Linguistics traced the Viking Age origins of rural idioms and proverbs.
Pioneering scholarly works on the Viking Age reached a small readership in Britain. The first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. In medieval English chronicles, they are described as "wolves among sheep". Vikings were portrayed as wholly violent and bloodthirsty by their enemies. The Viking devastation of Northumbria 's Holy Island was reported by the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of Yorkwho wrote: "Never before in Britain has such a terror appeared". Three Viking ships had beached in Weymouth Bay four years earlier although due to a scribal error the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates this event to rather thanbut that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown, or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures, giving rise to the traditional but unattested prayer- A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine"Free us from the fury of the Northmen, Lord. In England, the beginning of the Viking Age is dated to 8 June when Vikings destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarnea centre of learning on an island off the northeast coast of England in Northumberland. Information about the Viking Age is drawn largely from what was written about the Vikings by their enemies, and primary sources of archaeology, supplemented with secondary sources such as the Icelandic Sagas. Many historical documents suggest that their invasion of other countries was retaliation for the encroachment upon tribal lands by Christian missionariesand perhaps by the Saxon Wars prosecuted by Charlemagne and his kin to the south, or were motivated by overpopulation, trade inequities, and the lack of viable farmland in their homeland. Viking travellers and colonists were seen at many points in history as brutal raiders. In this period, voyaging from their homelands in DenmarkNorway and Sweden the Norsemen settled in the present-day Faroe IslandsIcelandNorse GreenlandNewfoundlandthe NetherlandsGermanyPolandNormandyItalyScotlandEnglandWalesIrelandthe Isle of ManEstoniaUkraineRussia and Turkeyas well as initiating the process of consolidation that resulted in the formation of the present day Scandinavian countries.
It was preceded by the Germanic Iron Age. The Viking Age - AD is a period in the history of the Scandinaviansduring which they expanded and built settlements throughout Europe and beyond after the main European Migration Period.