Pioneering scholarly works on the Viking Age reached a small readership in Britain. The first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. In medieval English chronicles, they are described as "wolves among sheep". Vikings were portrayed as wholly violent and bloodthirsty by their enemies. The Viking devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island was reported by the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York, who wrote: "Never before in Britain has such a terror appeared". In the Lindisfarne attack, monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown, or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures, giving rise to the traditional (but unattested) prayer- A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine, "Free us from the fury of the Northmen, Lord." Three Viking ships had beached in Weymouth Bay four years earlier (although due to a scribal error the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates this event to 787 rather than 789), but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid.
The earliest raids were most likely small in scale, but expanded in scale during the 9th century. Judith Jesch has argued that the start of the Viking Age can be pushed back to 700–750 CE, as it was unlikely that the Lindisfarne attack was the first attack, and given archeological evidence that suggests contacts between Scandinavia and the British isles earlier in the century. In England, the Viking attack of 8 June 793 CE that destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning on an island off the northeast coast of England in Northumberland, is regarded as the beginning of the Viking Age. Information about the Viking Age is drawn largely from primary sources written by those the Vikings encountered, as well as archaeology, supplemented with secondary sources such as the Icelandic Sagas. Sailing innovations had allowed the Vikings to sail further and longer to begin with.
The aggressive expansion of the Carolingian Empire and forced conversion of the neighbouring Saxons to Christianity may also have been a factor. They may also have been pushed to leave their homeland by overpopulation, lack of good farmland, and political strife arising from the unification of Norway. The Vikings were drawn by the growth of wealthy towns and monasteries overseas and weak kingdoms. In 1021, the Vikings achieved the feat of reaching North America-the date of which was not specified until a millennium later. The Norse homelands were also unified into larger kingdoms during the Viking Age, and the short-lived North Sea Empire included large swathes of Scandinavia and Britain.
The Vikings founded several kingdoms and earldoms in Europe: the kingdom of the Isles ( Suðreyjar), Orkney ( Norðreyjar), York ( Jórvík) and the Danelaw ( Danalǫg), Dublin ( Dyflin), Normandy, and Kievan Rus' ( Garðaríki). The Norse-Gaels, Normans, Rus' people, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies. They also briefly settled in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to reach North America. Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the Norse people settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast and along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes in eastern Europe, where they were also known as Varangians. The Scandinavians of the Viking Age are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen, although few of them were Vikings in the sense of being engaged in piracy. The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. It followed the Migration Period and the Germanic Iron Age. The Viking Age (793–1066 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonising, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America.
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