I have a problem with the term Viking Age. And it’s not likely that I will ever get satisfaction. Because I am a Scandy archaeologist, and the term is owned by UK historians and the general English-speaking public.
The three-ages system was established by C.J. Thomsen in his 1821 book Ledetraad. It divides Scandinavian Prehistory into three ages, characterised by the material used in cutting tools: first stone, then bronze, then iron. In Swedish, this taxonomical level is the ålder – stenåldern, bronsåldern, järnåldern – using the close cognate of what Snorri back in the 13th century called his imagined periods of the past. Later in the 19th century Oscar Montelius divided these three åldrar into perioder. And over the 20th century later contributors subdivided these perioder into Stufen or faser. It’s a three-tier taxonomy which, translated into English, gives us ages consisting of periods consisting of phases. Obviously a part of an age can’t also be an age. That would be like calling a slice of bread “a loaf”, or calling a steering wheel “a car”. (Or, if you really want to get crazy, like calling your computer “the hard drive”.)
But. Long before there was any prehistoric archaeology, English historians were using the word age to refer to any demarcated historical interval, such as the Middle Ages – and the Viking Age. To them, the Viking Age was “the time when our island used to get raided or conquered or ruled by Vikings”, i.e. from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. From the perspective of British written history, the raids and the Danelaw are the single most important thing the Scandinavians were doing at the time – indeed, the only thing they did that is worthy of attention, since they did it in Britain and it’s almost the only thing about them that got recorded in writing. Historians don’t deal with silent periods.
To Scandinavian archaeologists, though, the raids on Britain are of little importance since they didn’t occur on our turf. We deal with what people were doing in Scandinavia at the time: mainly living on farms, burying the dead, erecting rune stones, hoarding silver, establishing our first towns and getting our first large-scale political organisation together. To us, the Viking time interval is a period of the Iron Age which starts with the appearance of certain jewellery types and ends with the appearance of masonry architecture. It is most emphatically not an Age. And that’s why, when I write in English, I stubbornly say “Viking Period” (94,000 Google hits) instead of “Viking Age” (955,000 Google hits).