Even during the lecture I attended about Vikings, I wasn’t certain how accurate the information was. For example, it was mentioned that King Harald was the cause of the Vikings, but he reigned in the 800s and the first documented Viking raid was 793 – a few things like this didn’t add up. So I spent a little time today on various college (.edu), magazine (Smithsonian), and other (Discovery Channel and PBS) sites poking around.
The Viking Age lasted from 793 BC until 1066 AD, but the reality is that like all dates these are not set in stone. Unlike The Roman Empire or US History, there is not a few leaders or a concrete event that one can wrap around the Vikings. Rather, Scandinavia was made up of many smaller kingdoms, and the Vikings were boat travelers, so an increasing number of groups within this area learned how to use their boats to augment land, money, women and slaves by attacking other settlements. Because they were not Christian, they did not mind attacking monestaries.
Because Vikings did not come from a single source, much of the history is learned and taken from The Sagas, which were written centuries later, and through archeologic sites, so this is an involving and somewhat interpreted history.