Viking Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Trivia quiz questions with answers about Vikings.

Viking Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What was a Viking?
A: Vikings were Norse seafarers who during the late 8th to late 11th centuries, raided and traded from their Northern European homelands across wide areas of Europe.

Facilitated by advanced sailing and navigational skills, and characterized by the longship, Viking activities at times extended into where?
A: The Mediterranean littoral, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

The period from the earliest recorded raids in the 790s until the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 is commonly known as what?
A: The Viking Age of Scandinavian history.

Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea for what?
A: Sea routes to the south.

The Normans were descended from Vikings who were given what?
A: Feudal overlordship of areas in northern France—the Duchy of Normandy—in the 10th century.

In that respect where did the descendants of the Vikings continue to have an influence?
A: In northern Europe.

Likewise, King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, had what ancestors?
A: Danish.

Geographically, a Viking Age may be assigned to not only Scandinavian lands (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden), but also territories under what dominance?
A: North Germanic, mainly the Danelaw, including Scandinavian York, the administrative centre of the remains of the Kingdom of Northumbria, parts of Mercia, and East Anglia.

Viking navigators opened the road to new lands to the north, west and east, resulting in the foundation of what?
A: Independent settlements in the Shetland, Orkney, and Faroe Islands; Iceland; Greenland; and L'Anse aux Meadows, a short-lived settlement in Newfoundland, circa 1000.

When was the Greenland settlement established?
A: Around 980, during the Medieval Warm Period.

Its demise by the mid-15th century may have been partly due to what?
A: Climate change.

As early as 839, when Swedish emissaries are first known to have visited Byzantium, Scandinavians served as what?
A: Mercenaries in the service of the Byzantine Empire.

There is archaeological evidence that Vikings reached what city, the centre of the Islamic Empire?
A: Baghdad.

The Norse regularly plied the Volga with what trade goods?
A: Furs, tusks, seal fat for boat sealant, and slaves.

Generally speaking, the Norwegians expanded to where?
A: The north and west to places such as Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland.

Where did the Danes expand to?
A: England and France, settling in the Danelaw (northern/eastern England) and Normandy.

What about the Swedes?
A: The Swedes spread to the east, founding Kievan Rus'.

Among the Swedish runestones mentioning expeditions overseas, almost half tell of what?
A: Raids and travels to Western Europe.

According to the Icelandic sagas, many Norwegian Vikings also went where?
A: To Eastern Europe.

After the end of the Viking Age the separate kingdoms gradually acquired distinct identities as what?
A: Nations, which went hand-in-hand with their Christianization.

Thus the end of the Viking Age for the Scandinavians also marks the start of their what?
A: Their relatively brief middle Ages.

When did colonization of Iceland by Norwegian Vikings begin?
A: In the ninth century.

The Vikings explored the northern islands and coasts of the North Atlantic, ventured south to North Africa and east to where?
A: Russia, Constantinople, and the Middle East.

Early Vikings probably returned home after what?
A: Their raids.

Later in their history, they began to do what?
A: To settle in other lands.

Vikings under Leif Ericson, heir to Erik the Red, reached North America and set up short-lived settlements in present-day what?
A: L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada.

This expansion occurred during what period?
A: During the Medieval Warm Period.

Viking expansion into continental Europe was what?
A: Limited.

Their realm was bordered by what to the south?
A: Powerful cultures.

Early on, it was the Saxons, who occupied Old Saxony, located in what is now what?
A: Northern Germany.

The Saxons were a fierce and powerful people and were often in conflict with whom?
A: The Vikings.

To counter the Saxon aggression and solidify their own presence, the Danes constructed what?
A: The huge defense fortification of Danevirke in and around Hedeby.

The Vikings soon witnessed the violent subduing of the Saxons by Charlemagne in what?
A: The thirty-year Saxon Wars in 772–804.

Fear of the Franks led the Vikings to further expand Danevirke, and the defense constructions remained in use throughout the Viking Age and even up until when?
A: 1864.

Raids in Europe, including raids and settlements from Scandinavia, were not unprecedented and had occurred when?
A: Long before the Vikings arrived.

The Jutes invaded the British Isles three centuries earlier, pouring out from Jutland during what?
A: The Age of Migrations, before the Danes settled there.

The Saxons and the Angles did the same, embarking from where?
A: Mainland Europe.

The Viking raids were, however, the first to be what?
A: Documented in writing by eyewitnesses, and they were much larger in scale and frequency than in previous times.

The "Highway of Slaves" was a term used to describe what route?
A: A route that had a direct pathway from Scandinavia to Constantinople and Baghdad while traveling on the Baltic Sea.

With the advancements of their ships during the ninth century, the Vikings were able to sail to where?
A: Russia and some northern parts of Europe.

By 1103, where was the first archbishopric founded in Scandinavia?
A: At Lund, Scania, then part of Denmark.

One of the primary sources of profit for the Vikings had been what?
A: Slave-taking.

Although Vikings were generally a non-literate culture that produced no literary legacy, they had an alphabet and described themselves and their world on what?
A: Runestones.

Most contemporary literary and written sources on the Vikings come from where?
A: Other cultures that were in contact with them.

The Norse of the Viking Age could read and write and used a non-standardized alphabet, called runor, built upon what?
A: Sound values.

While there are few remains of runic writing on paper from the Viking era, thousands of stones with runic inscriptions have been found where?
A: Where Vikings lived.

They are usually in memory of the dead, though not necessarily placed where?
A: At graves.

The use of runor survived into the 15th century, used in parallel with what?
A: The Latin alphabet.

The majority of runic inscriptions from the Viking period are found where?
A: In Sweden and date from the 11th century.

The oldest stone with runic inscriptions was found in Norway and dates to when?
A: The 4th century, suggesting that runic inscriptions pre-date the Viking period.

Many runestones in Scandinavia record the names of participants in what?
A: Viking expeditions, such as the Kjula runestone that tells of extensive warfare in Western Europe.

Other runestones mention men who died on what?
A: Viking expeditions.

Among them are around 25 Ingvar runestones in the Mälardalen district of Sweden, erected to commemorate members of a what?
A: A disastrous expedition into present-day Russia in the early 11th century.