prose Edda of about 1220, the fullest source for Norse myth, and Heimskringla of about 1230, the history of the Norwegian kings, and is often thought to be the author of Egil's Saga. Authorship of these works is argued, not proved. He wrote more than two hundred years after most of the events he describes, and he treated the gods as ancient men, which helped a Christian audience accept them.

How they rose: Fostered at the great learning centre of Oddi, he married well, took over Reykholt in 1206, and became lawspeaker in 1215. He was honoured at the Norwegian court from 1218.

How they died: Killed at Reykholt on 23 September 1241, by a raid led by his enemy Gissur Thorvaldsson, after King Haakon had sent a secret letter ordering him killed or captured.

• A warning in cipher runes reached him before the attack, but he could not read it.
• Heimskringla opens with the legendary Ynglinga saga, in which Odin is a man and a king, and moves to historical times.
• Later accounts report his last words in the cellar as Eigi skal höggva, an order not to strike.

Sources: Wikipedia: Snorri Sturluson; Project Gutenberg: Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, translated by Samuel Laing (1844); Project Gutenberg: The Younger Edda (Prose Edda), translated by R. B. Anderson; Wikipedia: Prose Edda; World History Encyclopedia: Temple at Uppsala

The Eddas and the Codex Regius (written in the 1270s; found 1643; returned to Iceland 21 April 1971)

The Poetic Edda survives chiefly in the Codex Regius, written in the 1270s, the sole source for most of its poems. Now in 45 leaves, it has lost a further eight. The Prose Edda, written around 1220 and credited to Snorri Sturluson, is a textbook for poets: a question-and-answer tour of mythology (Gylfaginning, about 20,000 words), then lists of kennings (Skáldskaparmál, about 50,000 words), and a guide to metre (Háttatal). Both were written down in Christian Iceland, more than two centuries after the conversion, so neither is a direct window on Viking religion.

• The Codex Regius came into Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson's hands in 1643, and in 1662 he gave it to King Frederick III of Denmark; hence 'Royal Book'.
• It returned to Reykjavík by ship with a military escort, because air travel was not trusted with such cargo.
• A second Codex Regius, of the Prose Edda, named for its long stay in the Royal Library, came home in 1985.

Sources: Wikipedia: Codex Regius; Wikipedia: Prose Edda; Wikipedia: Poetic Edda; Project Gutenberg: The Younger Edda (Prose Edda), translated by R. B. Anderson

The end of Norse Greenland (last written record, a wedding at Hvalsey, September 1408; settlements gone by the end of the 1400s)

In September 1408 Sigrid Björnsdóttir married Thorstein Olafsson in the church at Hvalsey, the best-preserved Norse ruin in Greenland; letters of 1409 to 1424 mention it, and they are the last written record of the colony, without any hint of crisis. The settlements, begun in the 980s and perhaps about 2,500 people at most by recent estimates (older ones run as high as 10,000), had vanished by the end of the fifteenth century. Thomas McGovern's older view blamed stubborn farmers who ruined their land and died in the cold, but Konrad Smiarowski has since found seal bones abundant at every site he has studied. James Barrett and colleagues argue that walrus ivory built the colony and its decline hurt it, with Greenland a near monopoly for Western Europe from the 1100s. No single explanation is agreed: over-hunting, the Little Ice Age and the Black Death are all named as possible causes of the trade's end.

• When Europeans returned in the early 1700s, they found ruins but no Norse people.
• The Hvalsey couple had been blown off course on the way from Norway to Iceland; Wikipedia says they later settled in his native Iceland, while Smithsonian says they stayed in Greenland. Another record of the period says someone was burned at the stake there for witchcraft.
• Follow-up work from Oslo and Britain suggests hunters had to go farther north for smaller-tusked animals, a sign of serial depletion.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine: Why Did Greenland's Vikings Vanish?; University of Cambridge: Lost Norse of Greenland fuelled the medieval ivory trade, ancient walrus DNA suggests; University of Oslo via Science Norway: Vikings in Greenland traded exclusive walrus tusks; Wikipedia: Hvalsey Church

