Viking settlements

Names and definition

Viking settlements were the farms, trading towns, camps and colonies founded by Norse-speaking Scandinavians at home and abroad between about 750 and 1100: from Ribe, Birka and Hedeby in Scandinavia to York, Dublin and Normandy in the west, Iceland and Greenland in the North Atlantic, a short-lived base at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, and Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod and Kyiv in the east. The word "viking" (Old Norse víkingr, and fara í víking, "to go on a viking") originally named an activity — seaborne raiding and expedition — rather than a people, so "Viking settlements" is a convenient modern label for the places where Scandinavians of the Viking Age lived, traded and ruled. In the east they were known to Greeks and Arabs as Varangians (Old Norse Væringjar, Greek Varangoi, usually derived from vár, "pledge", hence "sworn companions") and as Rus'; most linguists derive Rus' from an Old Norse root róþs- ("rowing, rowers") through the Finnic name for Sweden, Ruotsi, a view proposed by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1877 and still the majority position, though never uncontested. Norse sources called the lands along the Volkhov Garðar, "the towns" or "enclosures"; the grander Garðaríki for the whole of Rus' is a later usage. This entry surveys the whole Viking world; the separate entries on the Danelaw, the Duchy of Normandy, the Icelandic Commonwealth, the Kingdom of the Isles, Norse Greenland, the Rus' and Kievan Rus' go further into each region.

Major Viking settlements at a glance

The main places where Scandinavians lived, traded or ruled in the Viking Age, with what makes each one important. The sections below tell each story in full.

Dating the Viking Age

English-language histories traditionally date the Viking Age from the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 to the death of Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge on 25 September 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates the Lindisfarne raid to a day in January, but historians generally read that as a scribal slip for 8 June. Archaeologists increasingly prefer about 750–1050, because Scandinavian expansion visibly began well before 793: the two ship burials at Salme on the Estonian island of Saaremaa hold 41 men who died violently around 750 and came, by their isotopes and genomes, from central Sweden; Ribe on the west coast of Jutland was a market by about 700; and Staraya Ladoga, south of Lake Ladoga, has tree-ring dates from the 750s. Where the age ends depends on the region. In England and Scandinavia it closes in the mid-11th century, with Christian kingdoms and royal armies replacing independent raiding; in Iceland and Greenland Norse society simply carried on into the Middle Ages, and the Greenland colony outlived the Viking Age by more than three centuries.

Homeland farms and longhouses

Most Scandinavians of the Viking Age never went viking. They lived on dispersed farms whose centre was a longhouse — a long, often slightly bow-sided, three-aisled timber building in which people lived at one end and cattle were stalled at the other — with smaller pit-houses, byres, stores and smithies around it. Wealthy households ran several buildings and halls; chieftains' halls such as those at Lejre in Zealand or Uppåkra in Scania were political and religious centres. Towns were the exception, and a handful of trading places concentrated the craft production and long-distance exchange that the rest of the country depended on.

A typical longhouse had walls that bowed outwards in plan, giving it the outline of a ship. Two rows of internal posts carried the roof together with the walls, which were lined with clay or built of vertical planks set into the ground, and sloping posts often braced them from outside. Roofs were thatched or wooden; in Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, where timber was scarce, houses were built of turf and stone instead. There were no chimneys or windows. Smoke from the long central fireplace, where the food was cooked, escaped through a hole in the roof, and people sat and slept on plank benches along the walls. If the farm had no separate byre, the animals stood in stalls at one end of the house. Size reflected status: at Borg in Lofoten, excavations in the 1980s uncovered a chieftain's longhouse 83 metres long. A full-size copy of it now forms the core of the Lofotr Viking Museum, founded in 1995.

