Viking Attack on Lindisfarne

“Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race.” So wrote the scholar Alcuin after Norse raiders struck the monastery of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria, on June 8, 793. It wasn’t the first Norse attack on English soil. Around 789, men from ‘Hordaland’ killed a royal reeve at Portland, in Wessex. But Lindisfarne shook Christian Europe like nothing before it, and historians still date the start of the Viking age from that day.

Heart of Christianity

Lindisfarne, the ‘Holy Island,’ was one of the most revered places in Northumbria. It was the resting place of St. Cuthbert, and Alcuin called it ‘more venerable than all in Britain.’ The raiders killed monks, carried others off to be sold as slaves, and stripped the church of its treasures. A 9th-century carved gravestone found on the island, sometimes called the ‘Domesday Stone,’ shows a line of armed men, and many people link it to the raid, though that connection can’t be proven.

Lindisfarne Politics

The raid is often pictured as hordes of pagans bursting out of the fog, but the reality was more complicated. Norse traders knew this coast. And Northumbria was in turmoil: in the years before 793 it saw kings murdered and deposed and royal heirs killed, leaving its rulers little time for defense. The raiders may well have spotted that weakness.

Element of Surprise

Since Vikings were trading along the coast, the monks and priests probably didn’t react to the ships as they came ashore. For them, it was probably just another trading party, something that would further improve the financial welfare of the rich area. They wouldn’t have known what was happening until the Vikings had drawn their weapons.

Vestige of Wealth

Raiding offered a much faster route to riches, especially silver, than trading furs and slaves. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the heathens ‘destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne through brutal robbery and slaughter.’ Yet the community survived, and so did its greatest treasure, the Lindisfarne Gospels, which the monks carried with them when they finally abandoned the island decades later.

Lindisfarne was only the beginning. Over the next 250 years the Norse would sail farther, raid harder, and settle everywhere from Dublin to Normandy. At Asgard Alaska we want to tell the whole story, not just the raids. Join our newsletter to follow along.