The Children of Ash and Elm

The men wore jewellery of simple cloak pins, implying practical, hard-wearing gear for use at sea—nothing fancy. The exceptions were a few wearing beads and two with necklaces of bear’s teeth; they would have looked striking. The bodies were strewn with gaming pieces. Some had fish carefully placed over them; others held sea birds in their arms. So

Attention turned to another passage in Alcuin’s same letter to Aethelred of Northumbria: Consider the dress, the hairstyle, and the luxurious habits of the princes and people. Look at the hairstyle, how you have wished to imitate the pagans in their beards and hair. Does not the terror threaten of those whose hairstyle you wished to have?

In 792 a charter of King Offa of Mercia refers to Kent, and the need for military service against “seaborne pagans” (who can only be Scandinavians) in migratory fleets that had presumably been active for some time.

In the centre of the mound lay a man with some of the worst injuries and also the finest weapons, including a ring-hilt sword—the mark of a very high-status leader. Unlike the other bodies, his had not been covered with gaming pieces; instead, he had only one, the king, and it had been placed in his mouth.

The Vikings were back the following year, and they knew what they liked: isolated, undefended, but very rich monastic houses. They were probably well familiar with them from trading ventures, as markets were sometimes held near such institutions. Any Scandinavian entering a church of this kind—rather drab on the outside and served by ineffectual-lo

Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up paralle

The clear suggestion, reinforced by massive wounds on many of the bodies, is that the Salme burials resulted from a Svear maritime expedition that ended in violence—in other words, a raid. It has also been argued that this was a diplomatic mission; hawks were commonly used as prestige gifts and were extraordinarily difficult to keep alive in transp

In practice, the Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence, not the contact.

what systems theorists call singularities—relatively small social changes in themselves but with long-term and large-scale impacts. They can be hard to get a grip on, often the result of many separate elements suddenly coming together in what may be a more-or-less random manner. Once set in motion, however, they can be difficult or even impossible