The Viking Age — Longships, legends, and the first "Norway"

On the eighth of June 793, longships The longship × Photo by Berig, Tjängvide image stone (G 110), Alskog, Gotland, 8th–9th c., Swedish History Museum (CC BY-SA 4.0) About this image ▸ The Viking-Age Norse ocean-going vessel — clinker-built (overlapping hull planks), with a true keel deep enough to brace a mast, a square sail for wind propulsion, and rowing benches running the length of both sides. Light enough to be portaged between rivers and beached on a tidal flat, strong enough to take the open Atlantic. Typical lengths ran twenty to thirty metres, with crew capacities of thirty to sixty men. The longship made possible everything else about the Viking Age: the raiding economy reaching from Newfoundland to Constantinople; the settler colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and briefly North America; the river trade through Slavic country to the Caspian; the eventual conquest of England. from somewhere along the western Norwegian coast pull up on the tidal flat of Lindisfarne Lindisfarne × Thomas Girtin, Saint Cuthbert's Holy Island (1797), via Google Art Project About this image ▸ Tidal island off the Northumbrian coast of northeast England (now often called Holy Island), about three miles (five kilometres) long, accessible on foot at low tide. Site of one of the most prestigious Anglo-Saxon monasteries — founded by Saint Aidan in 635 and famous for the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels (c. 700) — until Norse raiders attacked on 8 June 793. The raid was not the first by Norsemen on the British Isles, but its vividness in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Alcuin of York's letters made it the conventional starting date of the Viking Age in European historiography. off the Northumbrian Northumbria × John Varley, Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland (watercolour), Yale Center for British Art About this image ▸ Anglo-Saxon kingdom of north-central and northeastern England, at its height stretching from the Humber to the Firth of Forth. Christianised in the early seventh century, Northumbria produced the Lindisfarne monastery, the Venerable Bede, and the Northumbrian Renaissance of illuminated manuscripts and Latin learning. Repeatedly raided and eventually largely conquered by Norse forces across the late ninth and tenth centuries; absorbed into the unified English kingdom by the eleventh. shore (in modern-day northeast England). The men who get out of them break into the wealthiest undefended monastery in the Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons × Unknown maker, the Sutton Hoo helmet (c. 600–650 CE), British Museum; photograph by Wikimedia contributor Geni (2016) About this image ▸ Germanic peoples — Angles, Saxons, Jutes — who migrated into Britain from the continental coast of the North Sea in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, displacing or absorbing the native Britons across most of what became England. By the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons had organised into the Heptarchy of seven kingdoms; by the late ninth century the surviving kingdoms (chiefly Wessex under Alfred the Great) had begun consolidating under sustained Norse pressure. The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England — formed by the conquests of Alfred's successors across the tenth century — was the country the Norse raided, settled, and finally invaded under Harald Hardrada in 1066, with the Norman Conquest ending Anglo-Saxon rule the same year. north. They kill some of the monks, drown others in the sea, drag a number off as slaves, and carry the gold and silver of the church back to the ships. The chroniclers record the year with omens — sheets of light in the air, whirlwinds, fiery dragons flying in the firmament — and then the pitiless raiding of the heathen men. The dragons are a literary flourish. The longships are not.

The English scholar Alcuin of York Alcuin of York × Jean-Victor Schnetz, Charlemagne Receives Alcuin (1833), Musée du Louvre About this image ▸ English scholar, theologian, and Latin poet (c. 735–804), born in Northumbria and educated at the cathedral school of York. From the 780s he served as the leading scholar at the court of Charlemagne in Aachen, where he organised the palace school and led the Carolingian educational and liturgical reforms. His letter home to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne in 793, written from Charlemagne's court when the news of the Lindisfarne raid arrived, is one of the most quoted contemporary witnesses to the start of the Viking Age. , in residence at Charlemagne Charlemagne × Carolingian workshop, Equestrian statuette of Charlemagne or Charles the Bald (c. 870), Musée du Louvre, OA 8260; photo: Shonagon (CC0) About this image ▸ King of the Franks from 768 and the first Holy Roman Emperor from Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned him in Rome. Consolidated most of western and central continental Europe under Frankish rule across four decades of campaigns and built a court and administrative system that became the model for medieval European kingship. Died at Aachen on the twenty-eighth of January 814. His court was the leading scholarly centre north of the Alps and the post Alcuin of York held when the news of Lindisfarne arrived. ’s court when the news arrives, writes home in grief: never before has such terror appeared in Britain, and no one had thought such an inroad from the sea could be made. The defining feature of the new threat is that it has come from a direction no one was watching.

It is not, strictly, the first raid. Four years earlier, three Norse ships had landed at Portland Portland × William Daniell, Light-house, Isle of Portland, from A Voyage Round Great Britain vol. VIII (1825) About this image ▸ Tied island and headland on the south coast of England (modern Dorset), connected to the mainland by the long shingle bar of Chesil Beach. Site of one of the very earliest recorded Norse raids on Britain — usually dated 789 — when three ships landed and killed the local reeve who rode out to meet them, believing them to be merchants. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates the raid four years before Lindisfarne; modern scholarship treats Portland rather than Lindisfarne as the historical opening of the Viking Age in England, though Lindisfarne remains the symbolic one. on the south coast of England, killed the king’s reeve who rode out to direct them to the king’s town, and disappeared again. Lindisfarne opens the era in popular memory because the chronicler who wrote about it wrote vividly. Portland is where the era really begins. The men come from Hordaland Hordaland × Adolph Tidemand & Hans Gude, Brudeferd i Hardanger (1848), Nasjonalmuseet / Google Art Project About this image ▸ Region on the western coast of Norway centred on what is now Bergen. In the petty-kingdom era a smaller maritime kingdom; from the high medieval period the dominant Norwegian commercial region through the Hanseatic period at Bryggen. Folded with adjacent Sogn og Fjordane into the modern county of Vestland in 2020. Hordaland (Bergen region) Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world on the western Norwegian coast.

The men who appear there become, in time, among the most recognizable figures in the world. The era they begin will redraw the trading routes of Europe, settle Iceland Iceland × Frederick W. W. Howell, Galtalækur and Hekla (c. 1900), Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University Library About this image ▸ The North Atlantic island settled from Norway in the ninth and tenth centuries by chieftains and their followings who refused to accept Harald Fairhair's authority on the Norwegian mainland and emigrated rather than submit. They built a country without a king, governed by an annual open-air assembly at Þingvellir called the Alþing — the oldest parliament in the world by date of founding. Three centuries after the migration, their descendants (notably Snorri Sturluson) composed the prose sagas that became almost the only literary memory of the Norwegian petty kingdoms. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldWorshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian NorwayThe King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churchesThe Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you thinkThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormant and Greenland Greenland × Grønlands historiske Mindesmærker vol. 3 (1845), plate VIII, British Library About this image ▸ The world's largest island, lying between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans west of Iceland. Colonised by Norse settlers led by Erik the Red beginning in 985 — the name "Greenland" was Erik's marketing, chosen to attract colonists to a marginally agricultural land. The Norse Eastern and Western Settlements on the southwestern coast sustained perhaps two or three thousand people at peak across four centuries before steadily diminishing in the cooling climate of the Little Ice Age and disappearing by around 1450. Today a self- governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Also discussed in The King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churchesThe Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you thinkThe Long Fall — the sudden loss of Norwegian nobility, the end of the kings, and half of Norway gone foreverThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormant and the eastern coast of North America, put a country named Russia on the map, and end three centuries later with a Norwegian king dead at a small river crossing in Yorkshire Yorkshire × Detroit Publishing Co. photochrom, York from City Walls (c. 1890–1900), Library of Congress About this image ▸ Historic county of northern England, the largest of the traditional English counties. Under heavy Norse settlement and rule from the late ninth century onward — the Norse-founded kingdom of York (Jórvík) was the centre of the Danelaw — until reabsorbed into the English kingdom in 954. Norse place-names ending in -by, -thorpe, and -thwaite still mark Yorkshire's villages and fields. Site of the Battle of Stamford Bridge (1066), where Harald Hardrada's last Norse invasion of England ended. Also discussed in A Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churches .

