The Vikings on the Continent
Alfred the Great was not the only one to be beset by Norseman – Simon Coupland and Janet Nelson re-interpret their impact on the mainland of 9th-century Europe.
The Vikings have become a high-profile subject in Britain in the 1980s, after a major exhibition at the British Museum and the huge success of the Jorvik Centre in York. Yet how many of us are aware that Vikings were just as active on the other side of the Channel in the ninth century? The problem here is not lack of evidence, since there is a wealth of contemporary Latin texts - far more texts than have survived from anywhere in Britain - which describe Viking activities. But hardly any of these texts have been translated; and nor have the standard works on the subject written by German and French scholars over sixty years ago. Furthermore, Continental archaeologists have been on the whole uninterested in early medieval sites.
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