Viking Age - Historical Considerations

Historical Considerations

In England the Viking Age began dramatically on 8 June 793 when Vikings destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning famous across the continent. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. Three Viking ships had beached in Portland Bay six years earlier, but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Lindisfarne was different. The Viking devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island was reported the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York, who wrote: "Never before has such an atrocity been seen". More than any other single event, the attack on Lindisfarne cast a shadow on the perception of the Vikings for the next twelve centuries. Not until the 1890s did scholars outside Scandinavia begin seriously to reassess the achievements of the Vikings, recognizing their artistry, technological skills, and seamanship.

Until Victoria's reign in Britain, Vikings were portrayed as violent and bloodthirsty. The chronicles of medieval England had always portrayed them as rapacious 'wolves among sheep'.

The first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. Pioneering scholarly works on the Viking Age began to reach a small readership in Britain. Archaeologists began to dig up Britain's Viking past. Linguistic enthusiasts started to work on identifying Viking-Age origins for rural idioms and proverbs. The new dictionaries of the Old Norse language enabled the Victorians to grapple with the primary Icelandic Sagas.

In Scandinavia Thomas Bartholin and Ole Worm, the 17th century Danish scholars and Olaf Rudbeck in Sweden were the first to set the standard for using runic inscriptions and Icelandic Sagas as historical sources. During the Age of Enlightenment and Nordic Renaissance, historical scholarship in Scandinavia became more rational and pragmatic in the works of a Danish-Norwegian historian Ludvig Holberg and Swedish Olof von Dalin. During the later half of the 18th century the Icelandic Sagas were still used as important historical sources, but the Viking Age was regarded as a barbaric and uncivilised period in the history of the Nordic countries. Until recently the history of the Viking Age was largely based on Icelandic Sagas, the history of the Danes written by Saxo Grammaticus, the Russian Primary Chronicle and The War of the Irish with the Foreigners. Few scholars still accept these texts as reliable sources; historians today rely more on archaeology and numismatics, disciplines that have made valuable contributions toward understanding the period.