One June day in the year 793, men in ships landed on Lindisfarne, an island off eastern England occupied by a monastery. The men, apparently from the north, plundered treasures, overthrew altars and set fire to buildings. They killed some monks and carried others off in chains; others, they stripped naked and left behind to the mercies of the weather. The attack shocked European Christian society. They came to mark it as the official start of the Viking Age, when Norse raiders ranged as far as the southern Mediterranean and northern Asia, before seemingly fading out some 250 years later.
In fact, the Vikings’ rise was not a sudden event, but part of a long continuum of human development in northern Scandinavia, whose long, intricate marine coasts and archipelagos led to the rise of a culture based on land, but heavily dependent on the sea. The Vikings (the name derives from the Norse for “bay dwellers”) were survivors of a harsh, cold environment, where climatic conditions constantly hovered on the edge of survivability, and small changes in weather could have big effects. So could changes in sea level. What influenced their brief florescence and decline, and how did they make a living over the long term? Today, their experiences may provide an object lesson in how changing climate can affect a civilization.
Continue reading at Earth Institute - Columbia University
Image Source: Columbia University
