Viking expansion was the movement of Norse seafarers out of what are now Denmark, Norway and Sweden between the late 8th century and 1066, as raiders, traders, mercenaries and settlers. In about 270 years it reached from Newfoundland in the west, where Norse activity has been dated to 1021, to the Caspian Sea and Constantinople in the east, and south to Seville and, through the Strait of Gibraltar, the coast of Morocco. At its political peak, Cnut the Great ruled England, Denmark and Norway together in the North Sea Empire, holding all three from 1028 until his death in 1035. Along the sea lanes and rivers moved silver, furs, walrus ivory and enslaved people. Its lasting result was a set of states and towns: Dublin, the Duchy of Normandy, the Rus’ principalities of Novgorod and Kiev, the Danelaw in England, and the settled societies of the Faroes and Iceland. It also put the Norse in Greenland and, briefly, North America.
789–840: Portland, Lindisfarne and Iona, the first raids from Hordaland
The earliest recorded landing in England came in 789, during the reign of Beorhtric of Wessex, when three ships from Hordaland in western Norway put in at the Isle of Portland in Dorset and killed the king’s reeve, Beaduhard, who had taken them for merchants. The attack usually treated as the opening of the Viking Age came on 8 June 793, when raiders sacked the monastery on Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the Northumbrian coast. Monks were killed or carried off as slaves along with the church treasures. Alcuin of York wrote that Britain had never seen such terror.
Raiders went for monasteries because that was where portable wealth was stored and where few men carried weapons. Iona, off western Scotland, was attacked in 794 and burned in 802; the northern Irish coast was raided from 795. Historians still argue over the causes. Suggestions include a surplus of young men without land in western Norway, a hunger for silver as trade with the Islamic world grew, and reaction to Charlemagne’s forced conversion of the pagan Saxons. None has been proven. The raiders’ advantage was the clinker-built ship, light enough to beach and shallow enough to row up rivers. The Oseberg ship, buried near Tønsberg in Vestfold no earlier than 834, is 21.58 metres long and built almost entirely of oak.
840–878: Dublin, Paris, Seville and York, from overwintering to conquest
Around 840 the raids changed character. In Ireland the Norse began building fortified ship camps called longphorts and staying through the winter, the first at Dublin and Linn Duachaill. In 853 Amlaíb (Olaf) became the first king of Dublin. On the Continent an expedition rowed up the Seine to Paris in 845. A fleet that had worked its way down the Atlantic coasts entered the Guadalquivir and took Seville, then part of the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba, in early October 844, before Emir Abd ar-Rahman II’s army drove it out. In 859–862 Hastein and Björn Ironside led 62 ships from the Loire through the Strait of Gibraltar, burned the mosque at Algeciras and occupied Nekor, on the Moroccan coast, for eight days.
The decisive shift came in England. In 865 the Great Heathen Army, a coalition mostly from Denmark led by Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan and Ubba, landed in East Anglia. It aimed not to raid but to conquer, and over 14 years it overran East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia, capturing York in November 866. Only Wessex held. Alfred defeated the Danish king Guthrum at Edington in 878, and a later treaty between the two kings drew a frontier up the Thames, the River Lea, a straight line to Bedford, then the Ouse to Watling Street. The land to the north and east became the Danelaw, and York, or Jórvík, became the centre of a Viking kingdom in the north.
860–1000s: Novgorod, Kiev and Constantinople on the eastern rivers
Swedish Vikings looked east. Crossing the Baltic, they followed the rivers of what are now Russia, Belarus and Ukraine: the Volga down to the Caspian and the Dnieper down to the Black Sea. These traders and warriors were called Rus’, and later Varangians. The Russian Primary Chronicle says that in about 862 the Finnic and Slavic tribes invited Rurik and his brothers to rule them, and he settled at Novgorod, Holmgarðr in Norse, on the Volkhov River. Oleg is said to have seized Kiev in 882, a date some historians now doubt, laying the foundations of Kievan Rus’. In 860 a Rus’ fleet attacked the outskirts of Constantinople itself.
