Peter Archer - The Book of Viking Myths: From the Voyages of Leif Erikson to the Deeds of Odin, the Storied History and Folklore of the Vikings

One morning in the year 793, the monks of the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of eastern Britain, looked from their stone huts in puzzlement. A vessel had anchored off the shore, one like none they had seen before. It was long and rode low in the water. Oarsmen maneuvered it into the tiny harbor, while a single square sail hung from the mast in the center of the boat. Its prow rose high above the crew and the monks noticed it was carved into a ferocious dragons head.

Who were these strange folk? the monks asked one another. And what did they want?

Their questions were soon answered. With cries, the men from the boat leaped ashore, wielding spears and axes. Monks who tried to stop them were hewn down. Others were captured, shackled, and carried off to the ship. Streams of blood ran over the rocks and mingled with the uncaring sea.

The invaders swept through the settlement, seizing precious relicsnot for their religious value but for their material worth. When all had been taken or destroyed, the raiders hurled torches into the buildings and returned to their boats. Those monks made captive looked back at the black smoke rising from the holy isle. It was the last they would ever see of it; most of them were carried off to the east where they were sold into slavery.

The raid on Lindisfarne was the first major attack by the people history would come to know as the Vikings. For more than a century, their longboats ranged along the coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. They brought such terror with them that for decades priests added to their prayers the words: From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us! The Lindisfarne raid sent shockwaves throughout Christendom. Alcuin of York, a leading intellectual light of Britain, later a member of the court of Emperor Charlemagne, wrote:

We and our fathers have now lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such a voyage was not thought possible. The church of St. Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagansa place more sacred than any in Britain.

The first Viking forays were, indeed, almost wholly destructive. What was portable was carried off in the longships. What was not was burned. Monasteries were particularly tempting targets, since they were concentrations of what wealth existed in the early medieval world.

However, gradually, over the next two centuries after the Lindisfarne raid, a change could be discerned. The raiders still came, striking terror into the hearts of Christians. But now they came to stay. Viking settlements spread across northern Britain until by 880 they had captured and controlled more than half the country.

Their territory was called the Danelaw, and their incursions were only halted by the military campaigns of the Wessex ruler, Alfred the Great.

Other Viking bands went even farther afield. Some attacked the coast of France; in 845 a Viking fleet sailed up the Seine River and attacked Paris. Some of the raiders traveled as far east as Baghdad; others launched assaults on the glittering city of Constantinople, the greatest city in Christendom. They penetrated lands to the north and settled there; they were known as Rus, perhaps from the red hair many of them grew. In time, the area would take its name from them and be called Russia.

And, amazingly, they sailed even farther to the west. In 860, Vikings landed on the uninhabited island of Iceland and established a thriving culture there. In the late tenth century Erik the Red, a Viking leader who was, at the time, wanted for murder in Norway and Iceland, planted a settlement in Greenland. Some years later, his son, Leif Erikson, and a small group of companions, sailed still farther west and encountered more land. They called it Vinland; today the site of their first settlement is called LAnse aux Meadows and lies at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. It was the first European settlement in North America, coming almost 500 years before the voyages of Columbus.