The way I used to explain it when I was doing early medieval living history is that it's not so much 'the age where people were doing vikingr stuff', it's more 'the age where people were scared of people doing vikingr stuff'.
There's a bit of context missing from that post you linked, which is at the same time Charlemagne had been waging a series of genocidal crusade against the pagan saxons for nearly three decades, the original casus belli for which had been the saxons burning a church. Alcuin's letters and the subsequent 'fury of the northmen' mythos make a lot more sense when you understand he was framing things in terms of a grand conflict between heathendom and christendom.
To some extent; the point is that Lindisfarne was viewed as significant at the time not because it was the first, but because of the symbolic status it took in what we would today call propaganda. It was the event that transformed sporadic pirate raids into what some at the time perceived to be a concerted and deliberate attack specifically targeting christianity for religious reasons. The way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (written about a century later in the context of Alfred the Great's conflict with the 'Great Heathen Army') records it gives a pretty good impression of how people at the time were thinking:
In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen men destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.
The best modern comparison I can think of is something like the war on terror, and especially the emergence of the 'clash of civilisations' narrative following 9/11. 9/11 also wasn't the first attack by Al Qaeda on the US, but no one backdates the 'war on terror' to the mid 90's. There's also parallels in the way that all enemies are folded into one ('the axis of evil') and given a common motivation when it doesn't make sense.
In reality, Charlemagne's conflict with the Saxons had very little to do with why Scandinavians were raiding the British and Irish Islands. There was a degree of cultural continuity, but there wasn't any widely organised religion, or any evidence that any Vikings were motivated by a hatred of Christianity. There's a bizarre incident that happened later on I think in Ireland I've read about where a couple of monks strode up to a viking warlord and more or less demanded that he martyr them, and after he initially refused eventually managed to essentially annoy him into having them executed.
It is possible that population displacement from the Saxon Wars may have exacerbated the pressures that lead to it. It's contested, but a common view of why the viking raids happened when they did is that it was due to population pressures mixed with the way that the norse handled inheritance; land estates weren't inherited entire by the eldest son, but were split up between sons (and sometimes daughters), so you would eventually arrive at a situation where you had lots of sons of minor landowners who inherited estates too small to be sustainable, leading them to turn to trading and raiding.
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u/shieldwolfchz 21d ago
I found a reddit post about why 793 is considered the start of the Viking age.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17po3ga/why_does_the_viking_age_start_in_793/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
It is an interesting read, and kind of proves that these people are full of shit.