![viking conquest danish longphort viking conquest danish longphort](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZECrIUTJbiw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Sometimes they would raid together sometimes they fought each other in desperate battles but to the English they presented themselves in the common guise of a merciless scourge. The relations between the Danes and the Norwegians were tangled and varying. Mexico has been theorised as a destination. The third far ranging impulse carried the Scandinavian buccaneers to the British Isles, to Normandy, to Iceland, presently across the Atlantic Ocean to the North American coast. The word ‘Rus’ (as in Russia – ‘state of the Vikings’), is another term for Viking or ‘sea pirate.’ Another contingent sailed in their long boats from Norway to the Mediterranean, harried all the shores of the inland sea, and were with difficulty repulsed by the Arab kingdoms of Spain and the north coast of Africa. One current of marauding vigour struck southwards from Sweden, and not only reached Constantinople, but left behind it a potent memory which across the centuries made their mark upon European Russia. The Viking Warriorįamous for their ‘spectacle’ helmet visors, Dane Axes and wolf skins. There was here no question of Danes or Norsemen being driven Westward by new pressures from the steppes of Asia, that put the early Englisc on their sea roving adventure to Britain. The causes, which led to this racial ebullition, were spontaneous growth of their strength and population, the thirst for adventure, and the complications of dynastic quarrels. Heavily tattooed, a Viking warrior would have looked very similar to an English Huscarl, who copied the Danish fighting arts, especially the use of the Dane Axe. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark threw up war bands of formidable fighting men, much akin to the early Englisc war bands that ravaged southern Britain, who, in addition to all their martial qualities, were the hardy rovers of the sea.Īrguably there still is much similarity between these Sea Nations today. In the eighth century a vehement manifestation of conquering energy appeared in Scandinavia. Measure for measure, what the Englisc had given the Britons in the early 400’s AD was meted out to their English descendants after a lapse of four hundred years. The Norsemen – why did they invade England?
![viking conquest danish longphort viking conquest danish longphort](http://www.ancientpages.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/battleofsvolder12.jpg)
One of the reasons why genetically it is difficult to separate Danes from English.
![viking conquest danish longphort viking conquest danish longphort](https://www.historyonthenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Aros_viking_town.jpg)
So we can see that the English and the Norse were of the same roots, and from more or less the same lands, in North Western Europe. But also the Vikings of Norway, Sweden and perhaps other Nordic tribes in that part of Northern Europe, and as we shall find, the Angles and Saxons were in many ways no different from the Vikings who first came to England in 793 AD as raiders like the Anglo-Saxons some four hundred years before.īoth the early English and the Norsemen worshiped more or less the same Gods, fought in more or less the same fashion, and more or less had the same cultural identity, poems, songs and lived more or less by the same codes, the same warrior codes, fought in the same sort of war bands and loyally serving and dying in battle for the same sort of voted for war leader, or warlord. Anglen in southern Denmark and the Islands of the Jutland Peninsula. The term Norsemen was used, and is used to mean the Vikings of Denmark, of which the early Angli ancestors originated from, i.e. And the Norsemen were, without a doubt a big part and reason for that future political State, and Nation Statehood, but we will also learn that the Norsemen are as much apart of the English nation, as a people and as much apart of England’s identity as the early Anglo-Saxon ancestors are. After the anglo-saxons had established their kingdoms this is another interesting part of English history, a period in which England went from a people divided, to a people united under one King, a period in which the English would become the worlds first known Nation State.