The Viking Age: History, Culture, and the Norse World

The Viking Age is conventionally dated from the raid on the English island of Lindisfarne in 793 to the Norwegian defeat at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, an interval of two hundred and seventy-three years during which the peoples of Scandinavia transformed themselves from a scattered fringe of the European world into the founders of kingdoms, duchies, and trading empires from Dublin to Kiev, from Newfoundland to Byzantium. The Vikings of this period were farmers and sailors, shipwrights and smiths, poets and lawmen, and their impact on the lands they touched is one of the great subjects of medieval history. They were also pagans, worshippers of Odin and Thor and Freyja, until the gradual Christianisation of the eleventh and twelfth centuries brought them into the Latin Christian world and made them, eventually, into the ancestors of modern Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland.

This survey traces the history of the Viking Age century by century, the geography of the Norse world, the social structure of Norse society, the legal and political institutions of the Scandinavian kingdoms, the religion of the pre-Christian North and its long process of conversion, the great expeditions of exploration to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, the expansion east along the rivers of Russia to the markets of Byzantium, the runic literacy and the great art styles of the age, the great trading centres of Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang, and Novgorod, and the deep inheritance that the Viking Age has left to the modern world. It is the natural companion to the pages on the Norse gods, the nine worlds, the Norse heroes and sagas, and the runic script in which so much of this history is preserved.

The Long Eighth Century: Prelude to the Viking Age

The Viking Age did not begin in 793. It grew out of a longer process of Scandinavian consolidation, the development of the sailing-ship, the rise of the great trading centres of the Baltic, and the political pressures of the Frankish, Frisian, and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms on the southern fringe of the Norse world. The Vendel period (c. 550–790) of central Sweden had already produced the great princely burials at Vendel and Valsgärde, the magnificent bronze work of the helmets and shields of the era, and a network of trade with the Baltic and the Roman world. The Ladoga culture of north-western Russia, the Petersen type of the early Viking ship, and the ribbed helmet of the period are all in place by the eighth century.

The Kvalsund ship of western Norway, dated to c. 690–700, is one of the earliest Viking-type vessels to survive. The Sutton Hoo ship of c. 625–635, on the English side of the North Sea, is roughly contemporary and is the supreme example of the same general type of vessel, with its steering-oar on the starboard side, its square sail, and its clinker-built hull. The Vendel helmets and the Sutton Hoo helmet show the same visual scheme, the same face-mask and the same protective plates, and they belong to the same general cultural complex.

The commercial revolution of the eighth century, with the rise of the emporia of Dorestad on the Rhine, Quentovic on the English Channel, Hamwic (Southampton) in Wessex, Ipswich in East Anglia, and Lundenwic in London, brought Frisian and Anglo-Saxon goods into the Scandinavian world. The Frankish chronicler of the period notes the increasing Scandinavian activity in the Frisian and English markets, and the Arabic silver of the eighth century, from the mines of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, was already reaching Scandinavia by way of the Volga, the Baltic, and the overland routes through the Slavic world.

By the early eighth century, the Scandinavian kingdoms were taking shape. The Danish kingdom of the Jelling dynasty was emerging in the lands of the Jutes and the Islands, with its centre at Lejre in Zealand and its cult-centre at Hedeby at the base of the Jutland peninsula. The Swedish kingdom of the Svear and the Gautar was emerging around the great temple at Uppsala, with its trading emporium at Birka on Lake Mälaren. The Norwegian kingdom was fragmented among the small kingdoms of Vestfold, Agder, Rogaland, Sogn, Hordaland, Trøndelag, and Hålogaland, with the first unifying kings of the Yngling dynasty taking shape in the Vestfold of the Oslo Fjord.

The Frankish political pressure of the eighth century — the wars of Charles Martel, the conversion of the Saxons, the consolidation of the Carolingian Empire — pushed the Scandinavian traders south and west, and the political pressure of the Slavic peoples on the south-eastern frontier pushed them east. The Radhanite Jewish merchants of the Frankish and Slavic worlds were already present on the Volga by the early ninth century, and the Rus’ (a Norse-Slavic ruling class) were already operating along the river system from Novgorod to the Black Sea. The Viking Age was about to begin.

The Raid on Lindisfarne and the Outbreak of War (793–800)

The raid on Lindisfarne of 8 June 793 is the conventional opening of the Viking Age. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the event with shock: “In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. These signs continued for many days after, and a little after that the heathens came and destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne with fierce plundering, and they slew all the people they found there.” The attack struck at the heart of the cult of St Cuthbert, the most sacred shrine of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and the reaction of the English churchmen was apocalyptic. The Letter of Pope John XIII to the English clergy condemned the attackers, the Venerable Bede’s Northumbrian Church was still a living institution, and the shrine of St Cuthbert was soon to be taken on its long wanderings to Chester-le-Street and eventually to Durham.

The first wave of Viking attacks was, in many ways, an intensification of an existing pattern of small-scale raiding. The Anglo-Saxon and Frisian coasts had been visited by Scandinavian raiders for decades, and the great emporia of Dorestad and Quentovic had already suffered from a number of small attacks. What made the Lindisfarne raid shocking was its scale, its target (a major monastic house rather than a coastal village), and the timing (the eve of the feast of St Cuthbert). The Northmen returned to Ireland in 795 (Rechru, now Lambay Island, off the coast of Dublin), to the Hebrides in 798, and to Iona in 802 and 806. By 800 the Irish annals speak of the fomhóraigh (“the foreigners of the sea”) as a recurrent presence, and the kingdom of Dal Riata was already crumbling.

