VIKING. A word wicing, "warrior," corresponding to the 0. Norse vikingr and the modern viking, was current in England at least a century before the earliest recorded Scandinavian descents upon the West. Its Scandinavian equivalent early acquired the more specialized sense of "sea-warrior," and the modern term "Viking age" is a convenient designation of the phase of Scandinavian history which produced the incessant raiding expeditions characteristic of the 9th and early loth cen turies. Most of our evidence as to the Vikings of this period is derived from the literature of the lands which they visited, and is therefore essentially hostile. To contemporary chroniclers they were utterly hateful, faithless, cruel and enemies of civi lization and the arts of peaceful life. Their own side of the story is untold, for the men who created the great literature of western Scandinavia had no certain memory of events or personalities in the true Viking age. Their character can only be inferred from the scale upon which their raids were planned, the forms of society which arose in the different lands of their settlement, and the archaeological evidence which reveals something of their cul ture. Judged in this way they cease to appear as a mere blind force of destruction. It becomes clear that they possessed their own culture, though it was not the culture of the Christian West. Long before the end of the 9th century they had learned to pene trate all the greater water-ways of Europe. And the raids through which they gained this knowledge were only preliminary to wider voyages through which at last even the New World became known for a moment to men of Scandinavian birth.
the northerners assimilated themselves more or less to the natives of the country. This course was followed in the history of the Viking attacks on Ireland, the earliest of their continuous series of attacks. Thus they began by seizing the island of Rechru (now Lambay) in Dublin bay (A.D. 795) and in 20 years were on the northern, western and southern coasts ; by A.D. 825 they ven tured raids to a considerable distance inland. In A.D. 832 came a large fleet under Turgesius (Thorgestr). The new invader ex tended his conquests till, in A.D. 842, one-half of Ireland (called Lethcuinn or Con's Half) had submitted; he established his wife, Ota, as a sort of volva, or priestess, in what had been one of Ireland's most famous literary monasteries, Clonmacnoise. Turgesius was killed soon after, in 845 ; and though in A.D. 853 Olaf the White was over-king of Ireland, the Vikings' power diminished. In the end, territory was—if by no formal treaty— ceded to their influence; and the (Irish) kingdoms of Dublin and Waterford were established on the island.
This sketch may be taken as the prototype of Viking invasion of any region of Western Christendom which was continuously attacked. Almost simultaneously with the attacks on Ireland came others, probably also from Norway, on the western coasts and islands of Scotland. Plunderings of Iona are mentioned in A.D.
802, 8o6, and in the course of a generation almost all the monastic communities in western Scotland had been destroyed. On the Continent there were three distinct regions of attack. The Danes early settled on the island of Walcheren, which had, in fact, been given by the emperor Louis the Pious to a fugitive Danish king, Harald by name, who sought the help of Louis and adopted Christianity. From the island the raids extended on either side: sometimes eastward as far as the Rhine, and so into Germany proper; at other times westward to the Somme, and thus into the territory of Charles the Bald, the future kingdom of France.