Vikings

Vikings were a seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe. They voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East, Greenland, and Vinland (present-day Newfoundland in Canada, North America). In their countries of origin, and in some of the countries they raided and settled, this period of activity is popularly known as the Viking Age, and the term "Viking" also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a whole during the late 8th to the mid-11th centuries. The Vikings had a profound impact on the early medieval history of northern and Eastern Europe, including the political and social development of England (and the English language) and parts of France, and the establishment of Kievan Rus', the ancestor of the later states of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Expert sailors and navigators of their characteristic longships, Vikings established Norse settlements and governments in the British Isles, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast, as well as along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes across Eastern Europe where they were also known as Varangians. The Normans, Norse-Gaels, Rus, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Vikings”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Vikings is Norse people, farmers, merchants, explorers, raiders and pirates, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 37 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