The first great recorded leader of the Viking attacks is Ívarr inn beinlausi (“Ivar the Boneless”), the son of the legendary Danish king Ragnarr loðbrók (“Ragnar Shaggy-Breeches”) of the Ragnars saga loðbrókar. The identification of Ívarr with the leader of the Great Heathen Army of 865 is debated, but the saga tradition and the Anglo-Saxon sources agree that he was a major figure in the first wave of the Viking attacks. The name “Ragnar” itself may be a literary creation of the twelfth century, but the figure of a great Danish leader of the early Viking Age is historicised in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson and the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus.

The Ninth Century: The Great Heathen Army and the Settlement

The ninth century is the central century of the Viking Age. It is the century of the Great Heathen Army (the micel here of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), the Danelaw, the Norwegian settlement of Iceland, the Swedish expansion along the rivers of Russia, the foundation of the Duchy of Normandy by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte (911), and the first recorded contacts of the Norse with the Carolingian Empire.

The Great Heathen Army landed in East Anglia in 865, and within a few years it had conquered the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and (almost) Wessex. The army was led by Ivar the Boneless, Ubbe, and Halfdan, and it campaigned for almost fifteen years before its defeat by Alfred the Great at Edington in 878. The treaty of Wedmore that followed divided the kingdom of the English-speaking peoples between the Anglo-Saxon state of Wessex under Alfred and the Scandinavian-settled Danelaw in the north and east.

The Danelaw is one of the great transformations of medieval Europe. The Scandinavian settlers, who had been arriving in small numbers since the 780s, were joined by a great wave of migration in the 870s and 880s, and by the time of the second treaty between Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum in 886, the eastern and northern half of England was Scandinavian in language, law, and material culture. The place-names of the Danelaw — the -by of Derby, Whitby, Grimsby, the -thorpe of Cleethorpes, Althorpe, the -thwaite of the highland settlements, the -toft of the homesteads — are still visible on the modern map, and the great cities of York, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford, Derby, and Leicester were major Scandinavian centres in the tenth century.

The Norwegian expansion in this period took two main directions. The first was westward, into the Northern and Western Isles of Scotland, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Faroes, the Iceland of the settlement (c. 870–930), and the Greenland of the late tenth century. The second was southward, into the Irish Sea, the kingdom of Dublin, the kingdom of the Isles (the Suðreyjar, the “Southern Islands”), the Isle of Man, the kingdom of York, and the English Channel coast.

The Swedish expansion of the ninth century was different in character. It was a movement east, along the great rivers of Russia, the Volga, the Dvina, the Dnieper, the Don, the Oka, the Western Dvina, the Niemen, and the Bug. The Rus’ (a Norse-Slavic ruling class, probably from the Swedish province of Roslagen, in the same general region as Uppsala and Birka) built a chain of trading settlements: Stara Ladoga (c. 760), Novgorod (c. 850), Polotsk, Kiev (c. 882), Tmutarakan at the mouth of the Don, Sarkel on the Don, and the great emporium of Itil at the mouth of the Volga in the land of the Khazars. The Rus’ traded in furs, slaves, walrus ivory, amber, and honey, and they brought the Arabic silver of the Abbasid caliphate into the Baltic world.

The Danish expansion in this period was the most varied of the three. The Danes attacked Frisia repeatedly, sacked Hamburg in 845, besieged Paris in 845 and again in 885–886, and established the Danelaw in England. The Duchy of Normandy was created in 911 when the Frankish king Charles the Simple granted the lands of the lower Seine to the Viking leader Rollo, and the descendants of Rollo would become the dukes of Normandy and (in 1066) the kings of England. The Danes were also active in the Baltic, where they contested the Swedish and Wendish control of the trade routes, and in the Mediterranean, where they attacked the coasts of Spain, the Balearics, Sardinia, and (briefly) Italy.

The Tenth Century: The Consolidation of the Kingdoms

The tenth century is the period in which the Scandinavian kingdoms of the Viking Age took their definitive shape. Denmark was unified by the Jelling dynasty of Gorm the Old and Harald Bluetooth, who converted to Christianity around 965, built the great fortress of Hedeby, and constructed the famous Jelling stones in memory of his parents. Norway was unified by the Yngling dynasty of Harald Fairhair (r. c. 872–930) and his descendants, and by the missionary kings Olaf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000) and Olaf Haraldsson (r. 1015–1028), whose saga lives are told in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson. Sweden was unified in the same period by the Svea kings, with the first Christian king Olof Skötkonung taking the throne around 995.

The Icelandic commonwealth of 930–1262, established by the settlers of 870–930 and codified in the Grágás (“Grey-Goose Laws”), was the first democratic political system in Europe, with the Althing of Þingvellir as its legislative and judicial assembly. The Icelanders wrote the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders), the Edda poems, and the great skaldic corpus of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and they established the first sustained tradition of historical writing in a vernacular language in medieval Europe.

The Viking diaspora of the tenth century reached its furthest extent. Iceland was settled by 930. Greenland was settled by Erik the Red around 985, and the Western Settlement of Greenland was the westernmost European settlement of the period. Vinland, on the coast of North America, was reached by Leif Erikson around 1000, and the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland (excavated by Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad in 1960–1968) is the earliest known European settlement in the Americas. The Russian state of Kiev was at the height of its power under Vladimir the Great (r. 980–1015), who converted to Byzantine Christianity in 988, and his son Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019–1054) presided over a brilliant civilisation of which the Sophia Cathedral of Kiev and the Gate-Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Veliky Novgorod are still standing.

