The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XII: The Viking Invasions, the Kingdom of England, and the Western Caliphate

THE term Viking is a derivative of the Old Norse Vik, a creek, bay or fiord, and means one who haunts such an opening and uses it as a base whence raids may be made on the surrounding country. The word is now commonly applied to those Norsemen, Danes and Swedes who harried Europe from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, and in such phrases as ‘the Viking age’, ‘Viking civilization’, is used in a still wider sense as a convenient term for Scandinavian civilization at a particular stage in ...