Trading towns: Ribe, Hedeby, Birka and Kaupang

Ribe emerged as a seasonal market around AD 700 and is generally regarded as Scandinavia's oldest town; a strontium-isotope study of its earliest burials (Croix, Frei, Sindbæk and Søvsø, 2020) found both locals and incomers among them, and the Aarhus University "Northern Emporium" project (2022) has traced its bead-making, comb-making and metalworking workshops. The missionary Ansgar was allowed to build a church there in the mid-9th century. Hedeby (Haithabu) at the head of the Schlei fjord in Schleswig was the great Danish entrepôt between the North Sea and the Baltic from the 8th to the 11th century; in the 10th century it was tied into the Danevirke earthworks, and after attacks in the mid-11th century — by Harald Hardrada around 1050 and by Slavic forces in 1066 — it was abandoned in favour of Schleswig across the fjord. Birka, on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren, flourished in the 8th–10th centuries under the royal estate at Hovgården, where Ansgar founded Sweden's first Christian congregation around 830; its trade ended in the later 10th century and Sigtuna took over its role. Kaupang in Vestfold, Norway's main emporium, was founded around 800 and abandoned in the mid-10th century; its excavators estimate a population of a few hundred.

Ring fortresses

Late in the 10th century Denmark acquired something no other Viking-Age kingdom built: five geometrically precise circular fortresses — Aggersborg, Fyrkat, Nonnebakken, Trelleborg and Borgring — each with a circular rampart, four gates on the cardinal axes and blocks of identical longhouses inside. UNESCO, which inscribed them together as the "Viking-Age Ring Fortresses" in 2023, dates their construction to about 970–980, in the reign of Harald Bluetooth. Aggersborg, the largest, held 48 longhouses. Their purpose — royal strongholds, muster points for armies, or centres for collecting tribute during the Christianization of the kingdom — is still debated, and they were used only briefly.

Why the Vikings expanded

No single cause explains the Viking expansion, and historians now weigh several together. Trade came first in many places: the emporia at Ribe, Birka and Hedeby were active before the raids began, and the pull of Frisian, Frankish and above all Islamic silver drew Scandinavians outward. Politics mattered too: competing chieftains needed wealth to reward followers, and the consolidation of kingdoms produced exiles and ambitious younger sons. The keeled sailing ship made long open-sea voyages possible; the larger Salme vessel of about 750 is one of the earliest Scandinavian ships with evidence for a keel and sail. Rich, lightly defended monasteries were obvious targets. The old explanation of population pressure at home is now weakly supported, and in Iceland the saga claim that settlers fled the tyranny of Harald Fairhair is a later tradition rather than evidence. The favourable climate of the Medieval Climate Anomaly helped North Atlantic farming and navigation, and its end is part of the story of Greenland's decline.

England, the Danelaw and Jórvík

After decades of raids, a large Scandinavian force that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls the "Great Heathen Army" landed in East Anglia in 865 and took York in 866. Its winter camp of 872–873 at Torksey on the Trent has been located and studied through thousands of metal-detected finds — hacksilver, weights, gaming pieces and Islamic dirhams (Hadley and Richards, 2016). After Alfred of Wessex defeated Guthrum at Edington in 878, Guthrum was baptised and a treaty divided England; the Chronicle records that in 876, 877 and 880 parts of the army "shared out" land in Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia and began to plough it. The name "Danelaw" for the region of Scandinavian law and settlement is not recorded before the 11th century. York, Norse Jórvík, was ruled by Scandinavian kings for most of the time until 954, when the Northumbrians drove out Eric — traditionally identified as Eric Bloodaxe — and the city passed permanently to the English crown. Scandinavian place-names, loanwords and personal names are densest in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the East Midlands.

See also: Danelaw · Kingdom of England

Ireland: longphorts and Dublin

The Annals of Ulster show raiders on Lough Neagh in 840 and still there the following year, the first time they are known to have wintered in Ireland, and in 841 they record a longphort — a fortified ship-camp — at Linn Duachaill (Annagassan, County Louth) and another at Duiblinn, the future Dublin. Dublin grew from that camp into a Hiberno-Norse town of wattle and plank houses, slave markets and mints, and the Norse founded or developed the ports of Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick. Over the 10th and 11th centuries these towns became part of Irish politics, with Norse-Irish kings, intermarriage and Christianity; the Hiberno-Norse ("Ostmen") remained a distinct urban community into the time of the English invasion of the 1170s.

