What Happened to the Vikings?

When I talk to general audience on Viking topics, some frequently asked questions are: What happened to the Vikings? A simplistic definition calls the Vikings those people who lived in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic settlements in the Viking age, with the Viking age arbitrarily defined as the years between 793 and 1066. It was during this time that these Northern people had the largest impact on other Europeans, through trade, and through their Viking raids.

Using this definition as a basis, it’s easy to answer to the question: what happened to the Vikings? The end of the Vikings occurred when the Northmen stopped raiding. Changes occurred not only in the Norse societies, but also throughout Europe where the raids took place.

A ship, required for raiding, was a substantial investment, and one couldn’t leave one’s farm unless there were enough hired hands available to take care of the farm chores while the owner was out raiding. By the end of the Viking age, this balance had changed. These people were not available to go raiding.

When a band of Danish raiders arrived in Frankish lands, they were met by a Frankish emissary, who asked to be taken to the leader of the Viking band. He was told, We are all leaders here. The island monastery at Iona was raided three times by Vikings, in the years 795, 802, and 806.

The Viking age ended when the raids stopped. The year 1066 is frequently used as a convenient marker for the end of the Viking age. The raids slowed and stopped because the times changed.

How Long Had Greenland Been A Viking Colony?

The couple had been sailing from Norway to Iceland when they were blown off course; they ended up settling in Greenland, which by then had been a Viking colony for some 400 years. But according to the letters, he says, “it was just an ordinary wedding in an orderly community.” Europeans didn’t return to Greenland until the early 18th century.

Amid that calamity, so the story goes, Greenland’s Vikings—numbering 5,000 at their peak—never gave up their old ways. You can do a lot of things right—you can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient—and you go extinct anyway.” And according to other archaeologists, the plot thickens even more: It may be that Greenland’s Vikings didn’t vanish, at least not all of them.

Nearly every summer for the last several years, Smiarowski has returned to various sites in the Eastern Settlement to understand how the Vikings managed to live here for so many centuries, and what happened to them in the end. The ubiquity of seal bones is evidence that the Norse began hunting the animals “from the very beginning,” Smiarowski says. In the earliest days of the settlements, Smiarowski says, the study found that marine animals made up 30 to 40 percent of the Norse diet.

Then the catch was divided among the farms, I would assume according to how much each farm contributed to the hunt.” The annual spring seal hunt might have resembled communal whale hunts practiced to this day by the Faroe Islanders, who are the descendants of Vikings. Smiarowski, McGovern and other archaeologists now suspect that the Vikings first traveled to Greenland not in search of new land to farm—a motive mentioned in some of the old sagas—but to acquire walrus-tusk ivory, one of medieval Europe’s most valuable trade items.

Written records from the period mention sailing times of 27 days to the hunting grounds from the Eastern Settlement and 15 days from the Western Settlement. “Norse society in Greenland couldn’t survive without trade with Europe,” says Arneborg, “and that’s from day one.” Then, in the 13th century, after three centuries, their world changed profoundly.

“If you consider the world today, many communities will face exposure to climate change,” says Dugmore. Some believe that the Norse, faced with the triple threat of economic collapse, pandemic and climate change, simply packed up and left. Every spring and summer, nearly all the men would be far from home, hunting.

A whole bunch of little communities never recovered.” Norse society itself comprised two very small communities: the Eastern and Western settlements. No sheep had been in that room,” says Arneborg.

When Did A Vast Number Of Scandinavians Leave Their Homelands To Seek Their Fortunes Elsewhere?

From around A.D. 800 to the 11th century, a vast number of Scandinavians left their homelands to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Over the next three centuries, they would leave their mark as pirates, raiders, traders and settlers on much of Britain and the European continent, as well as parts of modern-day Russia, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. Contrary to some popular conceptions of the Vikings, they were not a “race” linked by ties of common ancestry or patriotism, and could not be defined by any particular sense of “Viking-ness.”

The Viking predecessors–pirates who preyed on merchant ships in the Baltic Sea–would use this knowledge to expand their fortune-seeking activities into the North Sea and beyond. Early Viking Raids In A.D. 793, an attack on the Lindisfarne monastery off the coast of Northumberland in northeastern England marked the beginning of the Viking Age. The culprits–probably Norwegians who sailed directly across the North Sea–did not destroy the monastery completely, but the attack shook the European religious world to its core.

For several decades, the Vikings confined themselves to hit-and-run raids against coastal targets in the British Isles (particularly Ireland) and Europe (the trading center of Dorestad, 80 kilometers from the North Sea, became a frequent target after 830). Before long other Vikings realized that Frankish rulers were willing to pay them rich sums to prevent them from attacking their subjects, making Frankia an irresistible target for further Viking activity. Conquests in the British Isles By the mid-ninth century, Ireland, Scotland and England had become major targets for Viking settlement as well as raids.

In the first half of the 10th century, English armies led by the descendants of Alfred of Wessex began reconquering Scandinavian areas of England; the last Scandinavian king, Erik Bloodaxe, was expelled and killed around 952, permanently uniting English into one kingdom. Viking Settlements: Europe and Beyond Meanwhile, Viking armies remained active on the European continent throughout the ninth century, brutally sacking Nantes (on the French coast) in 842 and attacking towns as far inland as Paris, Limoges, Orleans, Tours and Nimes. This region of northern France is now known as Normandy, or “land of the Northmen.”

Beyond that, there is little evidence of Viking presence in the New World, and they didn’t form permanent settlements. Danish Dominance The mid-10th-century reign of Harald Bluetooth as king of a newly unified, powerful and Christianized Denmark marked the beginning of a second Viking age. Harald’s rebellious son, Sven Forkbeard, led Viking raids on England beginning in 991 and conquered the entire kingdom in 1013, sending King Ethelred into exile.

Upon his death (without heirs) in 1066, Harold Godwinesson, the son of Edward’s most powerful noble, laid claim to the throne. Today, signs of the Viking legacy can be found mostly in the Scandinavian origins of some vocabulary and place-names in the areas in which they settled, including northern England, Scotland and Russia.