Longships, Settlement and a Slow Conversion

Historians conventionally date the Viking Age from the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 CE to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, though Scandinavian trade, raiding and settlement both preceded and outlasted that span. Shallow-drafted longships let Norse crews raid and trade far beyond Scandinavia at once: west to the British Isles and Ireland, where they founded Dublin and settled large parts of England as the Danelaw; further west to uninhabited Iceland, settled from roughly 870 CE, and briefly to Greenland and the North American coast the sagas call Vinland; and east along Russian rivers as the Varangians, reaching Constantinople and founding the trade towns that grew into the Kievan Rus state.

Conversion to Christianity came unevenly and mostly from political pressure rather than mass persuasion. Iceland converted by a single decision of its assembly, the Althing, around the year 1000, reportedly as a compromise to avoid civil war between pagan and Christian factions, and allowed private pagan worship for a time afterward. Norway's conversion under kings Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson (later Saint Olaf) in the decades around 1000 to 1030 was considerably more violent, involving forced baptism and the destruction of temples. Denmark and Sweden converted over a similarly rough two centuries, with Sweden's major pagan cult center at Uppsala, described by the German chronicler Adam of Bremen, likely still active into the eleventh century. By 1100 or so, Christianity had formally displaced Norse Paganism as the region's state religion everywhere, though folk practice and belief persisted far longer at the margins.