Philip Parker

Blood & Thunder

The Age of the Vikings

By

Princeton University Press 328pp £19.95 order from our bookshop

The writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for AD 793 turned his attention to ominous portents recently spotted in the skies over Northumbria, describing ‘immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons’. Almost as an afterthought, the chronicler added: ‘on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter’. Thus he recorded the arrival of the small fleet of foreigners who carried out the first Viking raid, ushering in a 250-year-long storm of violence against vulnerable coastal communities and an influx of Scandinavian raiders, traders and migrants who fanned out across northwestern Europe, the North Atlantic and as far east as Russia. 

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