Scotland, the Northern and Western Isles, Man and Wales

Orkney and Shetland were settled so densely that they became the heart of a Norse earldom, and their Norse language, Norn, survived into the early modern period. The Hebrides and the Isle of Man formed the Kingdom of the Isles, a sea-kingdom of the Irish Sea and western Scotland; Man's parliament, Tynwald, claims descent from a Norse thing. On the Scottish mainland Norse settlement was concentrated in Caithness and Sutherland, and in Wales it left coastal place-names such as Swansea, Anglesey and Fishguard but little dense settlement. Ancient DNA has complicated the picture: two individuals buried with Viking-style weapons in Orkney had local, Pictish-type ancestry (Margaryan et al., 2020).

See also: Kingdom of the Isles

Normandy

After Norse fleets had spent decades on the Seine, the Frankish king Charles III ("the Simple") defeated a force under Rollo at Chartres in 911 and later that year, by the agreement known as the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, granted him land around Rouen and the lower Seine in return for baptism and his defence of the river. No text of the treaty survives, and the fullest account, by Dudo of Saint-Quentin a century later, is embellished; the earliest contemporary reference is a royal charter of 918 that mentions land granted to "the Northmen of the Seine, namely to Rollo and his companions". Rollo's successors extended the territory westward, adopted the French language and Christian institutions within a few generations, and gave their name to Normandy. His descendant William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066.

See also: Duchy of Normandy

The Faroe Islands and Iceland

The Faroes were settled by Norse farmers in the 9th century, but they were not the first people there: charred barley from a site on Sandoy shows that someone, probably from the British Isles, was farming on the islands between the 4th and 6th centuries (Church et al., 2013). Iceland was settled from about 870. Its own histories, Ari Þorgilsson's Íslendingabók (written 1122–1133) and the later Landnámabók, name Ingólfr Arnarson as the first permanent settler at Reykjavík and list some four hundred founding settlers; Ari also says Irish monks, the papar, had been there before them. The archaeological start is fixed by a volcanic ash layer, the "settlement tephra", dated to about 870, under which almost no human remains are found. The settlement period is conventionally 870–930, ending with the foundation of the Althing, the island's general assembly, at Þingvellir in 930. Genomes of 27 early Icelanders show a population of mixed Norse and Gaelic ancestry, the Gaelic share drawn from Ireland and Scotland and probably including many enslaved people (Ebenesersdóttir et al., Science, 2018).

See also: Icelandic Commonwealth

Greenland and why it was abandoned

Erik the Red led settlers from Iceland to south-west Greenland around 985. They formed two colonies: the larger Eastern Settlement (Eystribyggð) around modern Qaqortoq and Narsaq, and the Western Settlement (Vestribyggð) near Nuuk. The ICOMOS evaluation for the Kujataa World Heritage Site suggests the Norse population "possibly reached 2,000–3,000 people at its peak". The Greenlanders farmed cattle, sheep and goats, hunted seals and caribou, and paid for imported iron, timber and grain with walrus ivory and hides. In the mid-14th century the Norwegian priest Ívar Bárðarson found the Western Settlement deserted. The last written record from the Eastern Settlement is a wedding at Hvalsey church in September 1408; radiocarbon dates suggest people remained into the mid-15th century. Historians now explain the end as several pressures acting together rather than a single catastrophe: the cooling of the Little Ice Age, falling European demand for walrus ivory as elephant ivory returned to the market, isolation from Norway, soil erosion, competition with the Thule Inuit who were moving south, and — a newer finding — sea-level rise that flooded some 204 km² of coastal land in the Eastern Settlement (Borreggine et al., PNAS, 2023). Whether the last Greenlanders died out or left for Iceland and Norway is unknown; Inuit stories of an attack on Hvalsey have no archaeological support.

