Raping, pillaging Vikings were progressive

So they weren't really so fearsome?

Apparently not. Historians at a recent conference in Cambridge claim there was a lot more to the Vikings than pillage. Most of the seafaring peoples who came from Norway, Sweden and Denmark between the 8th and 12th centuries – the 'Viking Age' – were farmers and merchants, rather than violent raiders, and wherever they settled they brought advanced skills in leather and wood-work and soon integrated into local communities. You might even call them 'progressive'. Women, who were free to trade and participate in political and religious life, were afforded considerable respect, as witnessed by the riches found in their graves. Vikings were also in touch with their softer side, fussy about appearance and hygiene and very fashion-conscious. Archaeologists find more Viking combs than either swords or axes.

So how did they acquire their evil reputation in Britain?

The first recorded Viking landing was in 787, when three ships from Norway landed in Dorset. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, compiled more than a century later, the man sent to meet them was chopped up into little pieces on the beach, after which Viking raids became a byword for mayhem. "Behold, the Church of St Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of its priests," wrote Alcuin of York, a religious scholar, of the sacking of the monastery at Lindisfarne, Northumberland, in 793; and over 1,200 years later, Denmark still felt the need to issue apologies for Viking raids. "We are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings," said Brian Mikkelsen, the Danish culture minister, in 2007. Some scholars maintain that the raiders made themselves crazily violent by taking magic mushrooms and that from this arose the myth of the 'berserkers', warriors who in the heat of battle were impervious to pain.

And are these stories wrong?

They're almost certainly exaggerated. While raiding was a Viking tradition – fragments of bibles from British and Irish monasteries have been found in Denmark – there's scant evidence of extreme violence. There's not one case of rape reported in contemporary sources, and when Alcuin wrote his account of the destruction of Lindisfarne, he was at the court of King Charlemagne in Aachen, more than 500 miles away. Extensive archaeological surveys at Lindisfarne, meanwhile, have failed to come up with any evidence of a massacre: no signs of burning or mass graves of monks. There are even doubts about how much the Vikings looted from the monastery. In broader terms, excavations of Viking sites do still find the odd skull split in two, but most of the surviving evidence suggests that they were peaceful settlers.

What sort of evidence?

Many Viking archaeological sites contain no weapons at all, merely brooches, needles, coins and other examples of an everyday existence. "Most people's image of the