Novidades com Poeta Anginho

20/06/2026

23/03/2026

In the autumn of 865 AD, a fleet appeared off the eastern coast of England unlike anything the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had faced before.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records this force not as a seasonal raiding party but as a micel heathen here — a great heathen army — and the language itself signals that contemporaries understood this was something fundamentally different.
Previous Viking incursions followed a pattern. Small fleets arrive in spring. Strike monasteries. Seize wealth. Leave before winter.
The Great Heathen Army broke every element of that pattern.
It arrived with the intention of staying.
It brought not dozens but hundreds — possibly thousands of warriors from across the Scandinavian world.
And its purpose, according to Norse saga tradition, was not plunder but vengeance.
The sagas say Ragnar Lothbrok was captured by King Ælla of Northumbria and thrown into a pit of serpents. His sons — Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, and Ubba — assembled a coalition from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden to destroy the kingdoms responsible.
Within a year of landing they captured York. Killed King Ælla. Northumbria ceased to exist.