See also: Norse Greenland

L'Anse aux Meadows and Vinland

L'Anse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland is the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas. Discovered by Helge Ingstad and excavated by Anne Stine Ingstad from 1961, it consists of eight turf buildings with a smithy for working bog iron, and Norse artefacts including a bronze ring-headed cloak pin and a soapstone spindle whorl. In 2021 Kuitems and colleagues dated three pieces of wood cut there with metal blades. Each piece carried the radiocarbon signature of a solar storm of AD 993 twenty-nine rings in from the bark edge, which places the felling in 1021 — 471 years before Columbus. That is a date of Norse activity, not necessarily of the first voyage. The site was a base camp or ship-repair station used for a few years or at most a couple of decades, not a colony; butternuts found there grow only much further south, so the Norse travelled beyond it. The Icelandic sagas call the region Vinland. L'Anse aux Meadows became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.

Varangians and Rus' in the East

Swedes and other Scandinavians crossed the Baltic from the 8th century to the rivers of what is now Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, drawn above all by the silver of the Abbasid Caliphate. Unlike the Danes in England or the Norwegians in Iceland, they came in small numbers and settled in multi-ethnic places alongside Finnic and Slavic populations. They were not a single state but a network of warrior-traders who took tribute and controlled trading posts. The Primary Chronicle — compiled in Kyiv around 1113, so its dates for the 9th century are retrospective — says that in 859 "Varangians from beyond the sea" took tribute from the Chud, Slovenes, Merians, Ves' and Krivichians; that in 862 the tribes invited Rurik and his brothers to rule them; and that in 882 Oleg (Norse Helgi) took Kyiv. Names of the early Rus' rulers are Norse — Rurik from Hrœrekr, Oleg from Helgi, Olga from Helga, Igor from Ingvarr — and the dynasty that later traced its descent from Rurik ruled until the death of Feodor I in 1598, with a junior branch returning briefly under Vasili Shuisky (1606–1610). How far the Scandinavians created the Rus' state, and how far Slavic and Finnic societies built it with Scandinavian participation, is the old "Normanist controversy". Most historians today accept a Scandinavian origin for the Rus' elite that was quickly assimilated into Slavic society; Rurik's own historicity is debated.

See also: Rus' Khaganate · Kievan Rus' · Vikings in Russia and Ukraine: who were the Varangians? · Rurik

Staraya Ladoga, Novgorod, Gnezdovo and Kyiv

Staraya Ladoga (Norse Aldeigja), on the Volkhov near Lake Ladoga, was the gateway from the Baltic into the river system. Its earliest tree-ring date is 753, and its earliest dirhams date to 786/787; Finnic, Slavic and Scandinavian people lived there together from the start. A burnt workshop excavated there in 1997 had made glass beads, worked amber and probably cast brass, and contained three pieces of Scandinavian-type jewellery and a Scandinavian-type comb of early 9th-century style, although the building itself is tree-ring dated to about 900–905 (Kirpichnikov, Fornvännen, 2004). Upstream, the hill fort now called Rurikovo Gorodishche — Norse Holmgarðr — was occupied by the mid-9th century, with coin hoards of the 850s–860s and timbers felled in 889–897 on its fringes; Novgorod proper, beside it, has no layers earlier than the 930s–950s (Nosov, 1987), and its famous timber streets date from the mid-10th century. Gnezdovo, near Smolensk, controlled the portage between the Dvina and Dnieper; it was most active from about 920 to the 960s, and more than 1,200 of an estimated 3,500–4,000 burial mounds have been excavated, a minority of them clearly Scandinavian. Kyiv on the Dnieper became the seat of the Rus' princes after 882 by the Chronicle's reckoning; the Rus'–Byzantine treaties of 907/911 and 944/945 preserve lists of envoys with Norse names.

