Archeologists excavating the city ofZutphen in the Netherlands encountered a victim of Viking violence who was killed in 882.

Her well-preserved skeleton tells the story of her fate, which she shared with untold Europeans of the Viking Age. We do not know her name, but we know that she was a woman of around 40 years of age.

The early medieval northern seafarers and raiders known as Vikings endure a pervasive reputation of extreme and cruel violence. That reputation began during the Viking Age itself, when their victims produced most of the preserved stories about Viking activity. Later, such basically truthful but biased accounts provided an attractive foundation for narrative elaboration and exaggeration, contributing to the modern image, fomented in popular culture, of the Vikings as uniquely violent. Over the last half century, scholarship has contextualised the Vikings and their violence in what after all was a violent period, the early Middle Ages in Europe.

Despite its widespread modern use, the term ‘viking' appears only occa­sionally in contemporary sources, and its etymology is debated. The word is not an ethnic label, but rather a designation for seaborne raiders of any origin. When discussing the Vikings, contemporaries mostly talked, in Latin, Arabic, Old Irish and Old English, about being attacked by ‘Danes', ‘Northmen', ‘foreigners', ‘heathens' or simply ‘pirates'. In this chapter, I shall reserve the term ‘viking' for those Scandinavians who raided and battled in western Europe, in accordance with contemporary usage.

An example of a contemporary text that sets the tone for later under­standings of the violence exerted by the Vikings is what a monk in the monastery of Saint-Vaast in Arras, northern France, wrote about events in the year 884:

The Northmen did not stop from capturing and killing Christians or from destroying churches, pulling down fortifications, or putting villas to fire. The corpses of clerics, noble laymen and others, women, youth, and babies were lying in every street. There was no street or place in which the dead did not lie and lamentation and sadness filled everyone, seeing that the Christian people were massacred... But the Northmen, raiding as usual beyond the [river] Scheldt, devastated with fire and sword churches, monasteries, cities and villages, and slaughtered people.^[139]

This chapter traces the history of Viking violence in Europe during the Viking Age, conventionally dated to 793-1066. The history of Viking raiding falls into three periods: beginning on a small scale, the raiding parties became sub­stantial around the middle of the ninth century. Towards the end of the tenth century the Vikings put together even larger contingents of warriors which brought England to its knees. After outlining that history, we will analyse the function of violence in Scandinavian society and how the story of Viking violence had already become exaggerated in the Middle Ages.