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The chest contained over 200 tools and blacksmith works or works in progress, making it the largest Viking tool find in Europe. [6] The tools resemble early Roman tools, now on display in museums in Germany, among those the Saalburg. Technological influences spread throughout Europe with the expansion of the Roman empire.
The fast design of Viking ships was essential to their hit-and-run raids. For instance, in the sacking of Frisia in the early 9th century, Charlemagne mobilized his troops as soon as he heard of the raid, but found no Vikings by the time he arrived. [41] Their ships gave the Vikings an element of surprise.
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
The Iberian example shows how Viking were often traders and raiders, who in the aftermath of raids would use their newfound power to establish trade. [7]: 4-5 The Vikings also sent merchants as far west as Greenland and North America. [8] Trade routes would play an important role in rebuilding the economy of Europe during the Viking Age.
Viking landing at Dublin, 841, by James Ward (1851-1924). Knowledge about military technology of the Viking Age (late 8th to mid-11th century Europe) is based on relatively sparse archaeological finds, pictorial representations, and to some extent on the accounts in the Norse sagas and laws recorded in the 12th–14th centuries.
The king of Mercia requested help from the king of Wessex to help fight the Vikings. A combined army from Wessex and Mercia besieged the city of Nottingham with no clear result, so the Mercians settled on paying the Vikings off. The Vikings returned to Northumbria in autumn 868 and overwintered in York, staying there for most of 869.
The sagas tell much of Viking travel and trade throughout the North Atlantic which furthers the idea that the knarr was an essential part of Viking culture. Trade not only connected the Vikings to the world around them but also helped their interconnectedness as a culture.
The romanticised idea of the Vikings constructed in scholarly and popular circles in northwestern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries was a potent one, and the figure of the Viking became a familiar and malleable symbol in different contexts in the politics and political ideologies of 20th-century Europe. [243]