The traditional history of the Vikings is agreed upon. It begins with a lightening raid on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in 793 AD which killed many civilians and warriors. Although it is most likely that there had been at least one smaller raid before that time. Then in 789, a Viking ship landed in England and killed the king’s trusted representative, burning and ravishing villages before they sent sail.In that pivitol year, when the monastery at Lindisfarne in northern England was attacked by the Vikings, it was recorded by the Northumbrian chronicler Alcuin as an event of unspeakable brutality. Visions of bloody Viking helmet and swords flying with women and children screaming for their lives. Yet two and a half centuries earlier it was Alcuin’s ancestors, the heathen Saxons, who had shown that same brutality by slaughtering people with Viking battle axes and raping their way through the Christian cities across England.
It would seem that the Vikings were not too different from the other warrior factions at that time. Brutal and out for the spoils of conquest.
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