The Vikings

From Scandinavia, Norse seafarers raided, traded and settled from North America to Baghdad. They founded towns like Dublin, settled Iceland and Greenland, and reached Newfoundland, dated by tree rings to AD 1021.

Date: AD 793 to 1066VII · After the empiresVIII · Medieval networks and empires
Place: Lindisfarne · Jorvik (York) · Hedeby · L’Anse aux MeadowsEurope, The Americas
Laid out as: A migrationPeople on the move: where they set out from, where they went, and what they found.
Lessons: 7 planned, none written yet
Image: The Met Open Access, CC0
Themes: Exploration and migration
War, conflict and security
Economics, trade and money
Religion, belief and myth

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

From Lindisfarneto L’Anse aux Meadows

ILindisfarne
IILongships
IIISettlers in England and Ireland
IVIceland and its sagas
VEast to Baghdad
VIVinland
VIIShield-maidens: what the graves show

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Ragnar Lothbrok (in legend)
Leif Erikson
Freydís Eiríksdóttir
Cnut
Harald Hardrada

Objects

The Oseberg ship
The Lewis chessmen
Silver hoards

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

AD 793 to 1066. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?