River routes and silver

Two river systems carried the eastern trade. The Volga route ran from Ladoga to the Volga Bulghars and the Khazar capital Atil on the Caspian, and on to the markets of the Caliphate — the "Serkland" of the runestones. The route "from the Varangians to the Greeks" ran by portages from the Volkhov and Lovat to the Dnieper and down to the Black Sea and Constantinople. Furs, slaves, honey and wax went south; silver, silks, glass beads and weapons came north. Kenneth Jonsson (2009) counts some 83,800 Islamic dirhams among the Viking-Age coins found in Sweden, and most Swedish finds come from the island of Gotland. A higher estimate, of nearly 500,000 dirhams in Scandinavian collections (Hammad, 2023), shows how much the totals depend on what is counted. The largest single find, the Spillings hoard found on Gotland in 1999, contained about 67 kg of silver — over 14,000 coins, almost all Islamic — together with a separate hoard of bronze. From about 988 Scandinavian and Rus' warriors also served the Byzantine emperors in the Varangian Guard, which Basil II formed from the troops Vladimir of Kyiv sent him — traditionally 6,000 men. After 1066 the Guard also recruited Anglo-Saxons. Runestones in the Mälaren region, especially Uppland and Södermanland, commemorate men who travelled east, among them the Ingvar stones for an ill-fated expedition of about 1040.

See also: The Varangian Guard · Ibn Faḍlān's account of the Rus' · Viking trade routes to the East: the Volga and the Dnieper

The southern Baltic

Scandinavians also settled and traded on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic. Grobiņa in western Latvia has cemeteries of Gotlandic and central Swedish type from the mid-7th century and is interpreted as a Scandinavian colony. At Wiskiauten near the Curonian Lagoon (now Kaliningrad oblast) more than 500 burial mounds with mainly Scandinavian goods mark a trading community of about 850–1050. Wolin at the mouth of the Oder and Truso near Elbląg — the port named in the voyage of Wulfstan recorded at King Alfred's court — were multi-ethnic emporia with a Scandinavian component, though at both the share of Scandinavian residents is debated.

Daily life, economy and law

Abroad as at home, most Viking settlers were farmers raising cattle, sheep, goats and barley, fishing and, in the North Atlantic, hunting seals and walrus. Buildings followed local materials: timber in Scandinavia and Russia, turf and stone in Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, post-and-wattle and plank buildings in Dublin and York, and sunken-floored workshops in the towns. The towns specialised in combs, beads, metalwork and textiles. Exchange ran on a bullion economy in which silver was weighed rather than counted, so coins and ornaments were cut into hacksilver and nicked to test their purity. Society was divided into jarls and chieftains, free farmers (bœndr) and slaves (þrælar). Free men settled disputes and made law at open assemblies, the thing. Iceland's Althing met at Þingvellir from 930, and the element survives in place-names such as Tingwall in Shetland, Dingwall in Ross and Tynwald on Man.

Religion and Christianization

Norse religion, with its gods Odin, Thor and Freyr and its cult places and sacrificial feasts, coexisted with Christianity for generations wherever Scandinavians settled. Missionaries reached Birka and Ribe in the 9th century. Guthrum was baptised as part of his peace with Alfred in 878, and Rollo as part of his grant in 911. Harald Bluetooth's great runestone at Jelling, raised around 965, claims that he "made the Danes Christian". Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised in 988 in the settlement that also produced the Varangian Guard, and Iceland's Althing accepted Christianity in 999 or 1000. Norway and Sweden were Christianized over the 11th and early 12th centuries. Conversion is one of the conventional markers of the end of the Viking Age, and UNESCO's citation for the ring fortresses presents them as part of that transition.

Women, children and families

Viking settlement was not only the work of male raiders. Oval "tortoise" brooches, part of the characteristic dress of Scandinavian women, are found in graves in England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and Russia. Iceland's settlement histories name women among the founding landholders. Ribe's earliest cemetery includes men, women and children. Family groups travelled together: four of the men in the Salme ship burial were brothers who died on the same day. The Birka grave Bj 581, a woman buried with a full warrior's equipment, has been read as evidence of female warriors (Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., 2017); that interpretation remains contested.

