These Scandinavian adventurers, pirates and eventually, colonists, were certainly pagan initially. They had a whole pantheon of gods, and many are familiar to us today such as Thor, Odin and Frey. From the 8th century, their raiding parties plundered Christian monasteries on the islands and mainlands of Scotland, northern England and Ireland. They liked nothing better than to pillage the monastic settlements of their gold and fine ware, burn the holy books, kill the older monks and enslave all the younger people they could lay hands on.
Over time, when they settled throughout these lands, those very monasteries that survived their depredations began to exert an influence over them, and gradually the Vikings adopted Christianity (while, it is suspected, maybe not totally abandoning their own beliefs). In Dublin, where around 916 they built a fortified and important trading centre, their king, Sitric Silkenbeard, funded the erection of the town’s first cathedral around 1030. First built of wood, it was later rebuilt in stone and in the 1170s it took it present shape from Dublin’s latest conquerors, the Normans, who themselves were originally Vikings who settled in Normandy. The first bishop of Dublin was an Irish priest called Dúnán or Donat and the diocese was linked to the archdiocese of Canterbury in England.
In later blogs we will talk about the early Viking city of Dublin and about the subsequent arrival of the Normans to Ireland.
