Northmen

According to the saga, Yngvar died in 1041 aged twenty-five, in which case he would have been no more than six when he set out from Sweden.

The two Rus raids on the Caspian had created a very strong impression on the Muslim world. Ibn Miskawayh thought them formidable fighters, ‘they do not recognise defeats,’ he said, ‘no one turns back until he has killed or been killed.’ Another writer, Marwazi, praised their courage, saying that one Rus ‘is equal to a number of any other nation’. He was grateful that the Rus fought on foot, ‘if they had horses and were riders, they would be a great scourge to mankind’.

Magnus was the last Scandinavian king to be killed on a Viking raid. Many of Magnus’s closest advisers thought he was reckless in battle, but he always had an answer, ‘a king is for glory, not for long life’: it was a fitting epitaph for a Viking Age kingship.

With the Vikings, trade and war were always closely linked.

The Vikings did not burst out of nowhere and they lived through a long twilight. It is a long journey that starts in Asgard at the creation of the world and ends at a wedding in fifteenth-century Greenland.

Attitudes to the Vikings have shifted over the years. The main chroniclers of medieval Europe were monks and understandably, as they were frequent victims of it, they dwelled on the Vikings’ plundering, burning and captive-taking (they had little to say about rape, perhaps because, as men, they had little to fear from them on that account, at least).