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Learn The Vikings

Raiders, traders and settlers who reached from Baghdad's markets to Newfoundland.

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The Viking Age is the period from roughly the late 700s to the mid 1000s when Scandinavians raided, traded and settled across Europe and beyond. It is often dated from the attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 to the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. Norse people founded the Danelaw in England, settled Iceland and Greenland, reached North America around 1000 and traveled east along Russian rivers to Constantinople. Learnr builds a course of short lessons that uses archaeology, runestones and sagas to separate the real Norse world from the myths.

How to learn The Vikings, step by step

Learn what the word Viking meant. In Old Norse, going "a-viking" meant raiding by sea, so not every Scandinavian was a Viking. Most people farmed, fished and traded. Getting this right first keeps you from treating Norse society as one big warband.
Study the ships and the routes. Look at the Oseberg and Gokstad ships in Oslo and learn how shallow-drafted longships could cross seas and row up rivers. Then map the western sea routes to Britain and Ireland and the eastern river routes to the Black and Caspian Seas.
Read the sources with their dates in mind. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Frankish annals were written by victims of raids. Ibn Fadlan described Rus' traders on the Volga in the 920s. The Icelandic sagas were written down in the 1200s and later, centuries after the events they describe.
Learn to read runes. The Younger Futhark has sixteen runes. Learning them lets you read short runestone inscriptions, many raised in Sweden to commemorate relatives who traveled east or west. The Jelling stones in Denmark record Harald Bluetooth's claim to have made the Danes Christian.
Separate myth from evidence. There is no evidence Vikings wore horned helmets in battle, an image popularized in the nineteenth century. Compare popular images with burial finds and settlement archaeology, and read Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm for a current scholarly picture.
Keep places and dates straight with short reviews. Viking history jumps between Dublin, York, Normandy, Kyiv and Greenland. Short daily Learnr questions keep the geography and the timeline linked, so each raid or settlement lands in its right place.

What you'll learn

Explain what "Viking" meant and who the Norse peoples were
Describe Viking ships, trade networks and the silver economy
Trace Norse settlement in Britain, Ireland, Normandy, Iceland and Greenland
Explain the evidence for Norse presence in North America at L'Anse aux Meadows
Judge the reliability of sagas, runestones and foreign chronicles as sources

What's inside your The Vikings course

A sample path Learnr builds for The Vikings. Your real course adapts to your goal and level.

1. Scandinavia before the raids
2. Ships, raids and the first attacks
3. Settlers and kings in Britain, Ireland and Francia
4. East to the Rus', Byzantium and the Islamic world
5. Iceland, Greenland and Vinland
6. Christianization and the end of the Viking Age

How long does it take to learn The Vikings?

A good overview of the Viking Age takes about 4 to 6 weeks at 3 hours a week. Reading several sagas, studying Norse mythology or learning Old Norse can turn it into a long and rewarding hobby.

What you need before you start

No background is needed. A map of the North Atlantic and of Europe's major rivers helps, and some familiarity with early medieval England or Francia adds useful context.

Common mistakes to avoid

Treating the sagas as eyewitness history. They were written centuries later in Christian Iceland and mix tradition, family politics and literary invention.
Picturing Vikings only as raiders. Trade, farming, craft production and settlement were far more common activities, and many Norse communities merged with local populations.
Assuming Vikings were a single ethnic group. Danes, Norwegians and Swedes went in different directions, and Viking-era communities abroad included people of many origins.

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The Vikings questions, answered

Did the Vikings really reach America?

Yes. Excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland confirmed a Norse site, and tree-ring analysis published in 2021 showed wood was cut there in 1021. It appears to have been short-lived.

What are the best books about the Vikings?

Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm and Anders Winroth's The Age of the Vikings are strong introductions. For sources, try Egil's Saga or the Vinland sagas in Penguin translations.