The names the world gave them

There is no country yet called Norway. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden as modern nations are centuries in the future. The raiders are a population spread thin along the coasts of all three, organized into petty kingdoms Petty kings × Erik Werenskiold, Den fangne kong Gryting føres fram for kong Harald (1899), Nasjonalmuseet About this image ▸ The small-kingdom rulers of pre-unification Norway, smákonungar in Old Norse. From roughly the sixth century through the late ninth, the Norwegian coast was organised not as one country but as perhaps a dozen small thrones, each controlling a fjord or valley district. A petty king was a war leader and religious officiant who led men into battle, performed seasonal sacrifices, arbitrated disputes among his chieftains, and collected tribute in commodity from the farmsteads under his authority — but who governed alongside the regional thing, the assembly of free men. Harald Fairhair's consolidation around 880 broke the petty-kingdom system in the west and south; the inland and northern remnants persisted longer. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world and unified by little more than a shared language and a shared ship. The Old Norse word for what they do is víkingr Víkingr × Runestone Ög 8 (the Kälvesten stone), 9th century, Västra Stenby church, Motala, Östergötland. Photograph by Berig (2007), CC BY 2.5 About this image ▸ Old Norse word for the activity of raiding rather than for a people — að fara í víking meant "to go on a raid." The English word "Viking," derived from it, is a nineteenth-century retrofitting: medieval Scandinavians did not call themselves Vikings as an ethnic or national identity. Most Norse of the Viking Age never went raiding. The English use of "Viking" for the entire Norse population is the standard one today but is historically a category mistake — useful shorthand that conceals what the Norse themselves meant by the word. — the activity of the raid, not a name for a people. Most Scandinavians of the period never go on one in their lives.

The men who do, however, give Europe a new vocabulary.

To the Franks The Franks × Stuttgart Psalter (Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod.bibl.fol.23), Frankish riders (c. 820–830) About this image ▸ Germanic people who established the Frankish kingdom in Roman Gaul from the late fifth century and dominated continental western Europe for the next four centuries. Under Charlemagne (r. 768–814) the Carolingian Frankish Empire stretched from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and from the Atlantic to central Italy. By the mid-ninth century the empire had divided into West Frankia (the kernel of modern France) and East Frankia (the kernel of modern Germany); the boundary settled at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. The Franks were the Norse raiders' principal continental target across the ninth century. (in modern-day France and Germany) they are Normanni Normanni × Louis-Henri Brévière (engraver), Siège de Paris par les Normands, l'an 885, Musée Carnavalet, Paris (inv. G.30880) About this image ▸ Medieval Latin word for "Northmen," used by the Franks for the Norse raiders and settlers who came down out of Scandinavia from the late eighth century onward. The word survives in the modern name "Normandy" — the territory ceded to the Norse warrior Rollo by Charles the Simple in 911 — and in "Norman," used both for the Norse-descended ruling class of medieval Normandy and for the related French-speaking aristocracy that William the Conqueror put on the English throne in 1066. , the Northmen — a word that, three generations later, will give Normandy Normandy × Photochrom print, Mont St. Michel at high water (c. 1900), Library of Congress About this image ▸ Historical region of northwestern France along the lower Seine and the Channel coast. The territory was ceded to the Norse warrior Rollo and his followers by the West Frankish king Charles the Simple in the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte (911), in exchange for nominal vassalage and defence against further Norse raiding. The name comes from Normanni, "Northmen." Rollo's descendants ruled as Dukes of Normandy; his great-great-great-grandson William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, putting a Norse-descended Norman dynasty on the English throne. Also discussed in The King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to Christ (modern-day northern France) its name when the French king cedes the lower Seine Seine × Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Rouen — une vue panoramique de la Seine au premier plan (19th c.) About this image ▸ The principal river of northern France, rising in Burgundy and flowing about seven hundred and seventy-five kilometres northwest through Paris to the English Channel at Le Havre. The lower Seine and its estuary were the principal Norse penetration route into the Frankish interior across the ninth century; the territory at its mouth was the area Charles the Simple ceded to Rollo in 911 to become Normandy. valley in 911 to a Norse settler named Rollo Rollo × Friedrich Hottenroth, Charles the Fat and Rollo at the siege of Paris, Illustrirte Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (Stuttgart, 1873) About this image ▸ Norse warrior and chieftain (c. 860–c. 930) who led a Norse warband that settled in the lower Seine valley of northern France in the late ninth century. In 911 the West Frankish king Charles the Simple formalised the settlement in the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, granting Rollo and his followers the territory that would soon be called Normandy ("land of the Northmen") in exchange for nominal vassalage and defence against further Norse raiding. Rollo's descendants became the Dukes of Normandy; his great-great-great- grandson William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066. .

To the Anglo-Saxons they are Danes, generically, even when the raiders are Norwegian.

To the Irish they are Lochlannach Lochlannach × Annals of Ulster, Trinity College Dublin MS 1282, entry for the year 912 (compiled late 15th century by Ruaidhrí Ó Luinín) About this image ▸ The Irish-Gaelic word for the Norse — "the people of the lochs" (lakes/fjords). Used in the medieval Irish annals to distinguish the Norwegians from the Danes (the latter called Dubgaill, "dark foreigners," in contrast to Finngaill, "fair foreigners," typically the Norwegians, though the precise application varies by source). The Lochlannach in Ireland founded Dublin and several other coastal trading towns and were a major political force across two centuries. , the people of the lochs.

To the Slavs and Arabs of the eastern river-routes they are Rūs Rūs × Nicholas Roerich, Guests from Overseas (1901), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow About this image ▸ Slavic and Arabic word for the eastern Norse — the Swedish and later mixed Slavic-Norse population that moved down the Volga and Dnieper river-routes through the Slavic interior to reach the Black Sea and the Caspian. The name probably derives from Old Norse róðr ("rowing"), via the Finnish Ruotsi (Sweden) and the Slavic adaptation. Over generations the name attached not to the Norse traders themselves but to the country forming around the Norse-Slavic trading towns — the Kievan Rus and eventually Russia. — a word that will eventually name a country: Russia.

To the Byzantine Greeks Byzantine Empire × Byzantine mosaicist, Christ Pantocrator with Constantine IX Monomachos and Zoe (Hagia Sophia, c. 1042); photo: Myrabella About this image ▸ The continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of the western half in 476, with its capital at Constantinople until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The Greek-speaking, Eastern-Christian Byzantine state was the wealthiest and most institutionally sophisticated polity of the medieval Mediterranean. The Byzantine emperors maintained the Varangian Guard — an elite imperial bodyguard of Norse warriors — from the late tenth century onward; Harald Hardrada served in it for a decade in his twenties before returning to claim the Norwegian throne. Also discussed in The Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land the Norse mercenaries in the imperial bodyguard are the Várangoi Varangians × Madrid Skylitzes (Synopsis Historion of John Skylitzes), 12th-century illuminated manuscript, Biblioteca Nacional de España About this image ▸ Byzantine Greek Várangoi — the Norse warriors who served as the Byzantine emperor's elite imperial bodyguard from c. 988 onward, initially recruited under an agreement between Emperor Basil II and the Kievan Rus prince Vladimir of Kiev. The Varangian Guard was the most prestigious military service available to a Norse warrior of the eleventh century; service paid extraordinarily well and Norse sources speak of returning Varangians as the wealthy men of their generation. Harald Hardrada commanded Varangian forces in Sicily, North Africa, and the Holy Land for a decade before returning north to claim the Norwegian throne. Also discussed in The Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land , the Varangians.

To the Arabs of al-Andalus al-Andalus × David Roberts, The Mosque at Cordova (1833), Yale Center for British Art About this image ▸ The Arabic name for the parts of the Iberian peninsula under Muslim rule between 711 (the Umayyad conquest) and 1492 (the fall of Granada to Christian Castile). At its early-medieval height al- Andalus covered most of modern Spain and Portugal and was the wealthiest, most urban, and most learned region of western Europe. Norse fleets that rounded the Iberian peninsula raided into al-Andalus from the mid-ninth century; the Andalusian Umayyads called the raiders Majūs and inflicted some of the few decisive defeats on Norse forces in the Viking-Age west. they are Majus Majus × Unknown scribe, Ibn Fadlan's Risala, Ridawiya (Razavi) Library MS 5229, fol. 196v (13th-century copy of a 921-922 account) About this image ▸ Arabic word — majūs — used by the medieval Muslims of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) and North Africa for the Norse raiders who reached the western Mediterranean in the ninth century. The word originally meant "Zoroastrian" or "fire-worshipper" and was applied as the catch-all category for non-People-of-the-Book pagans. The application to the Norse — who were neither Zoroastrian nor particularly fire-worshipping — reflects the limits of medieval Islamic religious classification for an unfamiliar pagan people more than any specific theological observation. , most likely fire-worshippers — the category the medieval Muslim world reserved for non-People-of-the-Book pagans.

