This course will consider the Viking experience of the Celtic-speaking lands and how the Vikings, through both confrontation and collaboration, had a transformative impact on that world between c. 780 – 1020. The Vikings were largely a silent people and it is largely through the eyes of those they encountered – peoples who were already literate – that we first get to know them. Many of our enduring images of the Vikings are based on sources from the Celtic world, and some of the earliest and most complete accounts of the initial Viking raids are found in the Irish annals.
As the Vikings become a permanent presence in these lands, the Celtic and Norse views of the spiritual, heroic and economic world intersected and, at times, collided. We will trace the survival of rituals and beliefs brought from Scandinavia as exemplified by the decorated slabs and burials on the Isle of Man, where legends from Norse mythology feature on Christian crosses and a warrior was buried with a sacrificed slave. 
There were personalities, both Norse and Celtic, who straddled both worlds, and many of these men and women were nurtured in both traditions and reflect the enduring and transforming contacts made through intermarriage, fosterage and political alliances. Towns develop in the west and the north as a result of the Vikings’ new raiding/trading activities, and the connections between the contemporary developments of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick in Ireland and Kaupang, Birka and Hedeby in Scandinavia will be surveyed.