The eastern trade rested heavily on slavery. Captives taken in Eastern Europe and the Baltic were shipped down the Dnieper to Byzantium or down the Volga to Volga Bulgaria and on to the Abbasid and Samanid markets, in exchange for silk and silver dirhams. The Spillings Hoard, found on Gotland in 1999 and the largest Viking silver treasure in the world, weighed 67 kg and held 14,295 coins, most of them Islamic. Trading towns grew at the western end of these routes: Birka, on an island in Lake Mälaren about 30 km west of modern Stockholm, flourished from around 750 to 975, and Hedeby, at the base of the Jutland peninsula in today’s Germany, struck the traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub around 965 as “a very large city at the very end of the world’s ocean”. From the 10th century many Scandinavians served in the Byzantine emperors’ Varangian Guard. So many Swedes went that the Västergötland law code barred anyone staying in “Greece” from inheriting.
874–1021: Iceland, Greenland and L’Anse aux Meadows across the North Atlantic
West of Norway, the Norse moved from island to island: Shetland and Orkney, the Faroes, then Iceland. Written sources date permanent settlement of Iceland to about 874, when Ingólfr Arnarson arrived to farm near what is now Reykjavík. Archaeology agrees that the whole island was claimed within a few decades. Estimates of the number of settlers range from 4,300 to 24,000. In 930 they founded the Althing, an assembly meeting at Þingvellir, and the Age of Settlement is usually said to end then.
Greenland followed. Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland around 982, spent three years exploring its southwest coast and returned in 985 with colonists. Of 25 ships that set out, only 14 arrived. They founded the Eastern Settlement near today’s Qaqortoq and the Western Settlement near Nuuk, which at their height held 2,000 to 3,000 people living from livestock, seal hunting and the export of walrus ivory to Europe.
The sagas say Erik’s son Leif Erikson sailed on to lands he called Helluland, Markland and Vinland. The only confirmed Norse site in the Americas is L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, excavated from the 1960s. A 2021 study in Nature, measuring radiocarbon in the tree rings of wood found at the site, dated Norse activity there to 1021. Its eight sod buildings could house between 30 and 160 people and included an iron smithy and a boat-repair area, but no stables or graves. That suggests a base for repairing ships and gathering timber rather than a colony. Butternuts found there do not grow in Newfoundland, a sign that crews ranged further south.
911–1066: Rollo’s Rouen, Cnut’s North Sea Empire and the end at Stamford Bridge
In the 10th and 11th centuries raiders turned into rulers. In 911 the Frankish king Charles the Simple granted Rouen and the lower Seine to the Viking leader Rollo under the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, in return for baptism and a promise to guard the river against other Vikings. That grant became the Duchy of Normandy, and within a few generations its Norse settlers spoke a form of French. In Ireland the Vikings returned to Dublin in 914 after being expelled in 902 and founded Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick, Ireland’s first large towns; Dublin became the largest slave port in western Europe. Their power was broken by Irish kings, above all Brian Boru, at Glenmama in 999 and Clontarf in 1014. In England, Eric Bloodaxe took York in 947, but Scandinavian rule there ended in 954.
Scandinavia itself was becoming a set of Christian kingdoms with ambitions overseas. The Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard, who also held parts of Norway, conquered England in 1013. His son Cnut won the English throne in 1016, and when he died in 1035 he was king of Denmark, England and Norway and of part of Sweden. This North Sea Empire was held together only by the sea. It split on his death, and the last of it, Harthacnut’s rule of England and Denmark, ended in 1042.
The usual end date is 1066. On 25 September the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada was killed invading England at Stamford Bridge, near York. Nineteen days later, Duke William of Normandy, a descendant of Rollo, won at Hastings. Norse rule lingered at the edges: the Western Isles and the Isle of Man stayed under Norway until 1266, and Orkney and Shetland until 1469. The Western Settlement in Greenland was abandoned in the mid-14th century and the Eastern one in the 15th. The legacy is still on the map, in Dublin and York, in Normandy’s name, and in Iceland’s Althing. For the sea lanes and river portages in detail, see our guide to Viking trade routes. The ice-bound island at the far end of the Atlantic chain is covered in our Greenland guide.