The Danelaw of England was eventually absorbed by the West Saxon kings of the House of Wessex. The English reconquest under Edmund Ironside and Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–1066) re-established English control over the Danelaw, and the Norman invasion of 1066 brought the Anglo-Saxon period to an end and, with it, the Viking Age of English history.

The Eleventh Century: The End of the Viking Age

The eleventh century is the period in which the Viking Age came to an end. The Norman invasion of 1066 — the last great Scandinavian attack on England — is the conventional closing date of the Viking Age in the British Isles, and the Norman dukes of England and the dukes of Anjou and Normandy are themselves descendants of the Viking settlers of 911. The Battle of Stamford Bridge of 25 September 1066, in which the English king Harold Godwinson defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada and his English ally Tostig Godwinson, was the last great battle between the Norse and the English-speaking peoples, and it took place only three weeks before William of Normandy landed at Pevensey to claim the English throne.

The Christianisation of Scandinavia was the most important single process of the eleventh century. Denmark was Christian by 1000. Norway was Christian by the time of Olaf Haraldsson (r. 1015–1028) and his successors. Sweden was Christian by the time of Olof Skötkonung (r. c. 995–1022) and Anund Jacob (r. c. 1022–1050). Iceland was Christian by the decision of the Althing in 1000. The Icelandic decision — the Kristnitökusaga of the Kristni þáttr — is the supreme example of the political negotiation of Christianisation. The Icelandic chieftains agreed to accept baptism in a single day, with the proviso that the older customs of the Norse religion could continue in private.

The Icelandic saga-writing of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is the supreme literary achievement of the Viking Age. The Íslendingasögur (the Sagas of Icelanders) are the long narrative prose works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that tell the stories of the Icelandic settlers and their descendants. The greatest of them — Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Njáls saga, Laxdæla saga, Gísla saga Súrssonar, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Vatnsdæla saga, Eyrbyggja saga, Þorgils saga ok Hafliða, and many more — are among the most remarkable works of medieval prose in any language, and they preserve the historical, legal, social, and religious memory of the Viking Age in Iceland.

The Geography of the Norse World

The geography of the Viking Age is the geography of the North Atlantic, the North Sea, the Baltic, and the great river system of Russia. The Norse travelled by sea and by river, and their political and commercial networks extended from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Hebrides in the west to the Volga Bulgars in the east. The Norse sailor relied on the sailing-ship with its single square sail, the steering-oar on the starboard quarter, and the clinker-built hull, and he sailed by landmarks, by the sun and the stars, by the flight of birds, and by the currents and the swell of the open sea.

The Scandinavian heartland is a long, narrow peninsula of mountains and fjords, of forests and lakes, of long coastlines and short distances across the mountains. The Norwegian coast is the most indented in Europe, with hundreds of fjords and thousands of islands; the Swedish coast is gentler, but the great lakes of the central lowland are navigable; the Danish islands and the Jutland peninsula bridge the gap between the North Sea and the Baltic. The Norse sailor was, by the eighth century, the most accomplished seaman in Europe, and he had a vocabulary of more than a hundred specialised terms for the parts of his ship, the state of the sea, the wind, the weather, and the landmarks of the coast.

The settled lands of the Norse in the Viking Age include Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Faroes, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, the coast of Ireland (the kingdom of Dublin and the kingdom of Limerick), the Danelaw, the duchy of Normandy, the kingdom of the Isles, the Russian trading settlements, the Volga Bulgaria of the Bulghar emporium, the Crimea of the Khazar khanate, the Dnieper route to Byzantium, the Atlantic of the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, and the Mediterranean of the Norse mercenaries in the service of the Byzantine emperor.

Society, Law, and the Thing

The Norse society of the Viking Age was a kinship-based society of free farmers, chieftains, and a small class of unfree slaves. The free farmer held his land under the odal system, in which a freehold could not be sold outside the kindred and the inheritance of the land descended through the male line. The thrall (slave) was at the bottom of the social ladder, and the taking of thralls in war and the trading of thralls at the great emporia was a major part of the Viking economy. The churl (free farmer) and the hersir (local chieftain) were the bulk of the free population, and the jarl (great noble) and the konungr (king) were the political elite.

The Thing (Old Norse þing, Old English thing) was the assembly of the free men of a district, held at a fixed place in the open air, and it was the legislative and judicial institution of Norse society. The Icelandic Althing of Þingvellir was the highest of these assemblies, with the Lögrétta (the legislative council) and the fjórir fimbulþing (the four quarter-courts) as its main subdivisions. The Norwegian Gulathing of western Norway, the Frostathing of Trøndelag, the Eidsivathing of eastern Norway, the Borgarthing of the Oslo Fjord, and the Haugathing of the Grenland are all named in the medieval law-codes. The Danish Landsting of Viborg, the Swedish Ting of the Götar and the Svear, and the Ting of the Danelaw of England are all part of the same general tradition.

The lawman (lögsögumaðr in Iceland) was the public officer who recited the law at the assembly and gave legal advice to the chieftains. The Icelandic lawman recited the lögsaga (the law) one third at a time, and the full law was recited every three years. The Norwegian laws of the Gulathing and the Frostathing were written down in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and are the oldest comprehensive law-codes in any Scandinavian language.