Árni Magnússon and the manuscripts' return (Árni reached Copenhagen 1683, died 1730; Danish parliament's decision May 1965; first return 21 April 1971)

Árni Magnússon, born in Iceland in 1663, went to Copenhagen in 1683, became Secretary of the Royal Archives and a professor, and spent his life building the collection that bears his name. UNESCO's Memory of the World register calls it, by common consent, the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts, with nearly 3,000 items, the earliest from the 12th century, alongside about 14,000 charters. He left it in the care of the University of Copenhagen at his death in 1730. Iceland began petitioning for its return even before its separation from Denmark in 1944, and in May 1965 the Danish parliament ruled that works by Icelanders or chiefly about Iceland should go to Reykjavík. The Codex Regius, from the Royal Library, was brought back with Flateyjarbók to Reykjavík on 21 April 1971.

• The collection is now divided between Copenhagen and Reykjavík: 1,666 items plus all Icelandic charters and copies went to Iceland, with 141 manuscripts from the Royal Library. The last two arrived in June 1997.
• The Danish parliament's definition was broad: a work composed or translated by an Icelander, whose content was wholly or chiefly about Iceland, counted as Icelandic cultural property.
• As assistant to the Royal Antiquarian Thomas Bartholin, Árni transcribed and annotated thousands of pages of Icelandic material before starting his own collection.

Sources: UNESCO Memory of the World: Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection; Wikipedia: Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection; Wikipedia: Árni Magnússon; Arnamagnæan Institute and Árni Magnússon Institute: UNESCO Memory of the World nomination form; Danish-Icelandic Working Group on Old Icelandic Manuscripts: memo, April 2021

Romantic Vikings (from the late 1700s; Tegnér's Frithiof's Saga 1820 to 1825; strongest in the 1800s)

The first printed Saxo appeared in 1514 and Latin versions of the Edda from the 1600s, but it was the Romantic era that made Vikings heroes. Interest grew from the late 1700s, when the word Viking entered Modern English and raiding was recast as heroic adventure. In Sweden the Geatish Society led the movement: Erik Gustaf Geijer's poem The Viking appeared in the first issue of its journal Iduna, putting the Viking past at the centre of a rethought Swedish history after 1809, as Dag Blanck argues, and Esaias Tegnér's Frithiof's Saga became hugely popular in the Nordic countries, England, the United States and Germany. The revival had political implications too, and its heroic picture merged many different activities into one.

• Tegnér published four cantos in 1820, five more in 1822 and the whole poem in 1825; the elderly Goethe recommended it to German readers even before it was complete.
• The revival also reached architecture, such as a house of the early 1900s in Örgryte, Gothenburg, that borrows the forms of stave churches.
• Per Henrik Ling, the Swedish gymnastics pioneer, also contributed to the movement.

Sources: Wikipedia: Viking revival; Wikipedia: Frithiof's Saga; Wikipedia: Erik Gustaf Geijer; Dag Blanck, Journal of Transnational American Studies 7 (2016): The Transnational Viking; Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe: Tegnér, Esaias

Wagner's Ring (first complete cycle 13 to 17 August 1876)

Der Ring des Nibelungen opened the first Bayreuth Festival in a purpose-built theatre, running from Das Rheingold on 13 August 1876 to Götterdämmerung on 17 August. Wagner drew on Norse and German material: the Edda poems for Das Rheingold, the Völsunga saga for Die Walküre, the Edda, Völsunga saga and Thidrekssaga for Siegfried, and the German Nibelungenlied, apparently the original inspiration, for Götterdämmerung. His king of the gods is Wotan, the German form of Odin's name. The costumes by Carl Emil Doepler included the horned helmets widely credited with launching the popular image of the Viking.

• Illustrations and murals inspired by the Ring, by Michael Echter and Doepler, spread the look further; Echter's frescoes for King Ludwig II were destroyed in the Second World War.
• Doepler later published illustrations of Norse and Germanic gods, including a Thor.
• Doepler gave horns to the warrior Hunding but wings to Odin, and studied museum weapons for the rest of the costumes.

