#495 – Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age

Your writing and podcasts take us from the Vikings to the Normans to Crusades to the collapse of the East Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire.

There's a thread, I think, that connects the Vikings through all of it.

So let's start at the beginning.

Let's start with the Vikings.

So the age of the Vikings was intense and violent, as you write about, often dated from 793 AD to 1066 AD.

It lasted less than three centuries.

So the start is often dated to June 8th, 793.

What happened on June 8th, 793?

In June of 793, a group of Vikings, probably originating from Norway, arrived at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, which was a monastic community, and they essentially slaughtered everyone, burned a couple of buildings, and grabbed everything that had any value and left.

And that was the first Viking raid that came in force.

And I do think Lindisfarne is a good beginning date because the terror that it brought really signified what was to come for the next two to three centuries.

So the word of it has spread.

Like there's a bunch of accounts, like the monk Alcuin wrote about this event in a letter to King Aethelred of Northumbria, quote, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.

What made this race so psychologically devastating to this monk and to many of the monks on the island and then to all of Britain?

That's a great quote.

Alcuin was not just a regular scholar.

He was Charlemagne's favorite scholar, and he is largely responsible as much as one person can be for the Carolingian Renaissance that had done so much to elevate the early medieval world.

In fact, the spaces we have, the punctuation we have, spaces between words are likely a result of Alcuin's work.

He was an extremely literate man, and you can hear the terror creeping into that.

And part of that has to do with monastic communities, the church, and what they thought a monastic community was.

So the church was viewed as a sacred place.

Everyone in Europe, everyone in quotes, is nominally Christian, and the church is an area of safety.

It's a literal ark from the troubles of the world that you can flee to.

I believe there are even rules in England, for example, that if you had killed someone, you could flee to a church, and the civil authorities were not allowed to enter for up to 40 days.

So you could have sanctuary there.