The feud and the wergild were the principal mechanisms of dispute-resolution. The killing of a man created an obligation on his kin to take vengeance, and the obligation could be discharged by the killing of the killer or by the payment of a wergild (a sum whose amount was fixed by the rank of the slain). The Gulathing’s Law of c. 950 and the Codex Regius of Grágás of c. 1100 preserve the elaborate set of fines for killing, maiming, and insulting. The system is the most fully developed in the medieval Germanic world.

The Economy: Trade, Money, and the Silver Hoards

The Viking economy was, in many respects, an exchange economy. The Norse traders of the ninth and tenth centuries brought furs, slaves, walrus ivory, amber, timber, tar, wool, woollen cloth, and iron to the markets of Western Europe and the Islamic world, and they brought back silver (in the form of dirhams of the Abbasid caliphate and sasanian and Kufic coins of the pre-Islamic period), gold, glass, wine, spices, textiles, metalwork, and ceramics. The great silver hoards of the Viking Age — the Spillings hoard of Gotland (c. 870), the Hoen hoard of Norway, the Hedeby hoard of c. 980, the Cuerdale hoard of Lancashire (c. 905), the Vale of York hoard of c. 920, the Lilla Howe hoard of Yorkshire, the Scar hoard of Orkney, the Skaill hoard of Orkney, the Petersen hoard of Bornholm — are the most spectacular archaeological evidence of the volume and the reach of Viking trade.

The weight economy of the Viking Age was based on silver. The Norse preferred rings (the baugr) and hack-silver (broken pieces of silver jewellery and coins) for large transactions, and they preferred coins for small transactions. The Samanid dirhams of the caliphate of Isfahan and Bukhara, the Abbasid dirhams of Baghdad, the Umayyad dirhams of Spain, the Anglo-Saxon pennies of Offa and Æthelstan, the Carolingian deniers of the Frankish kings, and the Byzantine miliaresion of the Eastern Empire all circulated in the Viking world, and the weight-standard of the Norse (the mark of approximately 215 grams of silver, divided into eight eyrir of 27 grams) was the basis of the economy of the whole of northern Europe in the tenth century.

The emporia of the Viking Age were the great trading centres at the junctions of the trade routes. Birka on Lake Mälaren in central Sweden, Hedeby (Old Norse Heiðabýr, German Haithabu) at the base of the Jutland peninsula, Kaupang in Vestfold (Norway), Pskov, Novgorod, Kiev, Staraya Ladoga, Itil, Sarkel, Tmutarakan, Bulghar on the Volga, Samarra in the middle Tigris, Miklagard (Constantinople), Alexandria, Baghdad, Quentovic in Flanders, Dorestad on the Rhine, Hedeby and Birka in Scandinavia, Kaupang in Norway, Aarhus in Jutland, Ribe in Jutland, Sigtuna in Sweden, and Truso at the mouth of the Vistula are all part of the same network.

Religion: The Old Norse Faith and Its Conversion

The Old Norse religion of the Viking Age was the religion of the Æsir and the Vanir, the religion of Odin and Thor and Freyja and Tyr and Baldr and the Norns and the valkyries and the dísir and the landvættir (the spirits of the land). The religion is preserved in the Poetic Edda of the Codex Regius, the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson, the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, the Germania of Tacitus, and the History of the English Church and People of the Venerable Bede. The religion had no single text, no fixed doctrine, and no central authority, and its surviving form is a complex of older and newer elements drawn from a long prehistory.

The conversion of Scandinavia was a long, complex process. The Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian missions of the eighth and ninth centuries established Christian communities in the southern parts of Denmark and Norway, and the Hanseatic trade of the tenth century brought Christian merchants and Christian money into the great Scandinavian emporia. The kings of the conversion period — Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, Olof Skötkonung of Sweden, Olaf Haraldsson of Norway — used the new religion as a political instrument to consolidate the new kingdoms, and the conversion was a long process of negotiation and resistance.

The Icelandic conversion of 1000 is the most fully documented. The Althing of 1000 debated the question for several years, and the decision was taken by the chieftain Þorgeirr Ljósvetningagoði, who accepted the new religion with the proviso that the older customs of the Norse religion could continue in private. The Kristni þáttr of the Hómilíubók (c. 1200) and the Íslendingabók of Ari Þorgilsson (c. 1130) preserve the tradition, and the surviving Heathen Tombs of Iceland (the heiðinn siðr) suggest that the older religion continued to be practised in the countryside for at least two centuries after the official conversion.

The syncretic religion of the Viking Age was a religion in which the Christian and the Norse elements co-existed for a long time. The runestones of the eleventh and twelfth centuries sometimes bear Christian crosses and Christian invocations alongside the older Norse formulae. The Icelandic churches of the early Christian period are sometimes built on the sites of older pagan temples. The Adam of Bremen description of the great temple of Uppsala (c. 1070) suggests that the older religion was still being practised in central Sweden well into the twelfth century.

Runestones and the Runic Literacy of the Viking Age

The runic script of the Viking Age was the Younger Futhark (a 16-rune alphabet descended from the Elder Futhark of the Migration Period), and it is the script in which the Norse people of the period wrote the great runestone inscriptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Our cluster page on the Younger and Elder Futhark examines the script in detail, but it is essential to recognise the central role that the runestones play in the cultural life of the period.