A line of medieval Latin from a Frankish antiphony catches the period mood: de gente fera Normannica nos libera, quae nostra vastat, Deus, regna — deliver us, God, from the cruel race of Northmen who lay waste our realms. By the time the longships have been at it for half a century, no defensive system in Christian Europe has been built to expect what is coming.

A coastal society

The country that produces them is small. Norway in the late eighth century has a total population of perhaps two hundred thousand, overwhelmingly rural — farmers and fishermen working small holdings along the coast and in the southern lowlands. The raiding population is a minority within that, doing the work seasonally and returning each autumn to the farms they had left in spring. The ships sail in May and June. The grain ripens in August and September. The men come back for the harvest because the alternative is hunger over the long northern winter.

The arithmetic of the raid is therefore tight. A summer in open water has to bring back enough silver and slaves and movable goods to feed a household through to the next planting, with a margin left over for the chieftain who organized the expedition. The men who go raiding are not unemployed warriors. They are younger sons of farms that cannot support them at home, or men whose chieftain has called in service, or, increasingly through the ninth century, men whose home community has organized a larger expedition under a single ambitious lord. The lord takes the largest share; the men take a portion that depends on rank and contribution; the widows of those who do not return take a small fixed compensation from the chieftain’s hall. In everything but its mortality rate, it is recognizable as a trading venture.

Women run the farms in the men’s absence. By the standards of the medieval Christian Europe the raiders visit, the Norse woman’s legal position is unusually strong. She can own property in her own right, inherit when the male heirs are exhausted, hold the keys that mark the mistress of a household, and — under the regional law codes — initiate divorce if her husband proves unworthy. The Oseberg The Oseberg ship × Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Oseberg ship excavation (21 July 1904), inv. CfO0022 About this image ▸ Ninth-century Viking longship preserved nearly complete in a burial mound in Vestfold, Norway, and excavated in 1904. Built around 820, the ship was placed in the mound around 834 as the funerary vessel for two very high-ranking women — one in her seventies, one perhaps in her fifties — along with horses, dogs, an ox, a four-wheeled carved wooden cart, ornamented sledges, the richest collection of Viking-Age textiles, and a small wooden bucket of red apples preserved by the heavy blue clay. The most ornate Norse ship recovered. Held at the Museum of the Viking Age on Bygdøy, Oslo (closed for rebuild until 2027). burial in Vestfold Vestfold × Edvard Munch, Summer in Asgardstrand (1889), Woll 185, private collection About this image ▸ Coastal region on the western shore of the Oslofjord in southeastern Norway, the richest of the petty-kingdom-era Norwegian polities. Controlled the trade routes through the Skagerrak between the North Sea and the Baltic; the wealth in its royal mounds at Borre marks it as the dominant southern Norwegian power of the seventh through ninth centuries. The Yngling dynasty held the throne here. Modern Vestfold is the county containing Tønsberg, Sandefjord, and the Borre Mound Cemetery archaeological site. Vestfold Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldThe King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churches holds two of the highest-ranking women of their generation. The world that produced that burial is a world that had room for women of that standing.

The economy also runs on slaves Thrall × Sergey Ivanov, Trade Negotiations in the Country of the Eastern Slavs (1909) About this image ▸ Old Norse þræll — slave. Slavery was a foundational institution of the Viking-Age Norse economy. Norse fleets captured along every shore they touched — Christian monks bound for Islamic markets, Slavic captives bound for Dublin and the Mediterranean — and Dublin and the eastern river-trade towns became major medieval slave-trading hubs. A thrall could be bought, sold, given, freed, and put to death by his owner under regional law codes. The abolition of slavery in Scandinavia is a process of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, completed under Christian and royal-administrative pressure rather than from any moral movement inside Norse society itself. The English word thrall descends directly from the Old Norse. . Norse fleets capture along every shore they touch — Christian monks bound for Islamic markets, Slavic captives bound for Dublin Dublin × Thomas Medland after Angelo Maria Bigari, Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin (1790s), National Gallery of Ireland About this image ▸ Modern capital of Ireland; founded as a Norse trading and slaving town (Dyflin) on the south bank of the River Liffey around 841. The Norse Kingdom of Dublin became one of the great commercial centres of the Viking-Age west, the principal slave market for captives taken across the British Isles and the Frankish coast, and a base for further raiding. Under intermittent Norse rule until the High King Brian Boru's victory at Clontarf in 1014 (where Brian himself was killed) broke Norse political dominance in Ireland, though the city's Hiberno-Norse population persisted into the Anglo-Norman period. and the Mediterranean — and Dublin under Norse rule becomes one of the great slave ports of the medieval west. The chieftains’ halls, the imported wine, the dirhams Dirhams × Abbasid silver dirham of Abu Muslim, Marv mint (AH 132/749-50), The David Collection, Copenhagen; photo Richard Mortel (CC BY 2.0) About this image ▸ Silver coins minted across the Islamic world from the late seventh century onward, the standard medium of high-value exchange in the Abbasid Caliphate and successor states. Approximately three grams of silver per coin; minted at Baghdad, Samarkand, and dozens of other centres across the Islamic east. Vast quantities of dirhams flowed north through the Volga and Caspian trade into Norse- controlled Scandinavia from the late eighth through the early tenth centuries; the surviving Viking-Age silver hoards of Scandinavia contain tens of thousands of dirhams, the largest collection of Islamic coinage outside the Islamic world itself. in the silver hoards — all of it is built on the backs of human chattel. The longship trade is a slave trade as much as it is a silver one.

Glory and the skalds

The men in the longships do not see what they are doing the way the Christian monasteries they raid see it. The worldview they carry comes out of a religion whose central story is a final battle the gods themselves are going to lose, and whose afterlife sorts men by the manner of their death rather than the merit of their life. There is no salvation to earn and no damnation to fear. Courage in the longship is, under this logic, the rational choice. So is the willingness to take the smaller share of a raid in exchange for the larger share of being remembered.

The skalds Skald × Christian Krohg, illustration for Óláfs saga helga, in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (J.M. Stenersen & Co, 1899 edition) About this image ▸ Old Norse court poet. Skalds composed verse on behalf of kings and earls — praise-poems (drápur), genealogies (like Þjóðólfr's Ynglingatal), and memorial verse for the dead — and the most prized were attached to royal courts. The skaldic tradition is metrically intricate (the dróttkvætt metre is one of the most technically demanding in any European literary tradition) and the poems preserved alongside the prose sagas are some of the very few contemporary sources for Viking-age and pre-Viking-age Norwegian political history. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world are the bookkeepers of all of this. Every chieftain of standing carries his own court poet, sometimes more than one, and the skald’s job is to compose, in dense layered verse, the praise-poems that name what the chieftain has done and how his men have behaved. The verses run on figures called kennings Kennings × Codex Wormianus (AM 242 fol.), bl. 13r, 14th century — via Handbok i norrøn filologi, University of Bergen About this image ▸ Compressed metaphorical compounds — typically of two elements — that are the central poetic device of skaldic verse. Whale-road for the sea, swan-road for the same, dragon's bed for gold, wolf-feeder for a warrior, spear-din for battle. Many kennings required a listener familiar with Norse mythology to decode: Sif's hair for gold (because the gods cut off Thor's wife's hair and replaced it with strands of gold), Odin's wife's burden for the earth. The skalds layered kennings into stanzas of remarkable density; the surviving skaldic corpus is one of the most technically intricate bodies of poetry in any European tradition. — the sea is the road of the sea-kings, gold is the dragon’s bed, a man who kills in battle reddens the wolf’s jaws and feeds the raven. A warrior hearing such a verse in his chieftain’s hall hears, folded inside the imagery, the names of his uncles and his neighbors who have died in particular fights. Being named in a skald’s verse is the nearest thing the pre-Christian Norse have to immortality, and it is the reward the whole system is built around.

The bonds inside this world are as strong as the death-cult that shaped them. A chieftain’s hird Hird × Eilif Peterssen, illustration for Magnus Blindes og Harald Gilles saga, Heimskringla (J.M. Stenersen & Co, 1899 edition) About this image ▸ Old Norse hirð — the personal armed retinue of a king or jarl, the household warriors who lived at the king's hall, ate at his table, and fought as his core force in war. The size and quality of a king's hird was a direct measure of his political power. The Norwegian hird formalised across the medieval period; by the thirteenth century it had acquired continental-style subdivisions (kertilsveinr squires, hirðmenn men-at-arms, skutilsveinr knights). The Old English cognate húscarl enters English as housecarl. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world , his sworn warband, swears oaths to the chieftain’s death and sometimes beyond it — to die beside their lord rather than survive him. The warband eats at his table, sleeps in his hall through the winter, and rows his ship in the summer. The men who come ashore at Lindisfarne in 793 carry that worldview with them. They have been sworn to a chieftain, paid in silver and the prospect of remembrance, and they have no reason to fear an unarmed Anglo-Saxon monk who could not hurt them and whose god, in their understanding, would not save him.

