The Long Late Iron Age

Traditionally, the Viking Age was neatly defined through events of the classic kind, beginning with the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 CE and ending with the death of the Norwegian King Haraldr harðráði at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. Of course, reality is not so simple, and historians rarely speak in such terms now. Furthermore, a focus on kings and battles hardly encompasses the rounded world of everyday life and experience across the social spectrum. We prefer to look at the past in terms of longer-term change, political developments, and cultural shifts. This requires a broader, more vague idea of chronology, but historians can never really escape the trap of arbitrarily dividing up the past.

We view the Viking Age as covering the approximate period from 750-1050 CE, but with decades of fuzziness at the edges. It did not ‘begin’ or ‘end’ in straightforward ways, and the Viking phenomenon varied both regionally and over time.

Similar problems apply to the earlier centuries of the so-called Iron Age, which conventionally goes back as far as 500 years before the Common Era. Most of these time periods have equally difficult borders and also a variety of names from one country to another. This chart shows how the different time periods are conventionally labelled in the Nordic countries:

WIVA naturally focuses on the Viking Age, but that can only really be understood in a deeper temporal perspective. We therefore look at the whole ‘long Late Iron Age’.