I also want to add that the Viking age started long before the famous attack on Lindesfarne in 793.

But that was when the Viking age started for the foreign people.

And the reason the Viking attack started has been misunderstood for a long time.
They say it was because they then had invented the special Viking boats they used.

But the invention of those boats was simply a result of the fact that the Vikings at that time was forced to change trade with raiding, and for that reason they needed completely different ships then they needed for the traditional trade they had been done with the same people hundreds of years before that.

Around that time the European countries got a message from the pope that it was forbidden to trade with pagans (people who was not Christian, Jews or Muslims)
And that made it impossible for the Vikings to do the normal trading, and they started to raid the Christians for the same reason.
And when they discovered how helpless they had become after they had changed their weapons with bibles and prayers, it just become more and more popular to go on Viking tokt`s pretty soon.. lol

And they never ever used their woman as warriors as they do in the silly TV serials.
But a Viking woman was much more respected and had a lot more to say then the Christian woman in Europe had. ;)
(In the post about how Norway become a nation for the first time, you will get a little sense of that.) ;)