Daily History Challenge · No. 28 · Sunday 26 July 2026 · Gauntlet
Puzzle No. 28: Gauntlet
The Sunday Gauntlet: three before or after calls, four events to order and a final When? on Viking raid on Lindisfarne opens the Viking Age.
Act 1: Chain, against Murasaki Shikibu completes The Tale of Genji (1008 CE)
Before Murasaki Shikibu completes The Tale of Genji
After Murasaki Shikibu completes The Tale of Genji
After Murasaki Shikibu completes The Tale of Genji
Act 2: Order, earliest first
Act 3: When?
On 8 June 793 Scandinavian raiders attacked the wealthy monastery of Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria that was a preeminent centre of Christianity in early medieval England. The raiders plundered the church, slaughtered or drove off the monks, and seized treasure and captives for the slave trade. Recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and lamented in a famous letter by the scholar Alcuin, the assault shocked Christian Europe by violating a site long regarded as inviolable and sacred. Though Scandinavians had traded and raided earlier, the sack of Lindisfarne is conventionally taken as the symbolic beginning of the Viking Age, a roughly three-century period of Norse raiding, conquest, settlement and long-distance exploration that reshaped the British Isles, Francia, Ireland, the North Atlantic and Eastern Europe. It inaugurated decades of escalating attacks on coastal and riverine monasteries and towns, prompting new defensive measures and profoundly affecting the politics of England and the wider Frankish world.