ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the deeper prehistory of the Scandinavian peoples, and the Sámi with whom they shared their world, before the time of the Vikings and back to the early Iron Age. The crises of the so-called Migration Period are discussed in detail, as new political constellations emerged from the long shadow cast by the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In the wake of a sequence of major volcanic events in the mid-sixth century, leading to widespread social collapse and significant mortality, it is possible to discern the beginnings of the expansionist hall culture that would come to characterise much of the later Iron Age. The features that have been taken to define the Viking Age – raiding, trading, and slaving – can be seen as new exports of behaviour that had long been the norm inside Scandinavia.