The longship

What makes the raids possible is the ship.

The longship that puts to sea in the late eighth century is the end product of more than two thousand years of experimentation along the Scandinavian coast. The version that reaches Lindisfarne has crossed a technological threshold: a true keel deep enough to brace a mast, a square sail capable of driving the ship under wind power, and a clinker-built hull strong enough to take the open Atlantic and light enough to be portaged between rivers and beached on a tidal flat without breaking apart. A typical longship carries thirty to sixty men with their gear. Under favorable conditions it can cross from the western Norwegian coast to the English shore in three to four days.

A longship has no cabin and no deck to crawl beneath. A man crossing open water lives the whole passage in the open — perched on his sea-chest at the oar, or lying between the benches in a greased leather bag that keeps out some of the wet and none of the cold. The freeboard is low. The sea comes aboard with every swell, and someone is always bailing. There is no fire, which means no hot food and no drying out; a man who is wet on the second morning stays wet until landfall. He sleeps in snatches. He steers by things he has memorized — the height of the midday sun, the run of the swell, the shape of a coastline learned from a father who learned it from his — because there is no chart, no compass, no instrument of any kind aboard. For three or four days the only fixed thing in the world is the hull and the men bailing along its length, and everything the voyage depends on rides in the bilge under their feet.

No defensive system in late-eighth-century Europe has been built to expect a fast amphibious force coming out of the sea. Monasteries in particular — wealthy, coastal, prohibited by their own rule from keeping armed guards — are undefended targets. The whole shape of European Christian wealth in the late eighth century is, from a Norse perspective, an inventory of bullion stored in lightly-defended waterfront buildings at the edge of the sea. The longship simply makes that inventory accessible.

The reach — west and south

After Lindisfarne the longships come back. The next summer, and the summer after that, and the summer after that — sometimes the same chieftain and the same men, sometimes a new chieftain who has heard about the take and built a warband around the rumor of it. A summer in open water can bring back silver enough to feed a household for a year and glory enough to put a man’s name in a skald’s verse for the rest of his life. Nothing in Christian Europe is built to stop it.

On Iona Iona × L.A. Maclean (artist) / Allan & Ferguson (printers), Cathedral of Iona, lithograph, c. 1835–1875 — British Museum About this image ▸ Small island in the Inner Hebrides off the western coast of Scotland. Site of the monastery founded by the Irish saint Columba (Colum Cille) in 563, the most important religious centre in early-medieval Gaelic Christendom and the source of much of the missionary Christianisation of northern Britain. Repeatedly raided by Norse fleets across the late eighth and ninth centuries; in 806 a single attack killed sixty-eight monks. The community eventually retreated to Kells in Ireland, taking the Book of Kells with it. in the Hebrides Hebrides × J. M. W. Turner, Staffa, Fingal's Cave (1831–32), Yale Center for British Art About this image ▸ Archipelago of more than five hundred islands off the western coast of Scotland, divided into the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Settled by Celts and later substantially colonised by Norse from the late eighth century onward; the islands were under Norwegian sovereignty from c. 900 until the Treaty of Perth (1266) transferred them to the Scottish crown. Norse place-names persist densely across the islands today. the monks learn to watch the sea. They are raided once, and again, and again, knowing each time exactly what is coming and knowing too that their own rule forbids them the weapons to answer. In 806 sixty-eight of them die in a single morning. Eleven years of warning have bought them nothing.

Further south the same arithmetic runs on a larger scale. By 845 a Norse fleet has pushed up the Seine to Paris Paris × Jean-Victor Schnetz, Le comte Eudes défend Paris contre les Normands (1837), Galerie des Batailles, Versailles About this image ▸ Capital of medieval West Frankia and modern France, on the Seine. By the mid-ninth century already the chief commercial and ecclesiastical centre of the Frankish realm. Norse fleets ascended the Seine and besieged the city repeatedly across the ninth century — in 845 a fleet under the chieftain Ragnar (saga's Ragnar Lothbrok) extorted a payment of seven thousand pounds of silver, and in 885–886 a much larger fleet of perhaps seven hundred ships sat before the city for the better part of a year before the Emperor Charles the Fat paid them to move on. , and the Frankish king buys it off with seven thousand pounds of silver — the first of the ransoms the kings of Frankia (modern-day France) will keep paying, because paying is cheaper than fighting and never works for long. Forty years on, the fleets no longer leave for silver. In 885 some seven hundred ships come up the river and sit before the city for the better part of a year. Paris holds, barely. The emperor arrives. He pays them to go too.

The longships go south until there is no obvious south left. A fleet sacks Seville Seville × Frans Hogenberg after Joris Hoefnagel (pub. Georg Braun), Sevilla / Hispalis, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1593), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam About this image ▸ City on the Guadalquivir River in southwestern Spain. Under Andalusian Muslim rule in the mid-ninth century (al-Andalus, under the Umayyad emirate of Córdoba). A Norse fleet that had rounded the Iberian peninsula sacked the city in 844; the response — the emir Abd al-Rahman II's cavalry caught and destroyed much of the fleet before it could escape down the river — was one of the few decisive defeats inflicted on a Norse force in the field during the early Viking Age. Also discussed in The Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you think in 844 and is caught and cut to pieces by the emir’s cavalry before it can get clear. Another rounds Gibraltar Gibraltar × Gabriel Bodenehr, Bay of Gibraltar (c. 1704) About this image ▸ The narrow strait between the southern tip of Spain and Morocco connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, about thirteen kilometres at its narrowest. The Norse fleet that had ravaged the Atlantic coast of Iberia in 859–862 passed through Gibraltar in both directions, raiding into the western Mediterranean and harrying the Moroccan and southern French coasts before returning north — the deepest reach south of any Viking-Age expedition. Also discussed in The Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land to burn a trading town on the Moroccan coast. And in 860 a fleet comes out of the eastern rivers and appears, without warning, beneath the walls of Constantinople Constantinople × Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Map of Constantinople from the Liber Insularum Archipelagi (before 1430), Bibliothèque nationale de France About this image ▸ Capital of the Eastern Roman (later Byzantine) Empire, on the Bosphorus where the Black Sea meets the Mediterranean. Founded by the Roman emperor Constantine in 324 CE on the site of the older Greek colony of Byzantion and dedicated as the city of Constantinople on 11 May 330. Capital of the Eastern empire from 395 until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453; officially renamed Istanbul under the Turkish Republic in 1930. The Gothic historian Jordanes wrote the Getica, the first written account of the Norwegian petty-kingdom world, while working in the city in 551 CE. Norse mercenaries (the Varangians) later served there as the Byzantine emperor's elite imperial guard. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land (modern-day Istanbul, in Turkey), the richest city in the Christian world. The city does not know what it is looking at. The men whose trade is named víkingr at home have reached the greatest city on earth, and arrived as strangers without a name.

