Viking Age

The Viking age ran from the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 to the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, and in those two and a half centuries Norse seafarers reached Iceland, Greenland, North America, Russia, Constantinople and Baghdad. They sailed longships with a shallow draught that could cross open ocean and row up rivers, and they traded as much as they raided: furs, amber, walrus ivory and slaves went south, silver and silk came back, and the coins of the Caliphate found in Scandinavian hoards show the scale. Some settled, in the Danelaw of England, in Normandy, in the Orkneys, in Iceland from 874, and in Greenland from 985, while a farmstead was briefly established at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Others served the emperors in Constantinople as the Varangian guard, or traded down the rivers of Rus to the Black Sea. At home they carved runes, told the sagas and held things at the rock of Uppsala. The age ended with the christianisation of the north and with the failed invasion of Harald Hardrada in 1066, but the names they left, York, Kiev and the Isle of Man, outlasted them. Their ships carried goods as far as the Volga and the Dnieper.