The Viking Age (approximately 793–1066 AD) represents the last major wave of expansion from Scandinavia, but it is both more and less than popular imagination suggests: more geographically extensive, less consistently violent, and more thoroughly integrated into the existing world of medieval European and Islamic trade.

The famous monastery raids — Lindisfarne in 793, Iona in 795 — were significant partly because monasteries concentrated portable wealth in relatively undefended coastal locations. But Viking activity was not primarily raiding; it was also trading, settlement, and political intervention. Scandinavian merchants operated along the Volga and Dnieper routes to Constantinople and Baghdad (the eastern route being more profitable for most of the Viking Age than the western). The Arabic silver dirham is the most common coin found in Viking-age hoards.

Viking settlement in Ireland, England, Normandy, Iceland, Greenland, and briefly North America (L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland) represents a genuine colonization movement. The Normans — 'Northmen' who settled in the French region that takes its name from them — within two generations had adopted French language and culture and produced the political dynasty that conquered England in 1066 and southern Italy and Sicily in the same period.

Old Norse literature, preserved primarily in Icelandic manuscripts of the 13th century, provides our primary window into Viking-age culture: the eddic poems with their mythological and heroic content, the family sagas (Íslendingasögur) with their remarkably realistic portraiture of Icelandic society, and the kings' sagas (konungasögur). The sagas' prose style — understated, ironic, attentive to character — has influenced Scandinavian and English literature since their rediscovery.