Silver from the east

The eastern Norse live in a different world from the men who raid Lindisfarne. They travel by river — the Volga Volga × Isaac Levitan, Volga (1889), House-Museum of Isaac Levitan, Plyos About this image ▸ The longest river in Europe, about three thousand five hundred and thirty kilometres, rising in the Valdai Hills northwest of Moscow and flowing south through the Russian heartland to the Caspian Sea. The Volga was one of the two great north-south river routes (with the Dnieper) that the eastern Norse used to move silver, slaves, furs, and amber between the Baltic and the Islamic markets of the Caspian and Black Sea trade. and the Dnieper Dnieper × Arkhip Kuindzhi, Moonlit Night on the Dnieper (1880), State Russian Museum, St Petersburg About this image ▸ The fourth-longest river in Europe, about two thousand two hundred kilometres, rising in western Russia and flowing south through Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea. Together with the Volga it formed the principal north-south river system through which the eastern Norse moved goods, mercenaries, and silver between the Baltic and the Byzantine south. The trading towns of Kievan Rus — Smolensk, Kiev, and the Black Sea outlets — were strung along the Dnieper route. — through Slavic country to the Black Sea Black Sea × Ivan Aivazovsky, The Black Sea (1881), Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow About this image ▸ Large inland sea bordered by modern Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia, connected to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The southern outlet of the Dnieper river-route the eastern Norse (Rūs) used to reach Constantinople and the Byzantine markets. From the perspective of a ninth-century Norseman, the Black Sea was the southernmost reach of the river trade that ran two thousand kilometres up from Novgorod and Staraja Ladoga in the north. and the Caspian Caspian Sea × Taras Shevchenko, The Caspian Sea (c. 1850s), National Museum in Warsaw About this image ▸ The world's largest inland body of water, bordered today by Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan. The southern outlet of the Volga river-route and the body of water through which the eastern Norse reached the Islamic markets of Persia and the Abbasid Caliphate. The silver that paid the Norse warbands and built the chieftains' halls of Scandinavia — minted at Baghdad, Samarkand, and the other Abbasid centres — moved north through the Caspian and up the Volga. , and the men they meet on the way are Pechenegs Pechenegs × Unknown miniaturist, Madrid Skylitzes (Skyllitzes Matritensis), fol. 173r, Biblioteca Nacional de España About this image ▸ Turkic semi-nomadic people who dominated the Pontic-Caspian steppe (the grasslands north of the Black Sea) from the late ninth century through the mid-eleventh. The Pechenegs controlled the rapids of the lower Dnieper through which the Norse Rūs traders had to pass on their way to the Black Sea and Constantinople — Byzantine and Norse accounts both record the Pecheneg ambushes that made the river-passage one of the most dangerous parts of the eastern trade route. Defeated and dispersed by the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos at the Battle of Levounion in 1091. and Khazars Khazars × Briangotts, map of the Khazar Khaganate, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 About this image ▸ Turkic people who ruled a major steppe empire across the lower Volga, Caucasus, and northern Caspian region from the seventh century until their effective destruction by the Kievan Rus prince Sviatoslav in the 960s. The Khazars controlled the southern Volga trade and were a principal intermediary between the Norse Rūs traders of the north and the Islamic world of the Caspian and Persia. Unusually for a medieval polity, the Khazar ruling elite converted to Judaism in the eighth or ninth century — a fact attested in both Arabic and Hebrew sources. and Bulgars Bulgars × Madrid Skylitzes, fol. 35r detail (c. 1150s), Biblioteca Nacional de España About this image ▸ Turkic semi-nomadic peoples in the medieval Volga and Black Sea regions. The Volga Bulgars established a state along the middle Volga in the seventh century and converted to Islam in the early tenth — Ibn Fadlan's famous early-tenth-century account of the Rūs Norse on the Volga was written during a Bulgar diplomatic mission. A separate Bulgar group migrated into the Balkans in the seventh century and founded the First Bulgarian Empire south of the Danube, gradually adopting Slavic language and Eastern Christian religion. and Arabs rather than Christian monks. The economy that pays them is silver. Dirhams minted in the Abbasid Caliphate Abbasid Caliphate × Gertrude Bell, Great Mosque of Samarra and the Malwiya minaret (1909), Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University About this image ▸ Islamic empire ruling much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia from 750 (when the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads) through 1258 (when the Mongols sacked Baghdad). At its height in the ninth century the Abbasid empire was the wealthiest and most culturally productive state in the medieval world — the centre of the Islamic Golden Age. The Abbasid economy minted the silver dirhams that flowed north through the Volga-Caspian Norse trade route and bankrolled, indirectly, much of the Viking Age in Scandinavia. at Baghdad Baghdad × A. Parsons (drawing) / T. Medland (engraving), View of Bagdad or the Persian side of the Tigris (1808) About this image ▸ Capital of the Abbasid Caliphate from its founding by the caliph al-Mansur in 762. By the ninth century the largest city in the Islamic world and one of the wealthiest in the medieval world, centre of the Islamic Golden Age and the most prolific minter of silver dirhams. Vast quantities of those dirhams flowed north from Baghdad through the Caspian-Volga trade and into the silver hoards of Viking-Age Scandinavia, where they are recovered today by the tens of thousands. (modern-day Iraq) and Samarkand Samarkand × Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, Bibi-Khanym Mosque, Samarkand (1907), U.S. Library of Congress About this image ▸ Ancient city on the Silk Road in modern Uzbekistan, in the late ninth and tenth centuries one of the principal eastern minting centres of the Abbasid and Samanid silver economies. Silver dirhams minted at Samarkand and the other Transoxanian mints made up a substantial share of the bullion that flowed north through the Volga-Caspian Norse trade route and ended in the Viking-Age hoards of Scandinavia. (modern-day Uzbekistan) flow north up the rivers through Norse-controlled trading towns at Staraja Ladoga Staraja Ladoga × Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, Rurik fortress and the Church of St George, Staraya Ladoga (1909), Library of Congress About this image ▸ Trading town on the Volkhov River south of Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia, founded by Norse traders around 750 — one of the very earliest Norse settlements on the eastern river-routes and a key transit point on the Volga trade. Modern Russian historiography treats Staraja Ladoga as one of the founding settlements of the Russian state. The site preserves substantial Norse archaeological material from the ninth century. and Novgorod Novgorod × Apollinary Vasnetsov, Medieval Novgorod in Winter (1909) About this image ▸ City on the Volkhov River in northwestern Russia, traditionally founded by the Norse Rūs warlord Rurik around 862 as part of the Varangian river-trade network. With Kiev to the south, one of the two principal centres of the Kievan Rus state that emerged from the Norse trading towns. The chronicle tradition that traces the Russian state to a Norse founding (the "Varangian thesis") is contested in modern Russian historiography but supported by both archaeology and the linguistic record. Also discussed in The King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristThe Germans Who "Ruled" Bergen — the Hanseatic merchants on Bryggen Wharf (in modern-day northwestern Russia), into the Baltic, and from there into the silver hoards now recovered in their tens of thousands across Scandinavia. The bullion that pays the warbands and builds the chieftains’ halls comes roughly half from looting Christian Europe and half from trading with Islamic Asia, with slaves moving in both directions as a principal commodity.

The Norse in the east are the Rūs, and over generations the name attaches not to the traders but to the country forming around them. The first Russian state grows out of these trading towns. By the time the Norse mercenaries are filling the Byzantine emperor’s bodyguard, the people the West thinks of as raiders have founded a country.

The settlements

The same ship technology that takes the Norse south and east takes them west into open ocean. What they find there they do not loot. They settle.

The crossing to Iceland in the 870s is the first of a kind of human migration that had not been done before in the Atlantic. The settlers come in open longships, with families and cattle and seed-grain and tools loaded on top of the rowing benches, on a passage of more than a thousand kilometers across waters where no land is in sight for days at a time. They arrive on a treeless island of glacier and lava and find unclaimed land. By the close of the settlement period some sixty years later, the country has a population of perhaps twenty to thirty thousand and an annual assembly, the Alþing Alþing × W. G. Collingwood, The Althing in session (c. 1897), The Trustees of the British Museum About this image ▸ The annual open-air assembly of the Icelandic Commonwealth, founded at Þingvellir in 930 CE by the descendants of the Norwegian chieftains who had emigrated rather than submit to Harald Fairhair's consolidation. The Alþing met for two weeks each summer, conducted Iceland's legal business, and operated without a king for over three centuries — the longest-running stateless polity in medieval Europe. Reconstituted in 1845 as a consultative body and given legislative powers in 1874 with Iceland's first constitution. The modern Icelandic parliament still bears the name Alþingi and is the oldest continuously named parliament in the world. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world , which first meets at Þingvellir Þingvellir × Thorarinn B. Thorlaksson, Thingvellir (1900) About this image ▸ The plain of the thing — the open-air assembly site about forty kilometres northeast of Reykjavík where the Icelandic Alþing was founded in 930 CE. Iceland's law-speakers, free farmers, and chieftains met here annually for two weeks of legal proceedings, dispute resolution, and announcements of new law. The site sits on the geological rift where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart. Now Þingvellir National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world in the summer of 930.

Greenland is harder. A man named Erik the Red Erik the Red × Eiríkur rauði, woodcut frontispiece from Arngrímur Jónsson’s Gronlandia (1688), Fiske Icelandic Collection, Cornell University About this image ▸ Norse explorer and settler (c. 950–c. 1003), born in Rogaland in Norway and exiled from Iceland for killings in a feud. During his three-year banishment in the early 980s he explored the western coast of Greenland; he returned to Iceland and led a colonising expedition of perhaps twenty-five ships in 985, of which fourteen reached Greenland. Founded the Eastern Settlement at Brattahlíð on the southwestern Greenlandic coast. Father of Leif Erikson. , outlawed from Iceland for a feud killing, spends his outlaw years exploring the western coast of a great island he names brightly to attract settlers — brightly is required, because the land is marginal at the edge of glacial ice and only the southwestern fjords can sustain agriculture at all. The colony he founds in 985 survives, in steadily diminishing numbers, for more than four centuries before the cold finishes it.

