Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Viking settlers in the British Isles left remains of their material culture behind, which archaeologists have been able to excavate and interpret during the 20th and 21st centuries. Such Viking evidence in Britain consists primarily of Viking burials undertaken in Shetland, Orkney, the Western Isles, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and the north ...
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
Most of the Vikings arriving in the northern parts of Britain also originated in Norway. Settlement was densest in the Shetland and Orkney islands and Caithness, where Norn, a language descended from Old Norse, was historically spoken, but a Viking presence has also been identified in the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands. [42] [43]
From 793 onwards repeated raids by Vikings on the British Isles are recorded. "All the islands of Britain" were devastated in 794 [36] with Iona being sacked in 802 and 806. [37] (These attacks on Christian settlements in the islands of the west were not new.
793 − Viking raid on Lindisfarne [21] 800 − Waves of Danish assaults on the coastlines of the British Isles. 865 − Danish raiders first began to settle in England. Led by the brothers Halfdan and Ivar the Boneless, they wintered in East Anglia, where they demanded and received tribute in exchange for a temporary peace.
The British Isles have been subject to several waves of invasion and settlement since humans began inhabiting the region approximately 900,000 years ago during the Paleolithic. Notable invasions of the British Isles including the Roman conquest of Britain , Viking expansion , the Norman Conquest , the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland and the ...
The preserved ruins of a wheelhouse and broch at Jarlshof, described as "one of the most remarkable archaeological sites ever excavated in the British Isles". [1]Due to building in stone on virtually treeless islands—a practice dating to at least the early Neolithic Period—Shetland is extremely rich in physical remains of the prehistoric era, and there are over 5,000 archaeological sites. [2]
Between the 8th and 11th centuries, raiders and colonists from Scandinavia, mainly Danish and Norwegian, plundered western Europe, including the British Isles. [90] These raiders came to be known as the Vikings; the name is believed to derive from Scandinavia, where the Vikings originated.