When reading (popular science) about "viking/norse culture" lately one thing has struck me that seems to be accepted as "common knowledge", and that is that "the fjords provided a significant strategic defensive advantage to the Norsemen."
I wonder if that assumption is actually backed up by historical events. Have foreign ships ever tried to "counter-raid" viking villages? And if so, did the fjords actually provide a significant obstacle in these undertakings?
How dangerous is/was navigating the fjords? Some very basic googling suggests that it's actually the rocky coastlines that are the real danger.
From what I know, there were no 'counter raids' in the sense that you are indicating.
As far as I can tell, the primary reason for this is that Viking raids rarely came straight from their respective home (the fjords you mention), raided and then returned directly back. Far more often, viking raiders would find a suitable base in or near the region they were raiding, fortify it, and then use it to launch further attacks. When plunder, slaves, etc. had been amassed, then some would likely return to their home regions. But this brings up another key point.
Viking raids were far from homogenous groups of Scandinavians. A single ship might even have people from diverse backgrounds, and a fleet of over 100 could come from all over the Scandinavian world, and beyond. Frisians (modern day hollanders) are a good example of this - when Vikings started using the tricky waterways of the Low Countries to launch raids from, many of the locals are known to have joined them! All in all, a single (or even several) ships issuing from one fjord, raiding and then returning was highly unlikely. Far more often, groups of ships from diverse origins would group together to take a larger target such as a Monastery and divide the plunder. Afterwards some would likely return home, but others would stay on and group up with others or go their own way.
The true advantage of the viking raids was their pseudo-guerilla nature. A viking fleet could hit fast, load their ships with plunder and retreat before the local forces could be organized against them. Countries under threat of viking incursions developed many strategies to deal with this problem - fortifying their towns and villages (see the Burghal Hidage or the growth of castles) as well as building fleets to combat these raiding groups on the water. These met with mixed success, but fortifications generally slowed down the success of viking raids.
TLDR; There were no large counter-viking invasions or raids as far as I can tell. Far more common was fighting against viking groups already established in camps in the region they were raiding, such as Dublin in Ireland or Benfleet in England.
E. Lipson, (1959) The Economic History of England 12th ed., vol. 1
Michael Swanton, (1998) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Halsall, Guy (2003). Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450-900
Hill, David; Rumble, Alexander R., eds. (1996). The Defence of Wessex: The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications.
Allen Brown, Reginald (1976) Allen Brown's English Castles
Creighton, Oliver (2012), Early European Castles: Aristocracy and Authority, AD 800–1200
Peter Sawyer, (2003) The Viking Expansion, The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Issue 1
A similar question was asked about a month ago, which led to some interesting discussion. You might want to check it out, but here's a slightly edited version of my response there:
No. The (Western European) victims of viking raids never sent ships back to Scandinavia in retaliatory strikes. The most basic reason is that 'Vikings' weren't 'Scandinavians'. Neither of these words meant the same thing then as they do mean now, and their meanings certainly didn't overlap back during the Viking Age (ca. 800-1050).
The earliest uses of the word 'viking' actually date before the 'Viking Age' and come from Anglo-Saxon England, and there's a lot of Anglo-Saxon and Frisian (Netherlands) place-names that still have variants of vik, wic, or wijk in their present form, such as Sandwich which translates to 'sandy market'. It's easy to assume that 'viking' must be derived from an Old Norse word, but since Old Norse wasn't written down until centuries later, all we know for certain is that sometime before the year 800, people speaking various languages around the North Sea could all agree that 'vikings' were one thing: pirates. (Thus commonly glossed as pirata in Latin sources; sailors were always treated like feminine nouns in Latin.)
Pirates were very scary business for the rulers of Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian northern Europe. These were kings whose power depended on skimming the surplus off agricultural production. But when someone came in to take a piece of the pie without sticking around long enough to pick a fight, Western rulers had nowhere to turn. Especially in the rough-and-tumble kingdoms of the early middle ages, where power rested on prestige more than on wealth, even a handful of rogue pirates could undermine the legitimacy of an entire kingdom.
Retaliation, then, wasn't an option. The early viking raiders could disperse without leaving much of a trace, and a counter-raid on Scandinavia would neither punish the perpetrators nor deter future attacks. A king could secure his legitimacy only by securing his territory, and in fact we see that the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon kings trying to do just that: establishing defensive systems to deter the kinds of attacks that undermined their legitimacy.
Things got more complicated as the Viking Age progressed, since the 'viking' pirates were gradually replaced by standing armies. We've got an overarching concept of the 'Viking Age' that obscures these differences, but the people who lived through this period were quick to notice changes. The chroniclers of Western Europe had to come up with new names for these forces of occupation, such as Danes (i.e. people who spoke Old Norse) or Northmen (possibly meaning people who linked into the routes of the North-way along the coast of modern Norway; a good way to distinguish the Old Norse speakers of the North Sea from the Old Norse speakers who belonged to the emerging Danish kingdom—I warned you it got complicated!). At this point, the later 'Vikings' were actually based out of Western Europe, that is, they were actually Western Europeans, despite having strong cultural ties to Scandinavia. In effect, if Alfred the Great had lashed out against Scandinavia, it wouldn't have bothered Guthrum's Danelaw at all.
So in sum, this question needs a two part answer: (1) victims of the vikings knew better than to confuse viking raiders with Scandinavian people in general, and (2) victims of the vikings knew that killing people overseas wouldn't make them any safer at home. It almost makes the warlords of the 'Dark Ages' seem downright reasonable, doesn't it?