Well known but poorly understood, the Vikings provide a fascinating point of entry into the early medieval world. The Viking Age was characterized above all by movement. The ‘Vikings’ were willing and able to travel unprecedented distances from their homeland of Scandinavia to vastly diverse lands thousands of miles apart, from the Volga River on the geographic boundary between Europe and Asia, to Newfoundland in North America. They not only visited these places, but settled in most of them, usually with profound consequences. They populated Iceland for the first time; they transformed many other regions they raided and settled, being directly implicated in the formation of kingdoms in England, Ireland and Scotland; and they founded new political units that would have enduring importance in global history, in Normandy and around Kyiv in eastern Europe. This module introduces the Vikings and their deep influence on the culture, society and identity of the northern hemisphere.