How we know: DNA, isotopes, tree-rings and place-names

Much of what is new about Viking settlement comes from the natural sciences. The largest ancient-DNA study, Margaryan et al. (Nature, 2020), sequenced 442 genomes from across the Viking world. It found a major influx of Danish ancestry into England, Swedish ancestry into the Baltic, and Norwegian ancestry into Ireland, Iceland and Greenland, as well as gene flow into Scandinavia from the south and east. Some people buried as Vikings had no Scandinavian ancestry at all, which shows that being a Viking was a way of life and an identity, not a bloodline. The authors estimate that people in the UK today carry up to six per cent Viking-Age Scandinavian DNA. Strontium and oxygen isotopes in teeth show where individuals grew up, as at Salme and Ribe. Tree-rings and radiocarbon spikes from ancient solar storms have fixed dates to the year: 753 at Ladoga, the 889–897 timbers at Rurikovo Gorodishche, and 1021 at L'Anse aux Meadows. Place-names are the oldest evidence of all. In England, Scandinavian elements such as -by ("farm, village": Grimsby, Derby, Whitby), -thorpe ("outlying settlement": Scunthorpe), -toft ("house plot": Lowestoft) and -thwaite ("clearing", common in Cumbria) cluster in the former Danelaw. Their exact meaning is disputed since Frank Stenton's classic study of 1942. They may reflect a mass migration of Scandinavian farmers, or an elite takeover whose naming habits the local population adopted.

Myths and misconceptions

Popular images of the Vikings owe more to the 19th century than to the Viking Age. No horned helmet has ever been found in a Viking-Age warrior's grave. The horns entered the popular image through Romantic art and Carl Emil Doepler's costumes for the first Bayreuth staging of Wagner's Ring in 1876. Combs, tweezers and ear-spoons are among the commonest finds from Viking settlements. The Arab envoy Ibn Faḍlān, who met the Rus' on the Volga in 922, described them washing their faces and hair every morning, although he was disgusted that they all did so from one shared basin (translated by James E. Montgomery). Nor were Vikings a single ethnic group, raiders only, or all men, and the Rus' state was not a purely Scandinavian creation.

Where scholars disagree

Several questions in this entry remain open. Historians still differ over the dates of the Viking Age itself — 793 to 1066, or about 750 to 1050 or 1100. For the Rus', they debate the balance of Scandinavian, Slavic and Finnic roles in forming the state, whether Rurik existed, and how far the Primary Chronicle's 9th-century dates can be trusted. The causes of the expansion are argued over, above all how much weight population pressure deserves, and so is whether the Danelaw's place-names record a mass migration or an elite takeover. Greenland's end is unresolved: why the colony was abandoned, and whether its last people died out or left. So is how long L'Anse aux Meadows was used, how many dirhams actually reached Scandinavia, how large the Gnezdovo cemetery was and how Scandinavian, and whether the woman in Birka grave Bj 581 was a warrior.

Viking sites you can visit today

Seven Viking-Age sites and landscapes are on UNESCO's World Heritage List, from Birka in Lake Mälaren to L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland; the table below gives each with the year it was inscribed. Beyond them, the Ribe VikingeCenter, the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde, the Wikinger Museum Haithabu at Hedeby, the Historiska museet in Stockholm (home of the Spillings hoard), the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, Dublinia in Dublin and the Settlement Exhibition in Reykjavík, built around the remains of a 10th-century hall, all present Viking settlement in the places where it happened.

Legacy and the end of the Viking Age

The Viking Age ended not with a defeat but with integration. Denmark, Norway and Sweden became Christian kingdoms whose kings, not free-ranging chieftains, made war, and the diaspora communities were absorbed into the societies around them. The Normans became French-speaking lords, the Rus' elite became Slavic-speaking princes, the Danelaw settlers became English, and the Dublin Norse became part of Irish political life. Only the North Atlantic colonies stayed Norse. Iceland and the Faroes remain so, while Greenland's colony faded out in the 15th century. The Viking settlements left towns: Dublin, York, Rouen's Normandy and Novgorod among them. They left assemblies that still meet, in the Althing and Tynwald. English took from Old Norse everyday words such as they, sky, egg, window and law. And they left a long quarrel over national origins, the Normanist debate, which still colours how the early history of Russia and Ukraine is told.