Viking Age is the term for the period in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, spanning the late 8th to 11th centuries. Scandinavian Vikings explored Europe by its oceans and rivers through trade and warfare. The Vikings also reached Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and Anatolia. Additionally, there is evidence to support the Vinland legend that Vikings reached farther west to the North American continent. In England the Viking Age began dramatically on 8 June 793 when Vikings destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning famous across the... continent. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. Three Viking ships had beached in Portland Bay six years earlier, but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Lindisfarne was different. The Viking devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island shocked and alerted the royal Courts of Europe. "Never before has such an atrocity been seen," declared the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York.
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