AHC: An Earlier Viking Age

Is there any plausible scenario whereby the Viking Age could begin several hundred years earlier? If so, what might the impact be?

Specifically, my goal is to have the Viking Age begin in the 1st or 2nd century CE. An environmental cause would be ASB (although that could be interesting in its own right). Another possibility would be an earlier contact between the Romans and Scandinavia.

The obvious first target of any Viking raids would be Roman Britain. Depending on how much damage they did (and who was Emperor at the time), this would probably either push the Romans to reinforce Britain, leading to a more Romanized Britain, or lead to the Romans abandoning Britain as not worth it, in which case we might get a Norse England rather than a Saxon one. Beyond that, the Norse would raid into northern Gaul, Iberia, and eventually the Mediterranean.

Once the Norse started to threaten mainland Europe, the Romans would take action. They might invest in a stronger navy. Certainly they'd build coastal defenses. There would also likely be an ill-conceived punitive expedition against Scandinavia (fat chance anyone gets back from THAT one).
 
Is there any plausible scenario whereby the Viking Age could begin several hundred years earlier? If so, what might the impact be?

Specifically, my goal is to have the Viking Age begin in the 1st or 2nd century CE. An environmental cause would be ASB (although that could be interesting in its own right). Another possibility would be an earlier contact between the Romans and Scandinavia.

The obvious first target of any Viking raids would be Roman Britain. Depending on how much damage they did (and who was Emperor at the time), this would probably either push the Romans to reinforce Britain, leading to a more Romanized Britain, or lead to the Romans abandoning Britain as not worth it, in which case we might get a Norse England rather than a Saxon one. Beyond that, the Norse would raid into northern Gaul, Iberia, and eventually the Mediterranean.

Once the Norse started to threaten mainland Europe, the Romans would take action. They might invest in a stronger navy. Certainly they'd build coastal defenses. There would also likely be an ill-conceived punitive expedition against Scandinavia (fat chance anyone gets back from THAT one).
What do you mean by "Viking"?

A wave of Germanic seaborne raids and invasions in the North Sea?
There were seaborne attacks by Germanic people on Roman Britain and Belgica way earlier than the Vikings - we tend to call them Franks, Saxons, Angles and Jutes.

A wave of Germanic seaborne invasions which creates new states/colonies? That, too, was achieved by the former once the Roman Empire was too weak.

All of the above done by speakers of Northern Germanic varieties rather than Western Germanic ones?
There was indirect contact between the Roman Empire and Scandinavia, through middlemen from the Kimbrian peninsula and the Danish archipelago by groups the Romans tended to call "Iutii" (the same as later Jutes?), whose language we know little of, but which may have been somewhere between North Sea Germanic and North Germanic. Even more Northern groups who expand would rouse the wrath of those Germanic groups immediately to their South, who were more powerful (more numerous, better equipment). The Iutii, themselves, had little reason to act like 9th century Vikings because the Empire was strong and they benefitted from monopolising the trade. For all we know, these marine monopolisers may well have acted in a similarly aggressive manner towards Germanic competitors than the one you might ascribe to Vikings, only they weren`t primarily after plunder from their poor neighbours.

Maritime invasions from Scandinavia which bear maximum resemblance to the Vikings require a) the kind of naval technology achieved by the combination of (indigenous Northern European) longboats and (the South-imported idea of) sails, b) population pressure in Scandinavia as it existed from the 7th century onwards and c) the political culture / structure of warlordism as it emerged on the fringes of the decaying late antique Roman Empire and in the subsequent early middle ages. Getting all of these in the 1st / 2nd century CE is near-impossible without changing much of the rest of Europe to a level where you wouldn`t recognise it.

In the 1st/2nd entury CE, Scandinavia and the Danish archipelago were thinly populated (after recent departures), the climate was comparatively OK, the Roman Empire was a distant place of legendary wealth and power, and contacts were monopolised by a small elite, who in turn was influenced to some degree by Roman culture - see the development of the Runic alphabet. The "easiest" way to change this may be to move the Roman Empire`s border farther North so as to bring it into closer vicinity with these groups and create a situation up North that would be comparable to the Frankish/Alemannic/Markomannic/Quadic/Vandal/Gothic border situation. I suppose this would require the Roman Empire to move at least as far North as the current German-Danish border. That begs the question of why the Romans would want to go there, of course...
 
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