Histories: Viking longships brought rape, pillage and cod

Just over a thousand years ago, a Viking chieftain named Ohthere paid a visit to England and the court of King Alfred. An intrepid mariner, Ohthere told the king about his homeland in Arctic Norway, and described long sea voyages around what are now Norway and Denmark. The learned king evidently listened intently, and instructed his scribe to note down the intelligence gathered from this visitor from the north. Today, the resulting late 9th-century manuscript, conserved in the British Library, is acknowledged to be the single most important contemporary account of a Scandinavian Viking-age traveller.