Ride of the VALKYRIES
... the English called them wælwulfas , 'slaughter-wolves' ... "Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence , not the contact ." The Vikings ominously enter the written record in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 789 AD: ' Here [King] Beorhtric [of Wessex] took [Mercian] King Offa's daughter Eadburh. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race. ' Some corrective notes are required for the chronicler's account. This occasion was probably not the first 'visit' of the th...