Sources: Wikipedia: Der Ring des Nibelungen; Wikipedia: Carl Emil Doepler; World-Tree Project: The horned helmet; Scandinavian Archaeology: The Debunked Helmet

Horned helmets: the great myth (popularised from 1876; horned helmets are from far earlier periods, not the Viking Age)

Vikings did not wear horned helmets. Viking Age depictions show warriors bareheaded or in simple helmets, and the few surviving examples have no horns. The best-preserved, from Gjermundbu in Norway, has a guard around the eyes, and the Yarm helmet, dug up in northern England in the 1950s, has been accepted as a close relative. The World-Tree Project traces the image to Doepler's costumes for Wagner's 1876 Ring: earlier art often gave Vikings wings, and horned headgear to barbarians. One popular account adds a Swedish artist named Malmström as an earlier source. Discover Magazine says Doepler borrowed from Native American headdresses; no other source cited for this entry supports that, so treat it with caution.

• Real horned helmets are far older: the pair from Veksø in Denmark date to about 1100 to 900 BC and were found in 1942.
• History.com suggests these artists may have been inspired by nineteenth-century finds of ancient horned helmets, and by Greek and Roman writers on northern barbarians.
• Horns remain a brand signal. The World-Tree Project notes the image is still regularly used to link products with Vikings.

Sources: World-Tree Project: The horned helmet; Wikipedia: Horned helmet; HISTORY: Did Vikings really wear horned helmets?; Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo: The Viking helmet from Yarm; Discover Magazine: No, Vikings Didn't Have Horns On Their Helmets

Digging up the Gokstad ship (excavated 1880; timber felled c. 890; replica sailed 1893)

In 1880 sons of the owner of Gokstad farm dug into a mound called Kongshaugen, the king's mound, in frozen ground and struck the bow of a boat. Nicolay Nicolaysen of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments then excavated it. The oak ship is 23.8 metres long and 5.1 wide, the largest preserved in Norway, with 32 oars, and tree rings date its timber to about 890. A timber chamber on board held a powerful man of about 40 to 50, about 181 to 183 cm tall, whose identity is unknown. It helped show the world what Viking ships were: as the Oslo museum says, before 1867 nobody had actually seen one.

• In 1893 a replica named Viking carried 12 Norwegians to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
• Its captain, Magnus Andersen, reported that the hull's flexibility let the bottom rise and fall by up to 18 mm in heavy seas.
• The replica was shown in Lincoln Park until 1994 and, as of 2025, was stored at Good Templar Park, in Geneva, Illinois, awaiting a new home.

Sources: Wikipedia: Gokstad ship; Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo: Welcome to the Viking Ship Museum; Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley: 1893 Viking Ship May Soon Have a New Home; Project Runeberg: N. Nicolaysen, The Viking-Ship Discovered at Gokstad in Norway (1882); Dag Blanck, Journal of Transnational American Studies 7 (2016): The Transnational Viking

The Kensington stone and the Vinland Map (Kensington stone found 1898; Vinland Map unveiled 1965 and rejected by Yale 2021)

Interest in Norse voyages produced famous fakes. Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant, said he found a runestone at Kensington, Minnesota, in 1898, claiming a journey from Vinland in 1362; since the first scientific examination in 1910 the scholarly consensus has treated it as a nineteenth-century hoax, though it retains believers. Yale unveiled the Vinland Map, supposedly from the 15th century, in 1965, showing Vinland. McCrone Associates declared it a forgery in the early 1970s, and in 2021 Yale's own researchers announced a titanium compound in the ink, not used until the 1920s, and said there was no reasonable doubt. Genuine Norse presence in America is proved instead by the digging at L'Anse aux Meadows.

• A bookbinder's Latin note on the back was overwritten in modern ink, which the researchers take as a sign of deliberate deception.
• Yale's researchers used X-ray fluorescence and Raman microscopy to scan the entire map; its curator Raymond Clemens announced the verdict.
• The stone now stands in a museum at Alexandria, Minnesota. Some critics have directly accused Ohman of making it.

