Play
Quiz, myth or fact, and a six-step story
Ten questions
All of these can be checked on the fact-check page. There is sometimes more than one respectable answer in the wider literature; the quiz follows the wording of the sources we cite.
The National Museum of Denmark dates the Viking Age to which span?
English Heritage dates the Lindisfarne raid to:
The Gokstad ship is how long?
L’Anse aux Meadows was inscribed by UNESCO in:
Tynwald, the name of the Manx parliament, comes from:
Most people in the Viking Age, according to the National Museum of Denmark, were:
Cnut was king of England:
Stamford Bridge was fought on:
A cargo ship in the Viking Age could carry up to about:
The stereotype of horned helmets goes back to:
Myth or fact?
Vikings wore horned helmets in battle.
Most people in the Viking Age were ordinary farmers.
The Vikings wrote long books about themselves, in runes.
L’Anse aux Meadows is the only known Viking site in North America.
Lindisfarne was the first Viking raid in England.
The name Tynwald comes from a Norse word for an assembly field.
Cnut ruled England, Denmark and, for a time, Norway.
The Danelaw was a single, neatly bordered Viking kingdom with a modern-style frontier.
Follow the story
Raids on the Wessex coast and Lindisfarne
A few years before Lindisfarne, three ships of northmen landed in Wessex and killed the king’s reeve. In 793 the monastery of Lindisfarne was attacked. Writers felt that second blow as a desecration, not merely a theft.
Overwintering, then conquest
By 850 foreign armies were spending the winter in England. By 870 a Danish conquest of the north, midlands and east had begun. Raiding had become something more lasting.
Alfred, a frontier, the Danelaw
Alfred of Wessex fought a frontier into being. A truce of 878 later underpinned a treaty that recognised a large Danish share of England. The region came to be known from “Danes’ law.”
Towns, trade, a wider ocean
York (Jorvic) and Dublin became major towns. Settlers moved into Iceland from about 900, then Greenland, and a short-lived camp in Newfoundland — the only known Viking site in North America.
Cnut’s North Sea rule
Cnut was king of England from 1016 to 1035, and also of Denmark and later Norway: a political union across the North Sea, not a passing raid.
Stamford Bridge, then Hastings
On 25 September 1066 Harold II of England defeated Harald of Norway at Stamford Bridge, about 7 miles east of York. Three weeks later Harold died at Hastings. The English Viking Age, in the usual school telling, ends here.