Erik’s son Leif Leif Erikson × Christian Krohg, Leiv Eirikson discovering America (1893), National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (NG.M.00558) About this image ▸ Norse explorer (c. 970–c. 1020), son of Erik the Red. Around the year 1000 led an expedition west from Greenland that reached the eastern coast of North America, which he named Vinland for the wild grapes reportedly found there. The brief Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland — the only confirmed pre-Columbian European presence in the Americas — is associated with Leif and his expeditions in saga tradition and archaeology. Returned to Greenland and succeeded his father at Brattahlíð. sails farther west around the year 1000 and reaches a place he calls Vinland Vinland × Sigurd Stefánsson (attrib.), Skálholt Map (1570), surviving copy About this image ▸ The Norse name for parts of the North American Atlantic coast reached by Leif Erikson's expedition around 1000 CE and a handful of follow-up voyages from Greenland. "Vinland" probably means "wine-land" (from vín, wine), a reference to the wild grapes the Norse reportedly found there. The exact extent is debated; the confirmed archaeological evidence at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only undisputed Norse settlement, but scattered Norse artefacts have been found further south along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. , the wine-land, where the climate is mild enough to grow grapes. He overwinters, builds a base camp, and returns to Greenland. The colonizing expeditions that follow — most notably that of Thorfinn Karlsefni a decade later — attempt a lasting settlement and abandon it within a few years. The land is inhabited by people the Norse cannot defeat through superior technology, and the supply line back to Greenland is too long for a contested colony to hold. A site at L’Anse aux Meadows L'Anse aux Meadows × D. Gordon E. Robertson, reconstructed Norse longhouse, L'Anse aux Meadows (2010), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 About this image ▸ Archaeological site at the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada, excavated in the 1960s by the Norwegian husband-and-wife team Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. Eight Norse-style sod buildings, iron- smithing remains, and a small collection of Norse artefacts confirm a short-lived occupation around the year 1000 CE — the only pre-Columbian European presence in the Americas confirmed by archaeology, almost certainly associated with the Vinland voyages led by Leif Erikson from the Greenland colony. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site. on the northern tip of Newfoundland Newfoundland × After Sebastiano Caboto, Sebastian Cabot's Map (1544), reproduced in Bryant & Gay, A Popular History of the United States (New York, 1876) About this image ▸ Large island off the eastern coast of Canada at the mouth of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence; together with Labrador it forms the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The northern tip of the island, at L'Anse aux Meadows, preserves the only confirmed pre-Columbian European archaeological site in the Americas — a brief Norse settlement of around 1000 CE associated with Leif Erikson's Vinland voyages from Greenland. (in modern-day Canada) preserves a brief Norse occupation of a few years — the only pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas yet found.

What the Norse achieve across this hundred and thirty years has no parallel for a population that size. A community not much larger than a midsize modern town sustains, simultaneously, a raiding economy reaching the Iberian Atlantic, a trading network running from Baghdad to Dublin, a settler colony in Iceland, a marginal farming community at the edge of the Greenland ice, and the only known European presence in the Americas before Columbus. The longships themselves are the supply line. When a raid or a settlement fails, no rescue is coming.

The end of the era

The Viking Age ends, for practical purposes, on a hot September day at a small river crossing in Yorkshire.

The man at the head of the last great Norse invasion of England is Harald Hardrada Harald Hardrada × Lars Utne, Harald Hardrada monument, Harald Hårdrådes plass, Oslo (unveiled 1905); photo: GAD (CC BY-SA 3.0) About this image ▸ King of Norway 1046–1066, bynamed Hardráði ("the hard counsel" or "stern ruler"); half-brother of Olav Haraldsson (Saint Olav). Spent ten years of his thirties as a commander in the Varangian Guard at Constantinople, fighting in Sicily, North Africa, and the Holy Land before returning north to claim the Norwegian throne. In 1066 he invaded England to press a contested claim to the English throne, defeated an English force at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed five days later at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire — by saga tradition, by an arrow through the throat. His death is the conventional close of the Viking Age. — “the hard counsel” — fifty-one years old, half-brother of Saint Olav Saint Olav × Saint Olav from Austevoll church (c. 1450), University Museum of Bergen; photo Wolfmann, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 About this image ▸ Olav Haraldsson, king of Norway 1015–1028, killed at the Battle of Stiklestad on 29 July 1030 and canonized one year and five days later by his English bishop Grimkell. Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae — the Eternal King of Norway. His shrine at Nidaros became the northernmost pilgrimage destination in medieval Christendom and the binding narrative of a converted country. The Norwegian Lion on the modern coat of arms — a golden lion bearing a golden axe on a red shield — is Saint Olav's iconography. On the trip The Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters) visit Nidaros Cathedral on Tuesday 28 July 2026 — the day before the 996th anniversary of the Battle of Stiklestad. The Olafskrinet was broken up at the 1537 Reformation and the body buried somewhere inside the cathedral in a spot no medieval source preserved. The building is what the nine-and-a-half centuries of devotion built. The pilgrim road, the Pilegrimsleden, runs past the cathedral's south door — the same door the medieval pilgrims walked through. Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim Also discussed in The King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristWorshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian NorwayA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churchesThe Reformation, 1537 — one church eradicated and another imposedLutheran Norway and Pietism — a farmer named Hans Nielsen Hauge and a lay revival that could not be silencedThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy LandThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe Quiet Revolution — how Norway won its independence without a warWorld War II — the King’s “No” and the Nazis in Norway , a soldier for nearly forty years. He had spent a decade in his twenties as a Varangian commander in the service of the Byzantine emperors, fighting in Sicily Sicily × Martinus Rørbye, Palermo Harbor with a View of Monte Pellegrino (1840), Los Angeles County Museum of Art About this image ▸ The largest island in the Mediterranean, off the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. In the early eleventh century divided politically between Byzantine holdings and the Muslim Kalbid emirate (under nominal Fatimid suzerainty), fragmenting into local fiefdoms; from 1061 conquered piecemeal by Norman adventurers, themselves descended from the Norse settlers of Normandy. Harald Hardrada fought as a Varangian commander in Byzantine campaigns against the Sicilian Muslims in the late 1030s, before the Norman conquest began. Also discussed in The Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land and North Africa and the Holy Land Holy Land × Hartmann Schedel, Hierosolima woodcut, Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) About this image ▸ Medieval Christian and Muslim term for the region of Palestine — the area in which the events of the Old and New Testaments are set, centred on Jerusalem. In the early eleventh century under Fatimid Caliphate rule, with a Christian population that retained pilgrim access to Jerusalem and the other holy sites. Harald Hardrada served there as a Varangian commander in Byzantine campaigns of the late 1030s, possibly reaching Jerusalem as a pilgrim. The Crusader conquest of Jerusalem followed in 1099. Also discussed in The Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land before returning to claim the Norwegian throne in 1046. In 1066 he claims the English throne as well, on the basis of a contested succession pact made nearly thirty years before, which he inherited from his predecessor Magnus. He lands his army in Yorkshire (modern-day northern England) in mid-September. He wins a battle on the twentieth. Five days later, at a small river crossing called Stamford Bridge Stamford Bridge × Matthew Paris, The Battle of Stamford Bridge, from The Life of King Edward the Confessor (13th c.), Cambridge University Library MS Ee.3.59 About this image ▸ Village in East Yorkshire about twelve kilometres east of York, on the River Derwent. Site of the battle on 25 September 1066 in which the English king Harold Godwinson defeated and killed the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada and the rebel English earl Tostig Godwinson, ending the last serious Norse invasion of England. Harold's exhausted army then marched back south and was destroyed by William the Conqueror at Hastings three weeks later. , an English army Battle of Stamford Bridge × Peter Nicolai Arbo, Battle of Stamford Bridge (1870), Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø About this image ▸ Battle fought on 25 September 1066 at Stamford Bridge in East Yorkshire between an English army under King Harold Godwinson and a Norse invading force under King Harald Hardrada of Norway. The English won decisively; Hardrada was killed, along with most of his army. Conventionally treated as the end of the Viking Age in English historiography. Harold Godwinson then marched his exhausted army south to meet William the Conqueror, who landed at Pevensey three days later — Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. under King Harold Godwinson Harold Godwinson × Silver penny of Harold II, obverse (1066), York Museums Trust, YORYM 2000.1348 About this image ▸ The last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England, reigning January–October 1066. Crowned the day after the death of Edward the Confessor; defeated Harald Hardrada's Norse invasion at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on 25 September 1066; marched his army south to the Channel coast; and was killed on 14 October at the Battle of Hastings against William the Conqueror — reputedly by an arrow through the eye, though the Bayeux Tapestry's depiction is debated. His death ends the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. appears on the road from the south, having marched on foot from London in a campaign no one had thought logistically possible.

