Maps

• In the year AD 789, three strange ships arrived at Portland on the southern coast of England and Beaduheard, the reeve of the King of Wessex, rode out to meet them. He took with him only a small blind of men under the mistaken impression that the strangers were traders: "and they slew him...” records the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tersely. It adds, with over a century of grim hindsight, "those were the first ships [of Northmen] which came to the land of the English".
• Vikings The North Atlantic Saga - 1000 years ago, Viking mariners set out from their fledgling colony in Greenland and became the first Europeans to discover and explore North America.  They called the land Vinland the Good, settling at a place known today as L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. The Vikings did not stay long in North America, but the story of their arrival and contacts with Native Americans ins a remarkable tale - or in Nordic terms - a saga....

• Viking is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the Nordic-speaking peoples from southern Scandinavia who raided, traded and settled in Europe and the British Isles roughly between A.D. 793-1066. They would have identified themselves as Danes, Svear, Goths, Norwegians, etc. There never really was a single "Viking" culture; only a loose assortment of people with shared ideas, economies, religious beliefs, and a common Germanic language known today as Old Norse.

• From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, the Vikings, comprising mainly Danes and Norwegians, shot around the Northern Hemisphere, plundering vast swaths of territory with the rapacity of a Genghis Khan. The Norsemen raided throughout the British Isles and the Frankish empire, and even attacked North Africa. They headed west to Iceland, Greenland, and what is now Canada, becoming the first Europeans to set foot in the Americas. And they traveled east into what is now northern Russia, ultimately lending their own name Rus, the Slavs' name for them, to that great country.
• Physical and social traces of the Vikings' lightning-like passing remain in sites stretching from Newfoundland to north Russia. On the map at left, click on Norse sites and get a feel for the sheer breadth of the Viking diaspora.