VIKINGS

Vikings were the seafaring Norse  people  from southern  Scandinavia  (in present-
day Denmark, Norway and Sweden) who from the late 8th to late 11th centuries pirated, raided and traded from
their Northern European homelands across wide areas of Europe, and explored westward to Iceland, Greenland,
and Vinland. In modern English and other vernaculars, the term also commonly includes the inhabitants of Norse
home communities during this period. This period of Nordic military, mercantile and demographic expansion
had a profound impact on the early medieval history of Scandinavia, the British Isles, France, Estonia, Kievan
Rus' and Sicily.

Expert sailors and navigators aboard their characteristic longships, Vikings voyaged as far as
the Mediterranean littoral, North Africa, and the Middle East. After decades of exploration around the coasts and
rivers of Europe, Vikings established Norse communities and governments scattered across north-western
Europe, Belarus, Ukraine and European Russia, the North Atlantic islands all the way to the north-eastern coast
of North America. The Vikings and their descendants established themselves as rulers and nobility in many areas
of Europe. The Normans, descendants of Vikings who conquered and gave their name to what is
now Normandy, also formed the aristocracy of England after the Norman conquest of England. While spreading
Norse culture to foreign lands, they simultaneously brought home strong foreign cultural influences
to Scandinavia, profoundly influencing the historical development of both. During the Viking Age the Norse
homelands were gradually consolidated from smaller kingdoms into three larger kingdoms; Denmark, Norway
and Sweden.

Norse civilisation during the Viking Age was technologically, militarily and culturally advanced. Yet popular,
modern conceptions of the Vikings—a term frequently applied casually to their modern Scandinavian
descendants—often strongly differ from the complex, advanced civilisation of the Norsemen that emerges
from archaeology and historical sources. A romanticised picture of Vikings as noble savages began to emerge in
the 18th century; this developed and became widely propagated during the 19th-century Viking revival.
Perceived views of the Vikings as alternatively violent, piratical heathens or as intrepid adventurers owe much to
conflicting varieties of the modern Viking myth that had taken shape by the early 20th century. Current popular
representations of the Vikings are typically based on cultural clichés and stereotypes, complicating modern
appreciation of the Viking legacy. These representations are rarely accurate—for example, there is no evidence
that they wore horned helmets, a costume element that first appeared in Wagnerian opera .