Little has been known of the Viking expansion in the East Baltic till some 10–12 years ago, when the new states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania began an enthusiastic exploration of their antiquities, in which research they have been joined by Finnish and Swedish archaeologists. In Russia, the Viking traces in Russian history have been the object of research for many years, and there the Nestor chronicle has been a literary guide to the results, which have given glimpses of the life of those ancient times—of the long water routes over Europe, the settlements founded by the Vikings, and the great cemeteries of primitive graves, outside those towns. In the following sketch of a Viking stronghold of the 8th–9th century no attempt is made to describe the many archaeological finds in systematic excavations; it is merely the impression, a strangely living impression, of one of those ancient places upon the ordinary tourist.

At the moment when Attila was preparing to attack the Western Empire a priest named Salvian, driven by the invasions from the Rhineland to Marseilles, published his tract De Gubernatione Dei, one of the strangest amongst the off spring of declining Latin literature.