Sublime

In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders,

Whereas the broader ships of the early Viking Age seem to have been multipurpose, capable of transporting both crews and cargo, from the late 800s, there is evidence of specialised vessels ranging from offshore patrol boats to the equivalent of royal yachts, deep-sea cargo haulers, fishing smacks, and—of course—a range of slim, predatory warships o

the legendary sagas sometimes include narratives that ostensibly concern events long before the Viking Age, stretching back to the time of the great migrations when the post-Roman map of Europe was violently transformed. Figures such as the Hun warlord Attila appear (rather approvingly), along with fifth- and sixth-century kings and military leader

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.

A much-quoted Oxfordshire chronicler, writing around 1220 but working from older sources, recorded that Viking men arriving in England combed their hair every day, washed once a week, regularly changed their clothes, and “drew attention to themselves by many such frivolous whims”—behaviour so astonishing that the English women preferred them to the

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.

At Mammen in Denmark, one of the richest chamber graves of the whole Viking Age was made c. 970 for a man whose clothing has enabled us to reconstruct the dress of society’s highest echelons. The chamber itself resembled a hall and even had a pitched roof, all concealed under a great mound. The man was interred with a magnificent axe decorated in a