The Vikings saga. Part 1: Men from the North.

THE SAGA OF VIKINGS.
The Vikings (in Old Norse: víkingr, in the plural víkingar) are explorers, traders, looters but also Scandinavian pirates during a period extending from the eleventh to the eleventh century1, commonly known as the "Age of the Vikings". They are often called Normans, that is to say etymologically "men of the North", in the old bibliography.
Unlike the other Germanic peoples of more southern Europe, they remained pagans until the first half of the tenth century. This is one of the reasons why it emerges from European texts from the Middle Ages (mainly from the ninth to the eleventh centuries), a negative image of their action, reduced to acts of piracy and looting, characterized by the violence of their raids and their "pagan" barbarism.
The vast majority of the authors of these texts are indeed clerics from monastic circles, yet the targets of looting were the monasteries, then the main centers of wealth in Europe.
However, we now understand better that these plunderings enabled them to obtain by force wealth which they converted (by melting gold) as a means of payment to acquire weapons on the European markets (Frankish swords) or luxury products on the markets of the Orient. The more contemporary documentation, mainly from recent archaeological excavations, has helped to qualify their negative image and rather emphasizes the positive aspect of their action in many cases, because they were also great sailors, explorers, merchants and warriors who reached the Atlantic coasts of Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Orient and even America (Vinland), while sometimes establishing trading posts and colonies as in the Faroe Islands, Orkney , Iceland, Greenland, etc.
They founded new and original states in Normandy and Russia.
They are considered to have been the architects of the second globalization, the first having been Roman. Their rapid assimilation in the colonized countries proceeds from a deliberate political choice which led to their acculturation in a few decades.
The Viking Age came to an end following the assertion in Scandinavia of centralizing monarchical powers and their conversion to Christianity.
Part 1: Men from the North.
The first months of 793 were a worrying period.
Later, Anglo-Saxon writers from the north of England recalled how "immense whirlwinds, lightning bolts - and flaming dragons - were seen flying in the air".
They believed that these phenomena - aerial - were the sign of an impending catastrophe. Indeed, a great famine ensued.
But the worst was to come. June 8.
On that day, men from the north on long boats plundered the monastery on the English island of Lindisfarne.
In a few hours, they fill their boats with rich loot: works of art, precious metals, slaves ...
Founded in 635 by the Irish monk Aidan, The attack plunges the Western Christian world into dismay.
This Viking raid on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the northwest coast, was not the first in England.
A few years earlier, in 789, "three ships of men from the north" had landed on the Wessex coast and killed the king's prefect who had been sent to bring foreigners to the court of West Saxony.
But the assault on Lindisfarne was different because it attacked the sacred heart of the kingdom of Northumbria, desecrating "the very place where the Christian religion began in our nation".
It was there that Cuthbert (died 687) had been bishop, and where his body was now revered like that of a saint.
The news of the raid quickly reached Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar living far away in the kingdom of the Franks, where he was the guardian of the children of the famous King Charlemagne.
Alcuin was dismayed by this unprecedented atrocity, which he described in five letters he sent to various English personalities of the time, as well as in his poem De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii.
As he wrote to Higbald, bishop of Lindisfarne, "a place more sacred than any other in Britain": Saint-Cuthbert Church is splashed with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furniture , exposed to the pillage of the pagans.
The monks who were able to flee from the island take with them the relics of Saint Cuthbert.
They eventually settled in Durham in 995.
Few, the Vikings fall on their prey by surprise then plunder - and kill with refinements of cruelty.
By horribly mutilating their victims, by torching everything in their path, they maintain - around them a reputation for violence which removes from anyone the desire to resist them - other than by fleeing ...
To follow on the video ...