Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Viking Age is generally dated from the attack on Lindisfarne on the 8th of June 793 to the 11th century. The death of King Harald Hardrada of Norway at Stamford Bridge in 1066 is often taken as its end, though scholars have proposed other dates and a "long Viking Age" may stretch into the 15th century.
On the 8th of June 793, raiders destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, an island off the north-east coast of England in Northumberland. Monks were killed, drowned, or carried away as slaves along with the church treasures, and the event is regarded as the beginning of the Viking Age.
Voyaging from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the Norse settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, the Baltic coast, and along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes in eastern Europe. They also briefly settled in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to reach North America.
Scholars cite demographic, economic, ideological, political, technological, and environmental factors. Wealthy towns and weak kingdoms drew them out, while overpopulation, lack of good farmland, and political strife from the unification of Norway under Harald Fairhair may have pushed them. Anders Winroth argued that without their shipbuilding skill there would have been no Viking Age.
Yes. Between 990 and 1050 CE, according to carbon-dating, Vikings established a small settlement near L'Anse aux Meadows on present-day Newfoundland. The feat of reaching North America in 1021 was a date not determined until a millennium later, and the remains are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Varangians were Scandinavians, often Swedes, who migrated eastward and southward through what is now Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in the 9th and 10th centuries. Led by Rurik, they settled around Novgorod and founded the early East Slavic state of Kievan Rus', and many later enlisted in the Byzantine Varangian Guard.