The Norse are caught in the September heat with most of their chainmail back in the ships. A single warrior is remembered for holding the bridge with an axe long enough for his comrades to form a shield-wall on the far bank, killing every Englishman who came onto the planks, until an English soldier rowed underneath and stabbed upward through the timber. The shield-wall holds for a while. It does not hold long enough.

The sagas say Hardrada is killed by an arrow through the throat.

In the sagas’ telling, as the armies form up a rider comes out from the English line under flag of truce, and when the question is put — how much of England will Harold Godwinson grant the Norwegian king? — the answer comes back: seven feet of ground, or as much more as he is taller than other men. Hardrada chooses the fight.

Less than three weeks later, on the fourteenth of October, the same Harold Godwinson is killed at Hastings Battle of Hastings × Bayeux Tapestry, Scene 57 (c. 1070s), Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux; photograph by Wikimedia contributor Myrabella About this image ▸ Battle fought on 14 October 1066 between an English army under King Harold Godwinson and an invading Norman force under William the Conqueror, on Senlac Hill about ten kilometres north of the town of Hastings in East Sussex. The Normans — themselves descended from the Norse settlers Charles the Simple had granted Normandy in 911 — won decisively; Harold was killed (the Bayeux Tapestry shows him reputedly struck through the eye by an arrow). The Norman Conquest that followed put a Norse-descended dynasty on the English throne, closing the long arc of the Viking Age. by William the Conqueror William the Conqueror × Louis Rochet, equestrian monument to William the Conqueror (1851), Falaise, Calvados. Photograph by Man vyi About this image ▸ Duke of Normandy from 1035 and King of England from 1066, born c. 1028, died 1087. Direct descendant (great-great-great-grandson) of the Norse warrior Rollo who had taken Normandy in 911. Defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066 and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. The Norman Conquest reorganised English landholding, replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with a Norman one, and transformed the English language through three centuries of French-speaking ruling-class influence. — whose Norman ancestors are themselves descended from the Norse settlers who took the lower Seine valley a century and a half before. The English kingdom changes hands. The kind of campaign Hardrada had just attempted is never tried again at scale. The Norse age ends not with a formal close but with a fifty-one-year-old half-brother of a saint, offered seven feet of English ground and choosing the fight.

What survives in Norway

The most tangible traces of the Viking Age in modern Norway are concentrated in three places.

The Museum of the Viking Age Museum of the Viking Age × Mittet & Co. (photographer), Vikingskiphuset, Bygdøy (before 1957), National Library of Norway About this image ▸ The University of Oslo's museum on the Bygdøy peninsula in Oslo that holds the Oseberg, Gokstad, and Tune Viking-Age ships — the three most complete Viking longships ever recovered — along with the grave goods buried with them and other Viking-Age material. Originally opened in 1926 as the Viking Ship House; closed for major rebuild from 2021 with reopening planned for 2027. While closed, the VÍKINGR exhibition at the Historical Museum in central Oslo holds Viking-Age material from the collections. On the trip The Museum of the Viking Age on Bygdøy is closed for rebuild through the family's July 2026 trip; the VÍKINGR exhibition at the Historical Museum in central Oslo holds Viking-Age material in its place. Museum of the Viking Age, Bygdøy on the Bygdøy Bygdøy × Aasta Hansteen, Oscarshall on Bygdøy (1854) About this image ▸ Peninsula at the western edge of the Oslo Fjord, immediately west of central Oslo. Mostly green parkland, royal residences, and museums — including the Museum of the Viking Age (closed for rebuild, reopening planned 2027), the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, the Fram Museum (Polar exploration), the Kon-Tiki Museum, and the Norwegian Maritime Museum. Bygdøy is reached from the city by ferry across the Oslo harbour in summer or by bus. Bygdøy, Oslo peninsula in Oslo holds the three most complete Viking-Age longships ever recovered — the Oseberg, the Gokstad The Gokstad ship × Unknown photographer, excavation of the Gokstad ship at the Gokstad farm, Sandefjord (c. 1880) About this image ▸ Ninth-century Viking longship, built around 890 and excavated in 1880 from a burial mound at the Gokstad farm in Vestfold, Norway. At twenty-four metres long it is larger than the Oseberg ship and was clearly built for ocean voyaging — the keel and hull are optimised for open-water sailing rather than ceremonial display. The ship was the funerary vessel of a high-ranking man who died around 900. Held at the Museum of the Viking Age on Bygdøy, Oslo (closed for rebuild until 2027). , and the Tune The Tune ship × The Tune ship, Viking Ship Museum, Bygdøy, Oslo. Photograph by China Crisis (2006), CC BY-SA 2.5 About this image ▸ Late-ninth-century Viking longship excavated in 1867 from a burial mound at Haugen Farm in Tune (now Sarpsborg), Østfold, Norway — the first major Viking ship ever excavated. Substantially less complete than the later Oseberg and Gokstad finds; the surviving hull is partially restored. The vessel was a seagoing ship of about twenty metres in length. Held at the Museum of the Viking Age on Bygdøy, Oslo (closed for rebuild until 2027). ships, preserved in the heavy blue clay of burial mounds around the Oslofjord — the Oseberg and Gokstad in Vestfold, the Tune across the fjord in Østfold. The Oseberg is the richest. It was buried in the autumn of 834 with two very high-ranking women, one in her seventies and one perhaps in her fifties, along with horses and dogs and an ox, a four-wheeled wooden cart carved with animal-head terminals, ornamented sledges, the most elaborate textiles of any Viking-age burial, and a small wooden bucket of red apples preserved by the clay. The ship that carried them was built to sail, and it was buried with everything they would need for the world they were going to. (The museum is closed for rebuild until 2027; the VÍKINGR exhibition at the Historical Museum Historical Museum (Oslo) × Wolfmann, Viking-Age swords in the VÍKINGR exhibition, Historical Museum, Oslo (2020), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 About this image ▸ The University of Oslo's archaeological and ethnographic museum in central Oslo, near the Royal Palace. Houses Norway's principal collection of pre-Reformation artefacts, including medieval altarpieces from the country's wooden churches and the rotating VÍKINGR exhibition of Viking-Age material — particularly important while the Museum of the Viking Age on Bygdøy is closed for rebuild. Historical Museum, central Oslo Also discussed in Worshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian Norway in central Oslo holds Viking material in the meantime.)

