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term Viking is a derivative of the Old Norse Vik, a creek, bay or fjord, and means one who haunts such an opening and uses it as a base whence raids may be made on the surrounding country. The word is now commonly applied to those Norsemen, Danes and Swedes who harried Europe from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, and in such phrases as "the Viking age," "Viking civilisation," is used in a still wider sense as a convenient term for Scandinavian civilisation at a particular stage in its development. It is in this larger sense that the term is used in the present chapter, covering the activities of the Northmen in peace as well as in war. The term Viking in its narrower sense is no more descriptive of this age than "Buccaneering" would be of the age of Elizabeth.

Except along the narrow line of the Eider, Scandinavia has no land-boundaries of importance and is naturally severed from the rest of Europe. Though known to Greek and Roman geographers and historians, it was almost entirely unaffected by Roman civilisation. It was not till the Scandinavian peoples were driven by stress of circumstance to find fresh homes, that they found that the sea instead of dividing them from the rest of Europe really furnished them with a ready and easy path of attack against those nations of North-West Europe who had either neglected or forgotten the art of seamanship.

The history of the Teutonic North from the middle of the sixth to the end of the eighth century is almost a blank, at least in so far as history concerns itself with the record of definite events. During the first half of the sixth century there had been considerable activity in Denmark and Southern Sweden. About the year 520 Chocilaicus, King of the Danes, or, according to another authority, of the Getae (i.e. Götar) in South Sweden, made a raid on the territory of the Franks on the Lower Rhine, but was defeated and slain by Theudibert, son of the Frankish king Theodoric, as he was withdrawing from Frisia with extensive plunder. This expedition finds poetic record the exploits of Hygelac, King of the Geats, in Beowulf. Some forty years later there is mention of them in Venantius Fortunatus's eulogy of Duke Lupus of Champagne. They