Viking Age: Did you mean...?

Aethelflaed (r. 911-918 CE) was the daughter of King Alfred the Great of Wessex (r. 871-899 CE) and became queen of Mercia following the death of her husband Aethelred, Lord of the Mercians (r. 883-911 CE). She is best known as the “Lady...

The Battle of Ashdown, fought on 8th January 871 in southern England, saw the Kingdom of Wessex defeat the Great Heathen (Viking) Army. This was the first major defeat of the Viking army, which had arrived in England in 865 and had conquered...

The Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) refers to a period when robbery on the high seas and at colonial ports reached an unprecedented level. Although not all historians agree on the precise time frame, it is generally applied to those pirates...

The norns were supernatural female entities responsible for the fates of all living beings in Viking Age Scandinavia. Associated with Yggdrasil, the world tree and central element of the nine realms of Norse cosmology, the norns are not active...

Aethelred II, also known as Aethelred the Unready, was king of the English from 978-1013 and 1014-1016. His long reign was initially stable, but Viking attacks on England escalated from the 990s onward. Viking incursions eventually grew so...

The Old Norse word saga means 'story', 'tale' or 'history' and normally refers specifically to the epic prose narratives written mainly in Iceland between the 12th- and 15th centuries CE, covering the country's history as well as Scandinavia's...

The decline of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East has puzzled historians and archaeologists for centuries. While many have ascribed the collapse of several civilizations to the enigmatic Sea Peoples, Professor...

The Bronze Age in Sicily, considered one of the most important periods of the island's prehistory, witnessed the establishment of a unitary and in some ways artistically vibrant culture. The three main phases of the period take their name...

In Norse belief, the soul of the deceased might wind up in any one of a number of afterlife realms. There was Valhalla, the realm of Odin where the dead warriors drank, fought, and told stories, Folkvangr ('the Field of the People'), the...

An ice age is a period in which the earth's climate is colder than normal, with ice sheets capping the poles and glaciers dominating higher altitudes. Within an ice age, there are varying pulses of colder and warmer climatic conditions, known...