Viking incursions into Gascony

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Viking incursions into Gascony began with a first raid in 840 and ended in 982 with the battle of Taller.

Since 1911, the historians and linguists have been showing that only the Vikings who distinguished themselves north of the Loire and founded Normandy were well enough documented to be worthy of interest. In the wake of Lucien Musset in France, they have never found any reason (documents, archeological sites or artefacts) to start to study seriously the actions of the Vikings south of the Loire. Lucien Musset wrote as follows: "The Norwegian raids south of the English Channel, pure pirate ventures, left no lasting traces, on the Loire, the Garonne or the Bay of Biscay"....^[1] For their part, Aquitaine historians, following in the footsteps of Charles Higounet, consider the 9th and 10th centuries as "white pages" of history. "Between the catastrophe of the mid-9th century and the end of the 10th, the history of Bordeaux is almost a blank page, for lack of documents".^[2] In 2008, the historian Frédéric Boutoulle^[3] concluded that the sources in Gascony did not allow us to form an idea and that salvation could only come from an archaeological discovery. However, uncompleted and disputed sources do exist, some contemporary -Annales Bertiniani, Andreas of Bergamo- and others later. These sources would state that the Vikings carried out operations south of the Loire that went far beyond simple attacks on defenseless monasteries. They describe massive attacks followed by installations and takeovers of the territory. In other words, these sources describe an invasion. The lack of archaeological finds, the absence of linguistic elements, both in onomastics (personal names, place names) and borrowing of words from a Scandinavian language in the local Occitan dialect, Gasconic Occitan, tend to prove that these writings have greatly exaggerated the facts. There is no evidence of Viking settlements in Gascony. In addition, new genetic studies show that the Gascons are close to the Basques (as their name indicates) and not related to the Scandinavians.^[4]

This did not prevent the medievalist Renée Mussot Goulard specializing in the Goths in Aquitaine from asserting in the 1990s, that the Scandinavian presence in Gascony was "the longest known Scandinavian occupation in the kingdom".^[5]