In 793, a flotilla attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, ravaging Northumbria and the sacred island of Iona, before returning to assault Scotland and Ireland. Charlemagne himself witnessed the first raids on his shores, and was able to strike back. Now, in 845, a fleet of 120 longships carrying 5,000 Vikings sailed up the Seine and attacked Paris. The invaders sacrificed Frankish prisoners to their god Odin and departed only when the king of West Francia, later emperor, Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson, paid them Danegeld of 7,000 livres of silver and gold.
The war bands, led by lords and kings, had originally sought slaves and loot, but now they started to settle, founding kingdoms in Dublin, the isles of western Scotland, and York, the start of an advance into England that threatened the existence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The king of Wessex, Alfred, was driven by them into the Somerset marshes, but in 878 he defeated a Viking army, becoming strong enough to divide the island with the Danes, whose leader Guthrum he helped convert to Christianity. In 886, after merging Wessex with Mercia, Alfred called himself King of the Anglo-Saxons,* but the Vikings now ruled much of Britain and Ireland, and were soon attacking Francia again.
Who were they? They were Scandinavians who shared a worldview and cosmology based around their gods led by the one-eyed god of war Odin, who appeared as a warrior adventurer, and by Thor, god of farming. Theirs was a cult of war and heroism,* whose followers worshipped at annual festivals where horses and humans were sacrificed, the latter hung from trees – which had a special place in their beliefs – or torn apart by bending a tree back and releasing it. Their heroes and exploits were celebrated in epic stories and engraved runestones, their dead burned in or buried alongside their superb longships.
Arabs called them al-Madjus, fire worshippers, because they burned their dead; Europeans called them Norsemen; and they may have called themselves Vikings or
No one knows why these Scandinavians embarked on their adventures at this moment: a rising population maybe created competition for land; civil strife made life difficult; their ritual exposure of female babies may have created a shortage of women that required bride stealing. They initially took a delight in killing priests and raiding churches, revenge perhaps for Frankish atrocities, but the original motive was treasure, and then slaves – the grandees of Baghdad, Constantinople and Cordoba craved their furs and slaves. But perhaps the chief reason for launching their raids was that they could. Their improved shallow-draught, full-sailed ships, guided by lodestones, meant they could travel across oceans and up rivers. They were led by warrior kings yet they were partly governed by
How they really lived is mysterious enough that modern historians can project just about anything – including wild drug taking and transvestism – with the clues that have been left us. In battle they fought with a frenzy that may or may not have been stimulated by a hallucinogen – sticky nightshade. They were polygynous; some women may have been warriors, given that a very few female tombs contain broadswords – though it may be that everyone was buried with swords. Christians and Muslims were certainly amazed by their lack of sexual inhibitions.
In 862, a Viking chieftain named Rurik, the founder of a family that would rule Russia until 1598, led a war band southwards from Scandinavia down the Dnieper into an ever-changing riverine borderland where Turkic and Slavic pagans, dominated by a rising Turkic khanate, the Khazars, vied for the rich prizes of trade with Constantinople and Baghdad. At this time, Arab writers mention a grouping called al-Rusiyya – the Rus, probably derived from the Old Norse
