The late Viking Age and the early Middle Ages were a period of fundamental developments in Scandinavian political history. It was then that the three Scandinavian kingdoms originated – in chronological order: Denmark, Norway and Sweden – all of them precursors of the later national states. Norse communities were also permanently established in Føroyar and Iceland. Further north-west, in Greenland, and further south – in Shetland, Orkney, on the northern Scottish mainland and its western seaboard, in the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Ireland – other Norse communities were the results of Viking Age expansion but were not destined to survive the Middle Ages.

This was also the age when Scandinavia entered the world of script. In the Viking Age foreign written evidence starts to shed light on the activities of Scandinavians abroad, and also provides glimpses of internal Scandinavian affairs. We have seen that the Scandinavian poetry of the Viking Age, in the form of Eddic verse and skaldic poems, was preserved for generations as part of an oral tradition that was recorded in writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These centuries were the heyday of a rich Scandinavian historical literature, dealing to a large extent with the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages (Chapter 15). But writing in the Latin alphabet had already started in the eleventh century as part of the process of Christianisation, and before the end of that century had led to the first but no longer extant recording of provincial laws in Norway. Thanks to the written evidence from the eleventh and twelfth centuries Scandinavian history can be said to emerge from the twilight of prehistory.