There are about 2,500 runestones in Scandinavia, the great majority of them in Sweden (where the Rundata project has catalogued and located all of them). The Jelling stones of c. 965 are the most famous of the early runestones, raised by Harald Bluetooth in memory of his parents Gorm the Old and Thyra and proclaiming that “Haraldr konungr bað gørva kuml þausi á ept Gorm faður sinn aurg ok æft Þórví, móður sína, sá Haraldr es sér vann ǫll Danmǫrk ok Norveg ok dani gærði kristna” — “King Haraldr ordered these monuments made in memory of Gormr, his father, and Thyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.”

The Rök stone of Östergötland (c. 850) is the oldest datable runestone and is famous for its allusive, alliterative, and now only partly intelligible text in honour of a chieftain’s dead son Varin. The Karlevi stone of Öland (c. 1000) bears a complete nine-line skaldic stanza in the dróttkvætt metre. The Dynna stone of Västergötland (c. 1020) and the Stenkilsta stone of Östergötland (c. 1050) commemorate the erection of bridges, the traditional Christian work of charity. The Järsberg stone of Värmland (c. 600) is the oldest runestone in Sweden, and the Kylver stone of Gotland (c. 400) bears the complete list of the Elder Futhark.

The runic inscriptions of the Viking Age are not only on stone. They are on wooden sticks (the runekjevle of the Bergen archives), on bone and antler (the Flødstrup and Flødals combs of Norway), on metalwork (the Jellinge cup, the Sæbø sword, the Setre Comb), on jewellery (the Hon amulet of Norway, the Lindholm amulet of Scania), and on standing stones (the Møklebust stone of Sogn og Fjordane, the Rø stone of Norway, the Dynna stone of Sweden).

The art of the runestones is one of the great visual traditions of the Viking Age. The great Ringerike style, the Urnes style, the Mammen style, the Borre style, and the Jellinge style are the five principal art styles of the period, and they are visible on the runestones, on the woodwork of the great churches (the Urnes stave church, the Borgund stave church), on the metalwork of the period, and on the carved stones of the Gotland picture stones.

Art and Material Culture

The art of the Viking Age is one of the most distinctive in the medieval world. The great runic and figural styles of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries — the Borre style (c. 850–950), the Jellinge style (c. 900–1000), the Mammen style (c. 950–1000), the Ringerike style (c. 980–1090), and the Urnes style (c. 1050–1125) — are the five principal art styles of the period, and they are visible on the runestones, on the woodwork of the great churches, on the metalwork of the period, and on the carved stones of Gotland.

The Borre style is the first of the great Viking Age art styles, named after the Borre mound cemetery in Vestfold (Norway), and is characterised by its interlace, its gripping-beast motif, and its symmetrically arranged tendrils. The Jellinge style is named after the Jelling complex in central Jutland, and is characterised by its ribbon animals, its tendril ornaments, and its S-shaped figures. The Mammen style is named after the Mammen axe (c. 970) found in Jutland, and is characterised by its foliate tendrils, its animal figures, and its spiral patterns. The Ringerike style is named after the Ringerike region of central Norway, and is characterised by its foliate tendrils, its interlaced patterns, and its animal figures. The Urnes style is the last of the great Viking Age art styles, named after the Urnes stave church in Sogn og Fjordane (Norway), and is characterised by its elegant elongated animal figures, its interlace, and its foliate tendrils.

The metalwork of the Viking Age is one of the great achievements of the period. The tremolite and bronze of the earlier period, the gold and silver of the tenth century, and the bronze and iron of the later period all show the great runic and figural styles. The Oseberg ship-burial (c. 834) contained the most spectacular set of early Viking Age woodwork and metalwork, including the great Oseberg cart, the Oseberg animal-head post, the Oseberg bedposts, and the Oseberg tapestry fragments. The Gokstad ship-burial (c. 900), the Borre mound-burial (c. 950), and the Tune ship-burial (c. 900) are the other great examples of the period.

The woodwork of the Viking Age is preserved principally in the stave churches of Norway, of which about thirty still stand, the most famous being the Urnes stave church, the Borgund stave church, the Heddal stave church, and the Lomen stave church. The stave churches are the supreme examples of the Viking Age architectural tradition, and they show the great art styles of the period in their most elaborate form.

The textile tradition of the Viking Age is preserved principally in the Oseberg tapestry fragments, the Ladby ship-burial, the Skjoldehamn cloak of Greenland, and the Thorsberg cloak of the fourth century. The Viking Age textiles are woven in tabby and twill, with elaborate tablet weaves for borders and trimmings. The Ladby cloak of the fifth century and the Skjoldehamn cloak of the eleventh century are the most complete examples of the Viking Age textile tradition to survive.

The Ships of the Vikings

The Viking ships are the most distinctive technological achievement of the Viking Age. The Nydam boat of the fourth or fifth century, the Sutton Hoo ship of c. 625–635, the Kvalsund ship of c. 690–700, the Oseberg ship of c. 834, the Gokstad ship of c. 900, the Tune ship of c. 900, the Ladby ship of c. 950, the Skuldelev ships of c. 1030–1050, and the Roskilde ships of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are the most complete examples of the Viking Age shipbuilding tradition. Our cluster page on Viking Ships and Exploration examines the technology in detail.

The Viking ships were clinker-built (with overlapping planks), clinker-fastened (with iron rivets), and flexibly constructed (with the planks tied to the frames rather than rigidly fixed). They were powered by a single square sail and by oars, and they were steered by a steering-oar on the starboard quarter. The Viking ships were the fastest and most manoeuvrable vessels of their time, and they were the basis of the Norse expansion to Iceland, Greenland, Vinland, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the markets of the Islamic world.

The longship (langskip) was the warship of the Viking Age. The skaldic vocabulary of the ships is rich: the snekkja, the drekar (dragon-ship), the skeið (great warship), the busse, the karvi, the knarr (merchant ship), the byrðingr (great trading ship), the sleðinn (with an ornamental figure-head), the göndull, the reiði, and many more. The Norse sailors had a vocabulary of more than a hundred specialised terms for the parts of their ship, and the literature of the Viking Age is full of metaphors drawn from the ship.

Norse Exploration: From the Faroes to Vinland

The Norse exploration of the North Atlantic is one of the great achievements of the Viking Age. The Faroes were settled by the Norse in the early ninth century. Iceland was settled by the Norse in c. 870–930, and the Íslendingabók of Ari Þorgilsson (c. 1130) and the Landnámabók of the twelfth century preserve the tradition of the first settlers. Greenland was settled by Erik the Red around 985, and the Western Settlement of Greenland was the westernmost European settlement of the period. Vinland, on the coast of North America, was reached by Leif Erikson around 1000, and the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland (excavated by Helge Ingstad and Anne Stine Ingstad in 1960–1968) is the earliest known European settlement in the Americas.

The Eirik the Red saga and the Saga of the Greenlanders (both preserved in the Flateyjarbók of c. 1390) are the principal narrative sources for the Norse exploration of the North Atlantic. The two sagas differ in details — the Eirik saga places Leif Erikson’s voyage first, the Saga of the Greenlanders places Bjarni Herjolfsson’s accidental sighting of Vinland first — but they agree on the essentials. The Norse explorers reached the coasts of Baffin Island, Labrador, Newfoundland, and (probably) Nova Scotia in the early eleventh century, and they attempted to settle in the area of L’Anse aux Meadows before withdrawing in the face of resistance from the indigenous Beothuk and Innu peoples and the hostility of the climate.

The runestones of the period preserve the names of some of the explorers. The Kensington runestone of Minnesota (now widely regarded as a forgery of the late nineteenth century) once claimed to record the visit of a Norse party to the American interior in 1362. The Vinland runestones of the period are documented in the sagas but have not been archaeologically confirmed. The L’Anse aux Meadows settlement is the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas.

Norse Expansion East: The Rus’ and the River Routes

The Norse expansion east along the rivers of Russia is one of the great chapters of Viking Age history. The Norse-Slavic Rus’ built a chain of trading settlements along the Volga route to the Caspian Sea and the markets of the Islamic world, and along the Dnieper route to the Black Sea and the markets of Byzantium. The Constantine Porphyrogenitus (De administrando imperio, c. 950) describes the Dnieper route in detail, and the Ibn Fadlan account of the Volga route (c. 922) is the most detailed description of the Norse world to survive from the Islamic side.

The Rus’ of Kiev built a powerful state that controlled the trade routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev (r. 980–1015) converted to Byzantine Christianity in 988, and the Kievan Rus’ became one of the great Christian states of medieval Europe. The Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev (r. 1019–1054) presided over a brilliant civilisation of which the Sophia Cathedral of Kiev (c. 1037), the Gate-Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour at Veliky Novgorod (c. 1198), and the Spas-Nereditsy church of Novgorod (c. 1198) are the most famous surviving monuments.

The Norse influence on the Russian state is visible in the names of the early princes, in the runestone of the Berezan island in the Black Sea, in the amulets of the Gnëzdovo cemetery near Smolensk, and in the architecture of the earliest Russian churches. The Rurik dynasty, which ruled Russia from 862 to 1598, is said to descend from a Norse prince of the same name (or more probably a Norse prince called Rögnvald or Hróaldr), and the Varangians of the Russian chronicles are the Norse mercenaries and traders of the period.

The Norse in the Mediterranean

The Norse in the Mediterranean are the least known of the Viking Age diaspora, but they were a recurrent presence from the ninth century to the eleventh. The Norse Viking raiders of the period attacked the coasts of Spain (the Iberian Peninsula was attacked repeatedly between 844 and 1108), the Balearics (attacked 858–902), the French Riviera (attacked 859–972), Italy (Pisa was attacked in 860, the Liri was attacked in 902, Sardinia was attacked in 809–1015), and North Africa (the Norse raided the Maghreb in 859–861, and the Norman Roger II of Sicily would later have Norse-Gaelic elements in his court).

The Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperor was established in 988 by the emperor Basil II (r. 976–1025), and it became one of the most elite units of the Byzantine army. The Varangians of Constantinople were drawn from the Norse, the Rus’, the Anglo-Saxon exiles after 1066, and the Scandinavian and Icelandic adventurers of the period. The Harald Hardrada of Norway (r. 1046–1066) served in the Varangian Guard in his youth, and the Saga of Harald Hardrada in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson is one of the great sources for the period.

The Norse in the British Isles and Ireland

The Norse in the British Isles and Ireland are the most fully documented of the Viking Age diaspora. The Great Heathen Army of 865 conquered the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and (almost) Wessex, and the Danelaw of the ninth and tenth centuries was the principal settlement area. The Dublin Norse kingdom of the period was one of the most powerful Norse states, and the Orkney and Shetland earldom of the period lasted until 1468, when the islands were pawned to Scotland by the Norse king Christian I.

The Manx kingdom of the period was the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, and its kings ruled over the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, and parts of the Irish coast. The Crovan dynasty of the Isle of Man lasted from the late eleventh century to 1265, and the kingdom was finally absorbed by Scotland in 1265. The Hebrides of the period were the Suðreyjar (the “Southern Islands”) of the Norse, and they were ruled by the kings of Mann until the thirteenth century.

The Welsh coast was also attacked and partly settled by the Norse. The Strathclyde kingdom of the period was the Kingdom of the Britons of the Old North, and it lasted until the eleventh century, when it was absorbed by the Scottish kingdom of Malcolm III. The Danelaw of England, the Dublin kingdom of Ireland, the Orkney and Shetland earldom, the Manx kingdom, the Hebrides, the Welsh coast, and the Scottish coast are all part of the same network of Norse settlement in the British Isles.

The End of the Viking Age

The end of the Viking Age is conventionally dated to 1066 — the year of the Battle of Stamford Bridge (25 September 1066) and the Battle of Hastings (14 October 1066). The Harald Hardrada of Norway, who had served in the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperor in his youth and had won the throne of Norway in 1046, invaded England in 1066 with a great army of Norse and Orcadian warriors. He was defeated and killed at Stamford Bridge by the English king Harold Godwinson, and the Battle of Hastings that followed three weeks later, in which the Norman William the Conqueror defeated the English and killed Harold, brought the Anglo-Saxon period to an end and, with it, the Viking Age in England.

The Norman dynasty that now ruled England was, however, itself a Scandinavian dynasty. William the Conqueror was the descendant of the Viking leader Rollo, who had been granted the duchy of Normandy by the Frankish king Charles the Simple in 911. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 was, in this sense, the last great Scandinavian invasion of England, and the Norman dynasty that ruled England until 1154 (and the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled from 1154 to 1485) was itself a Scandinavian dynasty. The Stamford Bridge of 1066 was, then, both the end of the Viking Age in England and the beginning of the Norman period, in which the Scandinavian and the Anglo-Saxon and the Frankish elements were fused into a single English ruling class.

The end of the Viking Age in other parts of the Norse world is similarly gradual. The Norse of Iceland retained their political independence until 1262, when the Icelandic Commonwealth accepted the rule of the Norwegian king Hákon IV and the Icelanders became subjects of the Norwegian crown. The Norse of Greenland retained their settlements until the early fifteenth century, when the last records of the Greenland settlements disappear. The Norse of the Danelaw were absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon and Norman states of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Rus’ of the Dnieper and the Volga were absorbed by the Slavic states of the region in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The Norse Legacy

The legacy of the Viking Age is one of the deepest inheritances of the modern world. The English language of the modern period is full of Norse loanwords, including they, them, their, sky, skin, skull, leg, law, anger, husband, window, slaughter, birth, die, take, give, call, hit, run, ride, sail, and many hundreds of others. The place-names of the Danelaw are still visible on the modern map of England. The legal tradition of the Common Law of England and the Civil Law of Scotland has deep roots in the Norse legal tradition. The parliamentary institutions of the Althing of Iceland, the Storting of Norway, the Folketing of Denmark, and the Riksdag of Sweden are all descended from the Thing of the Viking Age. The saga tradition of Iceland and Norway is one of the great literary inheritances of the medieval world, and it continues to inspire writers and artists in the present day. The exploration of the North Atlantic, the settlement of Iceland and Greenland, and the discovery of North America are among the great achievements of the Viking Age, and they laid the foundation for the later transatlantic expansion of the modern world.

The memory of the Viking Age is preserved in the place-names of the modern world, in the language of the modern North, in the literary tradition of the Norse sagas and Eddic poems, in the visual tradition of the art styles of the period, and in the political institutions of the modern Scandinavian countries. The Norse of the Viking Age are the ancestors of the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Icelanders, the Faroese, the Greenlanders, the Orcadians, the Shetlanders, the Manx, the Hebrideans, the Normans, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Belorussians, and (in some measure) the English and the Irish, and their legacy is one of the great inheritances of the modern world.

The Norse World in Old Norse Literature

The Old Norse literature of the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages is one of the great literary inheritances of the medieval world. The Poetic Edda of the Codex Regius (c. 1270), the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1220), the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Fornaldarsögur (Sagas of Ancient Times) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Sturlunga saga of the thirteenth century, the Biskupa sögur (Bishops’ Sagas) of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the Konunga sögur (Kings’ Sagas) of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1230), the Landnámabók of the twelfth century, and the Íslendingabók of Ari Þorgilsson (c. 1130) are all part of this great tradition. The literature of the period is, in many ways, the literature of a small society of free farmers and chieftains, written in a small island republic on the edge of the Arctic Circle, and it is one of the great wonders of the medieval world that a society of perhaps seventy to eighty thousand people could produce a literary tradition of such richness and depth.

The saga form is one of the great inventions of medieval Europe. The Icelandic family saga is a long narrative prose work of some twenty to fifty thousand words, written in a sober, allusive, and understated style, and concerned with the lives of the Icelandic settlers and their descendants of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The greatest of the family sagas — Njáls saga, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, Laxdæla saga, Gísla saga Súrssonar, Eyrbyggja saga, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða, Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, Þorsteins saga Síðu-Hallssonar, Vatnsdæla saga, Kormáks saga, Hallfreðar saga, and the Heiðarvíga saga — are among the most remarkable works of medieval prose in any language.

The eddaic verse of the Codex Regius is the oldest stratum of the Old Norse literary tradition, and the heroic poems of the Codex Regius — Völuspá, Hávamál, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, Helreið Brynhildar, Sigrdrífumál, Atlakviða, Atlamál, Guðrúnarhvöt, Hamðismál — are the basis of the heroic tradition of the North. The skaldic verse of the period is more complex and is preserved principally in the Skáldskaparmál of the Prose Edda and in the Kings’ Sagas of the period.

The Norse World in the Latin West

The Norse of the Viking Age were not the isolated people of popular imagination. They were a society in continuous contact with the Latin West, the Byzantine East, the Islamic world, the Slavic peoples, the Finno-Ugric peoples, the Sami peoples, the Avar peoples, the Khazar peoples, the Volga Bulgar peoples, the Hungarian peoples, and the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. The Adam of Bremen description of the great temple of Uppsala (c. 1070), the Ibn Fadlan description of the Norse of the Volga (c. 922), the Constantine Porphyrogenitus description of the Dnieper route to Byzantium (c. 950), the William of Malmesbury description of the Norse of the Danelaw, the Matthew Paris description of the Norse of Norway, and the Saxo Grammaticus description of the Norse of Denmark are all part of the same general picture of a Norse world in continuous contact with the wider medieval world.

The Latin sources for the Viking Age are rich: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the ninth to twelfth centuries, the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica of the eighth century, Asser’s Life of King Alfred of the late ninth century, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum of the twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum of the twelfth century, Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum of the eleventh century, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla of the early thirteenth century, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s De Administrando Imperio of the tenth century.

The Arabic sources are also important: the Ibn Fadlan’s Risala of c. 922, the Ibn Rustah’s Al-A’laq an-Nafisa of c. 903, the Al-Masudi’s Meadows of Gold of c. 943, the Al-Idrisi’s Nuzhat al-Mushtaq of c. 1154, the Yaqut al-Hamawi’s Mu’jam al-Buldan of the early thirteenth century, and the Ibn al-Athir’s Al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh of the early thirteenth century are the principal sources. The Persian sources include the Gardizi’s Zayn al-Akhbar of c. 1050 and the Hudud al-Alam of c. 982.

The Norse World in Modern Reception

The modern reception of the Viking Age is one of the richest of any historical period. The Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — Esaias Tegnér, N. F. S. Grundtvig, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen — made the Viking Age the centrepiece of the new national literatures of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. The painters of the period — Lorenz Frölich, Peter Nicolai Arbo, Eilif Peterssen, Halfdan Egedius, Gerhard Munthe, Christian Krohg — illustrated the heroic and Viking Age material in a monumental style. The composers of the period — Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Hugo Alfvén, Wilhelm Stenhammar — drew on the same tradition.

The twentieth century added the films, the television series, the video games, and the popular fiction that have made the Viking Age a global popular culture phenomenon. The films of Richard Fleischer (the Vikings of 1958), Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror, 1987), and Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, 2010–) have brought the Viking Age to a global audience. The television series of the period — Vikings of History Channel (2013–2020), Norsemen of NRK (2016–2020), The Last Kingdom of BBC (2015–2022) — have made the Viking Age one of the most popular television genres of the present day.

The video games of the period — the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla of Ubisoft (2020), the God of War of Santa Monica Studio (2018–), the Hellblade of Ninja Theory (2017–), and the Valheim of Iron Gate Studio (2021–) — have made the Viking Age a global popular culture phenomenon. The popular fiction of the period — American Gods of Neil Gaiman (2001), The Gospel of Loki of Joanne M. Harris (2014), The Witch’s Heart of Genevieve Gornichec (2021) — has made the Norse gods and heroes the property of a global audience.

The academic reception of the Viking Age continues to grow, with the great new editions of the sagas, the great new runs of the Íslenzk fornrit, the Skaldic Project, the Ménestrel project, the ORL project, and the great new archaeological investigations of the period. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (Denmark), the Viking Museum in Oslo (Norway), the Viking Museum in Stockholm (Sweden), the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik, the British Museum in London, and the many regional museums of the Norse world preserve and exhibit the material remains of the Viking Age, and they remain the essential points of access for the modern visitor.

The Continuing Study of the Viking Age

The study of the Viking Age is one of the most active and exciting fields of medieval scholarship. The great textual editions of the period continue to be produced: the Skaldic Project of the University of Sydney and the University of Iceland has now published a complete critical edition of the skaldic corpus in eight volumes (2012–2024); the Íslenzk fornrit and the Editions Arnamagnæanæ continue to publish critical editions of the sagas and the medieval Norse manuscripts. The digital humanities revolution of the period has made the Norse sources accessible to a global audience through the Skaldic Project database, the Ménestrel project of the University of Oslo, the ORL project of the University of Bergen, the Rundata project of the University of Uppsala, the Handritastofnun Íslands (the Manuscript Institute of Iceland), and the four Scandinavian Diplomatarium series. The new finds at the Tissø complex in Denmark, the Uppåkra complex in Sweden, the Sigtuna complex in Sweden, the Birka complex in Sweden, the Hedeby complex in Germany, the Kaupang complex in Norway, the Jorvik complex in York, the Dublin complex in Ireland, the Novgorod complex in Russia, the Kiev complex in Ukraine, and the L’Anse aux Meadows complex in Newfoundland are all part of the continuing investigation of the period. The Viking Age is not a closed chapter of history; it is a continuing subject of investigation, and it continues to surprise us with new finds, new insights, and new questions.