If you are interested in this question, you have landed in the right place here!
WELCOME TO MY SITE! Urs Pape, Neerach / Switzerland.
For university-educated British people, the Viking Age begins on 8th June 793 with the attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne in the north-east of England by northern robbers and ends on 14th October 1066 with the victory in the Battle near Hastings by the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror over an Anglo-Saxon army led by King Harold II (Godwinson), sometimes called „The last Anglo-Saxon king“. This is what English students learn. These „precise“ time-lines, however, are quite debatable – but let’s leave that!
What is certain, however, is that the Vikings and the Normans wrote European history from the end of the 8th to the middle of the 11th century. They broke out of their barren surroundings within the cool fjords of the north and raged as robbers along the European coasts. They soon discovered new habitats first as settlers or as immigrants. They travelled as immigrants, in their impressive ships to the Orkneys, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Ireland. They discovered and populated the Faroe Islands and Iceland. In Greenland, they lived in almost 300 settlements for over 450 years, and they even sailed as far as the Canadian coast, scientifically proved by the discovery, excavation and documentation of L’Anse-aux-Meadows on the Canadian Island of Newfoundland.
As merchants, they traded with all European nations, opening up trade routes across the oceans surrounding Europe, even over the Russian rivers via Novgorod and Kiev to Constantinople.
They founded Normandy (A.D. 911) and travelled as Normans to southern Italy, Sicily and as far as Jerusalem and the North African coast. On behalf of the Pope, they established the first Christian kingdom of Sicily, whose first ruler was the Norman Roger de Hauteville.
Norwegians, Danes, Swedes: every Nordic nation had its different preferences, I call this the business plans of the Vikings.
. . . . . . . . . . . but the horned helmet never really existed; not at all! It really did n’t!