What Caused the Viking Age?
That they appeared suddenly in the historical record has launched historians, archeologists, and various fields of science on a quest to answer the question: What caused the Viking Age?
The causes of the Viking Age are a topic my co-host Terri Barnes and I have discussed at length on our podcast Vikingology.
On June 8, 793 A.D., the world of Christendom changed forever. A fleet of mysterious ships appeared off the coast of Northumbria and took aim at the island monastery of Lindisfarne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records: "In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these signs; a little after that in the same year on 8 [June] the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter."
In The Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Notker the Stammerer, the emperor of the Carolingian Empire allegedly bore witness to an early raid attempt off the coast of France. So the chronicler tells us when the Northman ships learned Charlemagne and his arm…
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