HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

‘In us is fulfilled what once the prophet foretold: “from the north evil breaks forth, and a terrible glory will come from the Lord”’ (in nobis impletum est quod olim per prophetam praedictum est: ‘ab aquilone inardescunt mala et a Domino formidolosa laudatio veniet’) (Alcuin, Epistola 19 to the abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. Dümmler 1895, 55, trans. Allott 1974, 40). In the view of the great Northumbrian scholar Alcuin (d. 804), the Viking raids which struck England at the end of the eighth century were an unforeseen and terrible affliction, hinting at fulfilment of divine prophecy and testing times to come for the English. The raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne on 8 June 793 which prompted Alcuin's letter was among the first of many. The Vikings returned to Northumbria the following year, and attacked Portland in Dorset at some point during the reign of Beorhtric (786–802). Ireland and the Frankish Empire also fell prey to Viking raids at much the same time.

These depredations mark the beginning of the ‘first’ Viking Age (Sawyer 1969): a period of about a century and a half during which Scandinavian raiders, traders and settlers moved across the North Sea, exerting a profound effect on the peoples of Britain and Ireland. At roughly the same time other Scandinavians ventured eastwards across the Baltic and into Russia, and south into what is now France and the Low Countries (see inter alia Sawyer 1971; 1982; 1997; Helle 2003; Christiansen 2006, 214–35; Brink and Price 2008; Williams et al. 2014). The sobriquet Vikings applied to Scandinavians of this period, especially when they appeared abroad as aggressors, is essentially a modern invention: victims referred to their attackers as pagans, Northmen (in the Frankish world), ‘foreigners’ (in Ireland) or (in England) as Danes, lumping together the complex range of local identities current within Scandinavia (Abrams 2012; Christiansen 2006, 87–167).