From USA Today:
An 8-year-old girl made a fantastic discovery playing in a Swedish lake: a pre-Viking era sword…
…That sword, made out of wood, leather and metal, could have been made 1,500 years ago, experts at the Jonkopings Lans Museum said in a press release.
From History.com:
The Viking Age, from the late-eighth century to the 11th century, produced pioneering explorers such as Erik the Red, who founded Greenland’s first Norse settlement, along with powerful kings such as Cnut the Great, who ruled a vast empire in northern Europe.
The six Norsemen listed in the article are as follows:
I have internal links on my site in the list above to more info on Cnut the Great and Harald Hardrada as I have researched them a bit more since they were around the time of the Norman Conquest of England. Most of my focus over the years of independent study has been during that period of English/French/Norse history.
From the Jorvik Viking Center. A collection of quick, historical articles detailing the lives of the Norsemen. Subjects cover:
Excerpt from “Who were the Vikings?”
Often the name Viking conjures images of brutes and barbarians, but the truth is a little different.
Vikings were warriors. More precisely ‘Viking’ is the name by which the Scandinavian sea-borne raiders of the early medieval period are now commonly known.
Even before the earliest Viking raids on the monasteries, the Anglo-Saxons used an Old English word ‘wicing‘. But this was not a word that they used often or exclusively for the Scandinavian raiders; instead it was used for all-comers and meant ‘pirate’ or ‘piracy’.
Discover more about the Vikings at the Jorvik Viking Center site.
From Live Science:
The Viking Age may not have started with the plundering of England, but with the peaceful trading of handcrafted combs made out of reindeer antlers, a new study suggests.
Until now, researchers thought the Viking Age began in June 793, when Norwegian Vikings raided Lindisfarne, an island off the northeast coast of England. But new research suggests Vikings were traveling from Norway to Ribe, one of Scandinavia’s earliest towns and a lively trading center on the west coast of Denmark, as early as 725, the researchers said.
