New dictionaries of the Old Norse language enabled more Victorians to read the Icelandic Sagas. Linguistic enthusiasts traced the Viking-Age origins of rural idioms and proverbs. Archaeologists began to dig up Britain's Viking past. Pioneering scholarly works on the Viking Age reached a small readership in Britain.
The first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. The chronicles of medieval England portrayed them as rapacious "wolves among sheep". Vikings were portrayed as uniformly violent and bloodthirsty. The Viking devastation of Northumbria's Holy Island was reported by the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York, who wrote: "Never before in Britain has such a terror appeared". Three Viking ships had beached in Portland Bay four years earlier (although due to a scribal error the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates this event to 787 rather than 789), but that incursion may have been a trading expedition that went wrong rather than a piratical raid. Monks were killed in the abbey, thrown into the sea to drown, or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures. In England, the Viking Age began on 8 June 793 when Vikings destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning that was famous across the continent. 11 Old Norse influence on the English language.