Sublime

In a different context again, in 1962 an innovative coffer-dam excavation revealed five ships that had been deliberately scuttled in the eleventh century to form part of a sunken blockade controlling access to the Roskilde fjord in Denmark. They proved to be of types that had not been seen before in the archaeology, but which expanded the typology

The Scandinavians of the eighth to eleventh centuries knew the word—víkingr in Old Norse when applied to a person—but they would not have recognised themselves or their times by that name. For them it would perhaps have meant something approximating to ‘pirate’, defining an occupation or an activity (and probably a relatively marginal one); it was

Whereas the broader ships of the early Viking Age seem to have been multipurpose, capable of transporting both crews and cargo, from the late 800s, there is evidence of specialised vessels ranging from offshore patrol boats to the equivalent of royal yachts, deep-sea cargo haulers, fishing smacks, and—of course—a range of slim, predatory warships o

the legendary sagas sometimes include narratives that ostensibly concern events long before the Viking Age, stretching back to the time of the great migrations when the post-Roman map of Europe was violently transformed. Figures such as the Hun warlord Attila appear (rather approvingly), along with fifth- and sixth-century kings and military leader

In poetry, the English called them wælwulfas, ‘slaughter-wolves’, and with good reason—but the Vikings even said it themselves. Here is the great tenth-century Icelandic warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grímsson, describing his raiding experiences (in an effort to impress a woman at a feast, which also tells you something about him): Farit hefi ek blóðgum

In Norway, especially (where there is greater resolution of the data), but also in the rest of Scandinavia, the major question is what happened to this system of communal government at its points of contact with the rising power of kings. It is not coincidental that this political friction begins to be felt precisely in the eighth century, at the s

the largest longship ever found—thirty-two metres long, with a single-watch crew of eighty that could have been doubled for war. Dating to the early eleventh century, it is of the dimensions the sagas give for the highest rank of royal warships.

In practice, the Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence, not the contact.

A much-quoted Oxfordshire chronicler, writing around 1220 but working from older sources, recorded that Viking men arriving in England combed their hair every day, washed once a week, regularly changed their clothes, and “drew attention to themselves by many such frivolous whims”—behaviour so astonishing that the English women preferred them to the