Sources: NPR via NHPR: The Vinland Map, thought to be the oldest map of America, is officially a fake; Medievalists.net: The Vinland Map is a fake; Wikipedia: Kensington Runestone; Wikipedia: Vinland Map; Wikipedia: Norse settlement of North America

Digging up the Oseberg ship and its two women (buried autumn 834; excavated 1904 to 1905)

Knut Rom found a wooden fragment on the farm at Oseberg near Tønsberg in 1903 and took it to Professor Gabriel Gustafson, who dug the mound with Haakon Shetelig in 1904 and 1905. The oak ship, built around 820 by National Geographic's date, was buried in a chamber with sledges, a cart, tapestries and silks, and the two women. Tree rings date the burial to autumn 834. One woman was about 80 (National Geographic says about 70) and badly arthritic, and the other was first thought to be 25 to 30, then about 50 to 55. Whether one was sacrificed for the other is unknown, and neither woman's name or station is known.

• A broken collarbone once read as proof of sacrifice proved to have been healing for several weeks.
• The older woman had Morgagni's syndrome, which would have given her a masculine look and a beard. It has been suggested she was Queen Åsa, with a female priest beside her, but Per Holck (2006) treats Åsa as a legend kept alive for decades.
• Alum, used to preserve many finds after the dig, has badly harmed the treated wood, and the Oslo museum warns of new cracks in the ships themselves.

Sources: Wikipedia: Oseberg ship; National Geographic: Was the Oseberg Ship a tomb for a Viking Queen?; Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo: Welcome to the Viking Ship Museum; Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo: Viking Collection deteriorating; Princeton University, Making the Viking Age: Rare & Peculiar: The Oseberg Ship

Later misuse of Viking imagery (Nazi-era use in the 20th century, including SS recruitment from April 1940; extremist use since 1945)

In the twentieth century the German Nazis took up runes and other old symbols to build a mythic 'Aryan' past, according to the Anti-Defamation League, and two Waffen-SS divisions used the othala rune as insignia. The SS Division Wiking grew from a recruitment drive for foreign volunteers begun in April 1940 and promoted as a crusade against Bolshevism, though its personnel stayed mostly German, at times over 90 per cent. After the war some white supremacists in Europe, North America and elsewhere took up the same signs. Specialists note the historical claim behind this does not hold: the University of Alberta's Natalie Van Deusen says records and DNA show that no age of Nordic racial purity existed. The ADL stresses that its listed symbols must be judged in context, since few are used by only one group or for one idea.

• At Charlottesville in 2017 some marchers carried banners with Thor's hammer, as the University of Alberta reports.
• In the US Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, one widely photographed participant had Thor's hammer and an image of Yggdrasil tattooed and wore a horned headdress, as discussed in Perspectives on History and by Snopes.
• Mjölnir itself is a genuine symbol of the old religion, as Snopes notes, so its appearance alone does not settle what a wearer believes.

Sources: Anti-Defamation League: Othala Rune; University of Alberta, Folio: White supremacists are misappropriating Norse mythology, says expert; American Historical Association, Perspectives on History: Vikings, Crusaders, Confederates; Snopes: The Myths Behind the Tattoos Worn by 'QAnon Shaman' Jake Angeli; Wikipedia: 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking

The Skuldelev ships (found by divers 1957; dug out from 6 July 1962; sunk c. 1070)

Around 1070 five ships were filled with stones and sunk in two phases in Peberrenden, a channel in Roskilde Fjord, across the route to Roskilde. They were surveyed from 1957 and raised in 1962, when on 6 July the National Museum's team began pumping out a cofferdam. The find runs from cargo ships like the seagoing Skuldelev 1 to warships, and it was so broken that it was first counted as six vessels until 2 and 4 proved to be one. A new museum opened at Roskilde in 1969 to hold them. Skuldelev 2 is the prize: reconstructed at 29.28 metres long by 3.76 wide, though only about a quarter survives.

