![]() ![]() The Western Viking Age is not a fiction, but, in its currently understood form, is a distorted concept, given a spurious and artificial coherence by later accounts. This stance was then continued into modern scholarship during the Scandinavian nationalist revivals of the nineteenth century. The limited contemporaneous evidence, it is argued below, has been embellished and reworked retrospectively into a ‘national conquest’ narrative by later historical and literary sources seeking to emphasise the power and lineage of medieval dynastic states. There are, however, grounds for challenging this sequence of assumptions, and for redefining the Viking Age as a sporadic, opportunistic and chaotic series of events and unforeseen cumulative impacts. Areas of Britain that have upheld the strongest Scandinavian cultural connections into modern times-notably Orkney and Shetland-are often viewed unquestioningly as the locations of the earliest and most vigorous Viking settlement. Territorial expansion is assumed to have succeeded the pattern of raiding in both time and location, and to have occurred first on the nearest and most convenient landfalls. ![]() Conventionally taken to begin with raids in the AD 790s, its causes have been sought primarily within Scandinavia, in relation to endogenous economic, political, environmental and social stresses. ![]() The Viking Age in the West is viewed in national and ethnic terms by academic and popular audiences as a ‘colonising’ migration of Scandinavians, who went on to form conquering elites or whole societies across the North Atlantic and Europe. ![]()
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