Who were the Vikings?

The Viking Age is conventionally dated from the raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The people involved came from what is now Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and viking originally described the activity of raiding rather than a people, so most Scandinavians of the period were farmers who never went viking at all. Their reach was extraordinary: raiding and settling in Britain, Ireland, and France, establishing trade routes through Russia to Constantinople and the Islamic world, colonizing Iceland and Greenland, and reaching North America around the year 1000, confirmed archaeologically at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, roughly five centuries before Columbus.

Their ships were the enabling technology. The longship combined a shallow draft that allowed river navigation and beach landings with a hull flexible and seaworthy enough for open ocean, and with both sail and oars it could move fast and land anywhere, which made coastal defenses of the period largely useless. Norse navigation across the North Atlantic without a magnetic compass relied on latitude sailing, landmarks, bird and wave behavior, and possibly sun compasses.

Several popular images are wrong. Horned helmets have no archaeological basis in the Viking Age and derive from nineteenth-century romantic art and opera costume design. The image of uniformly filthy barbarians conflicts with evidence of combs, tweezers, and razors as common grave goods and with contemporary English complaints that Danish settlers bathed weekly and were therefore unfairly attractive. And their societies were more complex than the raiding image suggests, with legal assemblies called things, extensive craft production, poetry and saga traditions written down later in Iceland, and trade networks that moved Arabic silver into Scandinavia in large quantities.