Shock and awe — what should we make of our Viking ancestors?

In June 793, a raiding force arrived by boat at the island monastery of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast. The attack that followed was shockingly brutal. The English cleric Alcuin wrote: ‘Never before has such terror appeared in Britain… Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments.’

It was the first recorded Viking raid on Britain. Many others were to follow, and the image of the axe-wielding raiding party remains the stereotypical view of the Viking horde. The question that this dark, brilliantly written and absorbing book asks is: who were these people and where did all that violence come from? It turns out that behind the Viking façade of fighting, drinking and pillaging, there lies ‘something very different, very old, and very odd’.

In the sixth century, Scandinavian society began to crumble. The cause of this sharp decline was a huge series of volcanic eruptions, which took place in what is now El Salvador between the years 536 and 540. The volcano ejected so much ash that it changed the earth’s climate. Dust blocked out the sun, average temperatures fell and harvests failed. Northern Europe was particularly affected and in the famines and migrations that followed, Scandinavia lost around 50 per cent of its inhabitants.

These tumultuous events became lodged deep in the Scandinavian folk memory. The Norse poets wrote of the ‘mighty winter’, when ‘Black became the sun’s beams/ in the summers that follow’. Another bard, from Finland, asked: ‘What wonder blocks out the moon/ what fog is in the sun’s way/ that the moon gleams not at all/ and the sun shines not at all?’ The idea of the end of the world became central to Norse myth. The final day became known as Ragnarök. It was then that the dead would rise to fight one last annihilating battle, in which the gods and humanity would all perish together.