‘The desolation of the pagans’

Abstract

One of the first recorded Viking raids in Western Europe took place on June 8th in the year 793, when the island monastery of Lindisfarne was sacked.¹ It was to be the start of a series of such assaults on parts of Britain, Ireland, and the Channel and Atlantic coasts of France which at times would become an almost annual occurrence. Such raids in turn proved to be the forerunners of waves of migration out of Scandinavia. The destructiveness of the Viking period in the history of Western Europe, which extended from the very end of the eighth to the early eleventh centuries, has long been appreciated, despite the recent attempts made by revisionist historians to try to minimise it.² The resulting populist slogan that has been applied to the Vikings — ‘traders not raiders’ — is deceptive in implying that the same people could not be both. On the other hand, it must be admitted that, in certain of the regions that they came to settle in, the economic and cultural contributions made by the Scandinavians in the ninth to eleventh centuries represented considerable advances over what had been achieved by the indigenous culture.³