• Its keelson tree was felled in May or June 1042, and the plank timber grew around Dublin and Waterford, so the Roskilde museum assumes builders from one of those towns, probably Dublin. RTÉ's 1989 report said around 1060, but the museum's figure is now 1042.
• A replica, the Sea Stallion from Glendalough, sailed from Roskilde to Dublin in 2007; the original had 60 oars and a crew put at 65 to 70.
• The museum has built working copies of all five Skuldelev ships.

Sources: Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde: The excavation; Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde: Skuldelev 2; Wikipedia: Skuldelev ships; Wikipedia: Viking Ship Museum (Roskilde); RTÉ Archives: Dublin Viking Ship

L'Anse aux Meadows found (discovered 1960; UNESCO listing 1978; Norse activity dated to 1021)

The site at the northern tip of Newfoundland was discovered in 1960 and excavated by the author Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad; Nature's 2021 paper calls it the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas (Greenland aside). Excavation uncovered eight timber-framed turf buildings in the style of Norse Greenland and Iceland: three dwellings, a forge and four workshops, on a terrace above a bog. Iron making and woodworking suggest ship repair, and finds indicate voyages farther south. UNESCO listed it in 1978. A 2021 Nature study led by Margot Kuitems measured a radiocarbon spike from AD 993 in wood cut with metal tools, placing Norse people there in the year 1021.

• Metal tools mattered because the local Indigenous people were not making such tools then, so the Nature team took the cuts as Norse work.
• Before 2021, more than 150 radiocarbon dates had been run, 55 tied to the Norse occupation, and none could fix the site precisely.
• The remains have been reburied to protect them, and Parks Canada shows visitors a reconstructed encampment beside them.

Sources: Nature (2021): Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site; Parks Canada: L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site; Wikipedia: Norse settlement of North America

The Birka warrior grave debate (excavated 1878; osteology 2014-2016; DNA 2017; reply in Antiquity 2019)

Hjalmar Stolpe excavated chamber grave Bj 581 at Birka in 1878, with a sword, axe, spear, armour-piercing arrows, two shields and two horses, and scholars assumed a man. Bone analysis in the 1970s said female but was dismissed; Anna Kjellström's reached the same result in the 2010s, and in 2017 Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson's team confirmed from a canine tooth and arm bone, with no Y chromosome, that the person was biologically female. They called her a female Viking warrior. Judith Jesch replied that a woman could have been buried with warrior gear without being a warrior in life, and that the authors did not pursue such alternatives; Fedir Androshchuk stressed the disturbed state of Birka's graves and Stolpe's recording. Neil Price and the original team answered in Antiquity in 2019, granting the alternatives but arguing the literal warrior reading fits best.

• The 2019 authors point out that when the grave was recorded warriorhood was presumed to be male, so the same reading would have been made with no bones at all.
• Stolpe called this perhaps the most remarkable grave in the field, one of about 1,100 graves he excavated at Birka.
• Birka had around 700 to 1,000 inhabitants in its day, according to the 2017 study, made up of traders, artisans and warriors.

Sources: American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2017), via PMC: A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics; Antiquity (2019): Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581; Judith Jesch, Norse and Viking Ramblings: Let's Debate Female Viking Warriors Yet Again; Wikipedia: Birka grave Bj 581

The genomes of the Viking world (published in Nature, 2020)

In 2020 a study in Nature sequenced 442 people from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland to trace the effect of the Viking expansion. It found gene flow into Scandinavia from the south and east during the period, and genetic structure within Scandinavia, with diversity greatest in the south. Danish ancestry flowed into England, Swedish into the Baltic, and Norwegian into Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. The authors also found substantial ancestry from elsewhere in Europe entering Scandinavia in the Viking Age, and scholars such as Natalie Van Deusen set evidence of this kind against claims of a pure northern race.

• The Nature authors date the expansion to about AD 750 to 1050.
• Natalie Van Deusen of the University of Alberta said in July 2020, before this paper appeared, that records and DNA already showed no age of Nordic racial purity existed.
• The DNA also showed that one Viking expedition included close family members.

Sources: Nature (2020): Population genomics of the Viking world; University of Alberta, Folio: White supremacists are misappropriating Norse mythology, says expert; Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine: World's largest ever DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons