Who is vikings

The reputation of the Vikings simply as raiders and plunderers has long been established. Restoring their fame as traders, storytellers, explorers, missionaries, artists and rulers is long overdue….

The Vikings originated in what is now Denmark, Norway and Sweden although centuries before they became unified countries. Their homeland was overwhelmingly rural, with almost no towns. The vast majority earned a meagre living through agriculture, or along the coast, by fishing. Advances in shipping technology in the 7th and 8th centuries meant that boats were powered by sails rather than solely by oars. Exactly what first compelled bands of men to follow their local chieftain across the North Sea in these longships is unclear.

It may have been localised overpopulation, as plots became subdivided to the point where families could barely eke out a living; it may have been political instability, as chieftains fought for dominance; or it may have been news brought home by merchants of the riches to be found in trading settlements further west.

Probably it was a combination of all three. But in that first raiding party hit Lindisfarne and within a few years further Viking bands had struck Scotland , Ireland and France Their victims did not refer to them as Vikings. At first the raids were small-scale affairs, a matter of a few boatloads of men who would return home once they had collected sufficient plunder or if the resistance they encountered was too strong.

But in the s they began to overwinter in southern England , in Ireland and along the Seine in France, establishing bases from which they began to dominate inland areas. The raids reached a crescendo in the second half of the ninth century. In Ireland the Vikings established longphorts — fortified ports — including at Dublin, from which they dominated much of the eastern part of the island. In France they grew in strength as a divided Frankish kingdom fractured politically and in a Viking army besieged and almost captured Paris.

In Scotland they established an earldom in the Orkneys and overran the Shetlands and the Hebrides. Led by a pair of warrior brothers, Halfdan and Ivar the Boneless, they picked off the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England one by one.

First Northumbria, with its capital at York, fell to them in , then East Anglia, followed by the central English kingdom of Mercia. Finally, only Wessex, ruled by King Alfred , remained. A pious bookworm, Alfred had only become king because his three more martial older brothers had sickened or died in battle in previous Viking invasions. In early January a section of the Great Army led by Guthrum crossed the frontier and caught Alfred by surprise at the royal estate at Chippenham.

Alfred barely managed to escape and spent months skulking in the Somerset marshes at Athelney. Before long other Vikings realized that Frankish rulers were willing to pay them rich sums to prevent them from attacking their subjects, making Frankia an irresistible target for further Viking activity. By the mid-ninth century, Ireland, Scotland and England had become major targets for Viking settlement as well as raids.

When King Charles the Bald began defending West Frankia more energetically in , fortifying towns, abbeys, rivers and coastal areas, Viking forces began to concentrate more on England than Frankia. In the wave of Viking attacks in England after , only one kingdom—Wessex—was able to successfully resist. Viking armies mostly Danish conquered East Anglia and Northumberland and dismantled Mercia, while in King Alfred the Great of Wessex became the only king to decisively defeat a Danish army in England.

In the first half of the 10th century, English armies led by the descendants of Alfred of Wessex began reconquering Scandinavian areas of England; the last Scandinavian king, Erik Bloodaxe, was expelled and killed around , permanently uniting English into one kingdom. Meanwhile, Viking armies remained active on the European continent throughout the ninth century, brutally sacking Nantes on the French coast in and attacking towns as far inland as Paris, Limoges, Orleans, Tours and Nimes.

In , Vikings stormed Seville then controlled by the Arabs ; in , they plundered Pisa, though an Arab fleet battered them on the way back north. In the ninth century, Scandinavians mainly Norwegians began to colonize Iceland, an island in the North Atlantic where no one had yet settled in large numbers.

By the late 10th century, some Vikings including the famous Erik the Red moved even further westward, to Greenland. According to later Icelandic histories, some of the early Viking settlers in Greenland supposedly led by the Viking hero Leif Eriksson , son of Erik the Red may have become the first Europeans to discover and explore North America.

The midth-century reign of Harald Bluetooth as king of a newly unified, powerful and Christianized Denmark marked the beginning of a second Viking age. Large-scale raids, often organized by royal leaders, hit the coasts of Europe and especially England, where the line of kings descended from Alfred the Great was faltering.

Crowned king of England on Christmas Day in , William managed to retain the crown against further Danish challenges. The events of in England effectively marked the end of the Viking Age. Today, signs of the Viking legacy can be found mostly in the Scandinavian origins of some vocabulary and place-names in the areas in which they settled, including northern England, Scotland and Russia.

Erik real name Erik Thorvaldsson owed his epithet to his violent temperament and flowing red hair. Leif is generally considered to have been the first European to set foot in North America, a full years before Christopher Columbus. The son of Erik the Red, Leif is thought to have arrived in the New World in around , having ventured off course en route to Greenland. No, not the wheelchair-bound detective from the s TV show.

This Ironside was a legendary Swedish king who may be familiar to fans of Vikings on the History Channel. Bjorn was the son of Ragnar Lothbrok and was renowned for the raids he led on France, England and along the Mediterranean coastline. Bjorn appears in various sources outside of the sagas such as Annales Bertiniani and the Chronicon Fontanellense, they depict him as a dominant Viking leader. Later, William would write about Bjorns raids down the Iberian coast and into the Mediterranean before his death in Frisia.

The longships were usually adorned with carved dragon heads at the bow, which were believed to keep evil spirits away. The dragon head coupled with a large square, red-striped sail would come to be known as the signature of the Vikings.

The sight would strike fear into the hearts of Europeans for three centuries. The Vikings set up colonies on the west coast of Greenland during the 10th century. The Viking sagas tell of journeys they undertook from these Greenland colonies to the New World. They mention places named "Helluland" widely believed to be Baffin Island , "Markland" widely believed to be Labrador and "Vinland" a more mysterious location which some archaeologists believe could be Newfoundland.

At present the only confirmed Viking site in the New World is located at L'anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. That site was excavated in the s. Additionally there are three possible Viking sites that archaeologists have recently excavated in Canada. Two of the possible sites are located in Newfoundland while a third site is located on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. One possible Viking site is located at Point Rosee in southern Newfoundland; at the site, archaeologists found a possible bog iron roasting hearth beside a structure made with turf.

Another possible Viking site is located at Sop's arm in Newfoundland and includes a series of "pitfalls" that would have been used to trap large animals such as caribou. These pitfalls are arranged in a straight line, and archaeologists believe that the Vikings could have driven the animals toward these pitfalls where the animals could have been trapped and killed. At the third possible Viking site, located at Nanook on Baffin Island, researchers found artifacts that may have been used in metal production and the remains of a structure that may have been built by the Vikings.

Many modern perceptions of Vikings found their origins through Catholic propaganda.