The etymology of "Viking" is uncertain. In the Middle Ages it came to mean Scandinavian pirate or raider. The Anglo-Saxons regarded the word wicing as synonymous with pirate and in several Old English sources wicing is

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Viking Age
The Viking Age in Scandinavian history is taken to have been the period from the earliest recorded raids by Norsemen in 793 until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea

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A variety of sources illuminate the culture, activities, and beliefs of the Vikings. Although they were generally a non-literate culture that produced no literary legacy, they had an alphabet and

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The Vikings established and engaged in extensive trading networks throughout the known world and had a profound influence on the economic development of Europe and Scandinavia.
Except for the major trading centres of Ribe,

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Medieval perceptions
In England the Viking Age began dramatically on 8 June 793 when Norsemen destroyed the abbey on the island of Lindisfarne. The devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island shocked and alerted the royal courts of

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Margaryan et al. 2020 analyzed 442 Viking world individuals from various archaeological sites in Europe. They were found to be closely related to modern Scandinavians. The Y-DNA composition of the individuals in the study was also similar to that of modern

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Knowledge about the arms and armour of the Viking age is based on archaeological finds, pictorial representation, and to some extent on the accounts in the Norse sagas and Norse lawsrecorded in the 13th century. According to custom, all free Norse men were required

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