Chapter I The territory of expansion

The birthplace of the Vikings was the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe (the land of Norway, Sweden and Denmark). There was infertile ground and corn failures were very often. The Vikings even had cruel tradition: in non-harvest years infant girls were taken away to the forest and then they died. Forests and mountains which covered the territory of Scandinavian Peninsula prevented to development of trading.

Today, historians agree, perhaps in one: the Vikings were moving to the west, and to the east – depending on the place of their residence. It is known that the ancestors of modern inhabitants of Norway, Denmark and southern provinces of Sweden to go camping in a westerly direction, reaching not only to Iceland and Greenland, but also to the borders of America which called Vinland. But those, who lived across the coast of Baltic sea, preferred to move to the East, their routs extended from Russian rivers to Byzantium borders. North Scotland and Ireland were also interesting for the Vikings. In 840 they founded Dublin, which was the part of Norwegian ownership until 1171.

There is a well-defined beginning of the Vikings era. Definitely then the monastery of Lindisfarne on the east coast of England was ruthlessly ruined by unknown fierce warriors. French, British and Irish told the stories about that awful day from generation to generation. Must admit that the Vikings liked robbery and they attacked usually defenseless churches and monasteries. There were discovered totally 4000 swords and spears by archeologists.

Iceland and Greenland were non-inhabited lands those days, so it was also attracted by the Vikings. Iceland is a great example of colonial policy- the clear descendants of the Norwegian Vikings lives here even in our days. But attempts to establish settlements in Greenland were unsuccessful.

The Vikings did not expand or conquer much into mainland Europe. Their realm was bordered by powerful cultures to the south. Early on it was the Saxons, who occupied Old Saxony, located in what is now Northern Germany. The Saxons were a fierce and powerful people and were often in conflict with the Vikings. To counter the Saxon aggression and solidify their own presence, the Danes constructed the huge defence fortification of Danevirke in and around Hedeby.

The motives driving the Viking expansion are a topic of much debate in Nordic history. 

One of the explanations is that the Vikings exploited a moment of weakness in the surrounding regions. England suffered from internal divisions and was relatively easy prey given the proximity of many towns to the sea or to navigable rivers. Lack of organized naval opposition throughout Western Europe allowed Viking ships to travel freely, raiding or trading as opportunity permitted. The decline in the profitability of old trade routes could also have played a role. Trade between western Europe and the rest of Eurasia suffered a severe blow when the Roman Empire fell in the 5th century. The expansion of Islam in the 7th century had also affected trade with western Europe.

R aids in Europe including raids and settlements from Scandinavia, were not something new and also seen long before the Vikings came. The Jutes invaded the British Isles three centuries earlier, pouring out from Jutland, before the Danes settled there. The Saxons and the Angles did the same, embarking from mainland Europe. The Viking raids were the first to be documented in writing by eyewitnesses, and they were much larger in scale and frequency than in previous times.

Facilitated by advanced seafaring skills, and characterized by the longship, Viking activities at times also extended into the Mediterranean littoral, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Following extended phases of (primarily sea- or river-borne) exploration, expansion and settlement, Viking (Norse) communities and polities were established in diverse areas of north-western Europe, European Russia, the North Atlantic islands and as far as the north-eastern coast of North America. This period of expansion witnessed the wider dissemination of Norse culture, while simultaneously introducing strong foreign cultural influences into Scandinavia itself, with profound developmental implications in both directions.

Popular, modern conceptions of the Vikings – the term frequently applied casually to their modern descendants and the inhabitants of modern Scandinavia – often strongly differ from the complex picture that emerges from archaeology and historical sources.

A romanticized picture of Vikings as noble savages began to emerge in the 18th century; this developed and became widely propagated during the 19th-century Viking revival. Received views of the Vikings as alternatively violent, piratical heathens or as intrepid adventurers owe much to conflicting varieties of the modern Viking myth that had taken shape by the early 20th century.