Markup View

Author: LordGro

Jun 23rd 2013 at 5:14:35 AM

@lakingsif: Not sure if I get your post. The Vikings weren't around in Britain in the 5th and 6th century. Maybe you mean the Anglo-Saxons? Also, the Vikings left no written records and neither did the Anglo-Saxons before c. 700 AD. -- There are many ''legendary'' sources about the "British Dark Ages" and also retrospective chronicles about the era, but ''contemporary'' sources from this era are indeed rare.

Also, it's obvious that historical sources are not distributed evenly over the world. For a period where there are few sources for one region, there may be many sources from another, and vice versa.

And Morgan Wick spoke of the (so-called) 'dark age' ''before'' the rise of Classical Greek civilization, i.e. the centuries after the Mycenic/Minoic era and before the time of Homer, Hesiod and "Archaic" Greece. This has been called the "Greek Dark Ages".

That said, historians have largely abandoned the term "dark age" for "obscure era", because a) the term is constantly confused with the ''other'' meaning of "dark ages", as coined by Renaissance poets, where "dark ages" is a derogatory synonym for "Middle Ages"; and b) because the rise of archaeology has gone a long way to fill in the white spots in history. Certainly there are eras about which we know less than about others, but there aren't really any "black holes" left in European history, at least not within the last two millennia.

However, the term "dark age" in that sense (i.e. of "historically obscure era") is neutral and non-derogatory, and has long been in use, so I don't think it is problematic to mention it here.