The Scandinavian expansion of the eighth to eleventh centuries: the kings, the battles, the ships and the weapons.
The Viking Age is conventionally dated from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the death of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge in 1066 — a span of less than three centuries in which people from a thinly populated northern periphery reached Newfoundland, Baghdad and the walls of Constantinople.
The word itself is a problem the archive takes seriously. "Viking" in the sources is closer to an activity than an identity: most Scandinavians of the period farmed, and the raiders who gave the age its name were a minority pursuing a seasonal trade. What made them formidable was not ferocity, which their victims had met before, but the ship — a shallow-draught hull that could cross open sea and then row up a river, which meant no monastery, town or royal hall within reach of navigable water was safe.
The political consequences outlast the raiding by centuries. Scandinavian settlement reshaped England, produced the Duchy of Normandy and through it the Norman conquests of England and Sicily, founded the Rus principalities that became Russia and Ukraine, and supplied the Byzantine emperors with the Varangian Guard. The unification of Norway, Denmark and Sweden into kingdoms happened in the same period and largely because of it.
What follows is everything the archive holds on the period: the rulers who unified the northern kingdoms and the ones who failed, the battles that decided them, the dynasties that came out of them, and the arms and armour the age is remembered for.