Did the Fall of the Roman Empire Cause the Viking Age?
Revisiting the timeline of Viking history through genetics, archaeology, and a forgotten migration.
For generations, the Viking Age has had a definitive start date: 793 AD, the year of the infamous raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne. But what if that moment was merely a symptom of a much deeper, longer historical process? In a recent episode of Vikingology, I sat down with Alex Harvey to explore a growing body of academic discourse that pushes the origins of Viking activity much farther back—potentially to the waning days of the Western Roman Empire.
In that conversation, we explored the idea that the social, economic, and environmental shifts at the end of the Roman period may have laid the groundwork for what would eventually be recognized as the Viking phenomenon. This includes the emergence of trade networks in the North Sea, the fragmentation of power structures across Europe, and long-term cultural exchanges between Scandinavia and the British Isles well before the first recorded raid.
This year, a newly published stud…
