The fury of the northmen: saints, shrines and sea-raiders in the viking age ad 793-878

For the modern secular historian, the raid on the holy island of Lindisfarne in A.D. 793 serves merely as the hallmark of the birth of the Viking Age. In its own world and time, though, that raid came as nothing short of a cataclysm: the Apocalypse made real on the sands of Northumbria. In the following years, those same sea-raiders, known to history as the Vikings or the Northmen, struck much farther down the coasts of Britain and Ireland. Their ravages ushered in one of the most turbulent periods of history the world has ever known.