Viking
âsteeds of the wavesâ
Building a Viking-Ship The earliest Viking vessels were copied from Roman or Celtic designs and powered by oars instead of the usual paddles. Like all ships of the time they were slow and prone to capsizing in rough seas, appropriate for short trips that hugged the shore. Sometime in the eighth century, however, the Vikings invented the keel. This simple…
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THE VIKINGS IN IRELAND 795â1014 Part II
The Viking slave trade Archaeological evidence indicates that by 902 Dublin had begun to outgrow the longphort and become a true town rather than an armed camp. Significantly, following the Irish conquest in that year, Dublin was not abandoned: there is clear evidence of continuity of settlement through to its…
THE VIKINGS IN IRELAND 795â1014 Part III
The Vikings in Wales One side effect of the strength of Irish resistance was to increase Viking interest in Wales. At its closest points, Wales was only a dayâs sail away from Dublin, Waterford and Wexford, and from the Viking colony in the Isle of Man, but despite this had…
The Siege of Paris (885-6)
Viking Siege of Paris, 885â886. Sometime in the autumn of 885 `seven hundred high-prowed ships and very many smaller onesâ snaked up the Seine in a column that `extended for more than two leagues down riverâ, according to Abbo of the nearby Abbey of St-Germain-des-Preâs, an eyewitness to the event.…
Hardrada
Contemporaries, it is clear, stood in awe of Harold Sigurdson . âThe thunderbolt of the Northâ, was how Adam of Bremen, who wrote in the 1070s, remembered him; âthe strongest living man under the sunâ, said William of Poitiers (albeit reporting the words of somebody else). A half-brother of King…
When Allah met Odin I
At about the same time as Harald Bluetooth was erecting his great monument to Viking Christianity at Jelling, and the Wessex dynasty was completing the first unification of England with the expulsion of Haraldâs brother-in-law Erik Bloodaxe from York, seafaring Vikings of the old-fashioned sort (Erik perhaps among them) were…
When Allah met Odin II
Other records exist, left by Arab travellers who encountered the Vikings under less fraught circumstances than these and who were able to indulge their anthropological curiosity to leave us an elliptical view of Viking culture that is largely missing from the wounded accounts of Christian scribes in the British Isles…