The Viking Invasion: England's Terrible Invaders

2. “In England the country began to suffer from a new and terrible race of invaders who now swooped down upon its coast. The Vikings, as these wild pirates were called, came from Denmark and Scandinavia, and were the terror of Western Christendom.” Charles and Mary Oman.A Junior History of England 1920

6. If you look hard enough, it is possible to find some good in any culture … In recent years, historians of the Vikings have been at pains to dispel the mythology that theirs was a sail-and-slash-burn-rape-and-pillage culture. But with the best will in the world, the idea of the early Vikings as speedy Baltic commercial travellers, singing their sagas as they rowed to a new market opening, doesn’t ring quite true. Just because so many of the tales of their early impact on Anglo-Saxon life are alarmingly violent, and because they come from Anglo-Saxon , Church sources, does not necessarily mean they were untrue. Simon Schama – A History of Britain, 2010