The Sverd i fjell Sverd i fjell × Photo: TomasEE (2013), Sverd i fjell, Hafrsfjord — CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons About this image ▸ Norwegian for "swords in mountain" — a 1983 sculpture by Fritz Røed on the eastern shore of Hafrsfjord near Stavanger, marking the traditional site of Harald Fairhair's consolidating sea-battle. Three giant bronze swords, each about ten metres tall, are driven point-down into the bedrock; one represents Harald, the other two represent the defeated petty kings. The monument commemorates both the battle itself and the country's unification under a single crown. One of Stavanger's principal landmarks. Sverd i fjell, Hafrsfjord Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world monument — “Swords in Stone” — on the southern shore of Hafrsfjord Hafrsfjord × Anders Beer Wilse, Hafrsfjord (1934), Galleri Nor / Norsk Folkemuseum About this image ▸ Shallow fjord at the southwestern edge of present-day Stavanger, in Rogaland. Saga tradition places the sea-battle that completed Harald Fairhair's consolidation of the western Norwegian coast in this fjord — traditionally dated 872 (a nineteenth-century back-calculation from Snorri's chronology) but placed by modern scholarship in the 880s. The traditional battle site is marked by the Sverd i fjell monument, three giant bronze swords driven into bedrock on the eastern shore. Hafrsfjord, Stavanger Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world near Stavanger Stavanger × Knud Knudsen, Stavanger (1888-1894), National Library of Norway About this image ▸ City on the southwestern Norwegian coast in Rogaland; modern Norway's fourth-largest city and the operational capital of the Norwegian petroleum economy since the 1970s. The traditional site of the sea-battle of Hafrsfjord that completed Harald Fairhair's consolidation lies at the city's southwestern edge, marked by the Sverd i fjell monument. The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, the safety regulator (Havtil), and Equinor (formerly Statoil) are all headquartered in or around the city. Population around one hundred and forty thousand in the municipality; metropolitan area roughly twice that. Stavanger Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churchesThe 400-Year Night — when the Northern Lion lay dormantThe 'Lucky Country' — the discovery that changed everything800,000 Norwegians Leave — the century that built a Second NorwayWorld War II — the King’s “No” and the Nazis in Norway marks the traditional site of Harald Fairhair Harald Fairhair × Flateyjarbók illumination, Harald Fairhair receives the kingdom (c. 1387–1394), Árni Magnússon Institute About this image ▸ Traditionally remembered as the first king of a unified Norway, reigning ca. 872 to ca. 933. Inherited the small kingdom of Vestfold at ten on the death of his father Halfdan the Black; over two decades subdued the petty kingdoms of the western coast, climaxing at the sea-battle of Hafrsfjord. His court poet's Haraldskvæði calls him lúfa ("shock-head"); Hárfagri ("Fairhair") appears in verse of debated authenticity attributed to his skalds, and is first securely attested in twelfth-century prose (Íslendingabók). The famous oath not to cut his hair until he had subjected every petty king is later saga construction. His actual authority stopped short of the Arctic north and the inland mountains, but he established the durable idea of a single Norwegian crown. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldThe Long Fall — the sudden loss of Norwegian nobility, the end of the kings, and half of Norway gone foreverThe Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you think ’s decisive sea-battle Battle of Hafrsfjord × Ole Peter Hansen Balling, Harald Fairhair in the Battle of Hafrsfjord (1870), Nasjonalmuseet, NG.M.03750 About this image ▸ The sea-battle in the Hafrsfjord near present-day Stavanger that saga tradition treats as the climactic engagement of Harald Fairhair's consolidation of the western Norwegian coast. The traditional date of 872 is a nineteenth-century back-calculation from Snorri's chronology; modern Norwegian scholarship places the battle in the 880s. Harald's coalition defeated an alliance of the petty kings of the western coast who had combined against him. The traditional site is marked by the Sverd i fjell monument — three giant bronze swords driven into the bedrock — on the eastern shore of the fjord. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the world . Three enormous bronze swords stand driven hilts-up into the bedrock at the water’s edge. The image is the argument: weapons struck into stone that can never be drawn against each other again.

The reconstructed chieftain’s hall at Borg Borg (Lofoten) × Photo: Jon Olav Eikenes (2009), CC BY 2.0 About this image ▸ Archaeological site on the island of Vestvågøy in the Lofoten archipelago, above the Arctic Circle. Excavations in the 1980s uncovered the foundations of a Viking-Age chieftain's longhouse eighty-three metres in length — the largest known Viking-Age building anywhere in Scandinavia. The hall has been reconstructed on its original footprint as part of the Lofotr Viking Museum, which presents the daily life of a chieftain's household at the northern edge of the Viking world. Borg, Lofoten on the Lofoten Lofoten × Gunnar Berg, Vinter i Lofoten (before 1893), via Wikimedia Commons About this image ▸ Archipelago in Nordland County in northern Norway, lying north of the Arctic Circle and stretching about a hundred and seventy kilometres off the mainland coast. Famous for dramatic peaks rising directly out of the sea, traditional fishing villages built on stilts (rorbuer), and the centuries-old winter cod-fishing industry that supplied the dried-stockfish trade Bergen ran during the Hanseatic era. Site of the reconstructed Viking-Age chieftain's hall at Borg — the largest known Viking-Age building in Scandinavia. Lofoten Islands Also discussed in The Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you thinkThe Germans Who "Ruled" Bergen — the Hanseatic merchants on Bryggen WharfDraugen — the drowned man who never came home islands, above the Arctic Circle, is the largest known Viking-Age building in Scandinavia. The original longhouse — eighty-three meters from end to end, unmatched at any other excavated Norse site — was found beneath the modern farmland and rebuilt on its original footprint. A visitor steps inside and stands in a single room the length of a small street: smoke-blackened oak pillars rising into the dim, the long fire down the middle of the floor, benches running the length of both walls, the chieftain’s high seat at one end. This is where the men slept through the winter, ate at the chieftain’s table, listened to the skald’s verses, drank from the same cups, and swore the oaths they would later die under. The hall was not a barracks. It was a household, in the broadest Norse sense — the place a chieftain’s hird were, in their own understanding, members of his family.

The country that built the longships is gone. The ships, the swords, and the hall are still here.

Sources & further reading

Primary sources

• Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Anglo-Saxon Chronicle × Unknown scribe, the Parker Chronicle (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 173), c. 890s About this image ▸ The principal historical chronicle of Anglo-Saxon and early-Norman England, compiled originally in the late ninth century under King Alfred the Great's patronage and continued by various monastic scribes into the mid-twelfth century. The Chronicle survives in nine manuscripts and fragments (seven wholly in Old English) with overlapping but not identical content. Its annal entries for 789 (the Portland raid) and 793 (the Lindisfarne raid) are the principal written witnesses to the opening of the Viking Age in the British Isles. , annal entries for 789 (Portland) and 793 (Lindisfarne).
• Alcuin of York, letters to King Æthelred of Northumbria and Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne, 793.
• Snorri Sturluson Snorri Sturluson × Christian Krohg, Snorre Sturlason (1899), from Norges Kongesagaer; scan: National Library of Norway About this image ▸ Thirteenth-century Icelandic chieftain, poet, and historian. Composed the Heimskringla and the Prose Edda in the 1220s from oral tradition and skaldic verse — three hundred years after the Viking-age events he describes. The single richest source for Norway's pre-conversion centuries and also the most aware Christian-Icelandic editor of them. Modern scholarship accepts what other sources independently confirm and treats his richest expansions as the work of a poet writing about a kingdom he had never seen. Assassinated at Reykholt on 23 September 1241 by agents of King Hákon IV after a falling-out at court. Also discussed in Before There Was Norway — petty kingdoms at the edge of the worldWorshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian NorwayThe King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churchesThe Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you thinkThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy LandNordisk Mytologi — Odin, the giants, and Ragnarok , Heimskringla Heimskringla × Kringlublaðið (the Kringla leaf), Lbs fragm 82, c. 1260 — National and University Library of Iceland About this image ▸ Snorri Sturluson's prose history of the kings of Norway, composed in the 1220s. Sixteen sagas running from the semi-mythical Yngling line through to the late twelfth century. The single most extensive medieval source for Norway's Viking and Christianization centuries — trusted on the broad shape of political history, questioned in the literary expansions, and written by a Christian Icelander three hundred years after the events. Also discussed in Worshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian NorwayThe King Who Became a Saint — how the Nordmen came to ChristA Catholic Norway — the faith that gave the kingdom its first institutions and the stave churchesThe Golden Age — a North Atlantic empire … reaching farther than you thinkThe Crusades?!!!! — sixty ships from Bergen, bound for the Holy Land (c. 1230), especially the sagas of Harald Fairhair, Olav Haraldsson, and Harald Hardrada.

Modern scholarship

• Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020). The leading recent synthesis, particularly strong on worldview, gender, and the slave economy.
• Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton University Press, 2014). The standard modern English-language synthesis.
• Knut Helle, ed., The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume 1: Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Cornell University Press, 1995).
• Ruth Mazo Karras, Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (Yale University Press, 1988).

Reference

• Store norske leksikon (snl.no), entries “Vikingtid,” “Slaget i Hafrsfjord,” “Osebergskipet,” “Slaget ved Stamford Bridge.”

Visit

• Museum of the Viking Age, Bygdøy, Oslo — closed for rebuild until 2027. https://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/museum-of-the-viking-age/
• VÍKINGR exhibition, Historical Museum, central Oslo — substitute Viking-Age display while Bygdøy is closed. https://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/historical-museum/
• Sverd i fjell, Hafrsfjord, Stavanger
• Lofotr Viking Museum Lofotr Viking Museum × Paul Berzinn, reconstructed Viking longhouse, Lofotr Viking Museum, Borg (2008), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 About this image ▸ Open-air museum at Borg on the island of Vestvågøy in the Lofoten archipelago, opened in 1995. Built around the excavated foundations of the largest known Viking-Age building anywhere — an eighty-three- metre chieftain's longhouse — the museum reconstructs the longhouse on its original footprint and presents the daily life of a high-ranking Viking-Age household at the northern edge of the Norse world. Includes a working forge, costumed interpreters, and a reproduction longship. Lofotr Viking Museum, Borg Also discussed in Worshiping Odin and Thor — the lived religion of pre-Christian Norway , Borg, Lofoten — https://www.lofotr.no