If they did, then their literary sources took great pains to avoid acknowledging it. By the first confirmed Viking attack in 793, the Anglo-Saxons had been Christian for two centuries, and sought to emphasise this fervent faith over their historic Paganism. While their previous religion is quashed, a sense of ethnic identity clearly is maintained among the English elite: when the princess Eadgyth marries the future Holy Roman Emperor Otto I in 924, the Mercian Register in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that "[King Æthelstan] gave his sister in marriage to the son of the king of the Old Saxons."

Compared to this expressed kinship, the Vikings are othered in every way possible, largely through rhetoric intent on framing the Christian triumph of the Cerdicing dynasty (what Asser terms the Gewisse) at the centre of English royal and political identity. When the Vikings first raid Lindesfarne in 793, they are referred to as heathens. Later on, they are referred to explicitly as the Danes to explicitly differentiate them from the English armies of Wessex and Mercia. Whether or not there was a unity between Vikings and English in the Danelaw, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, differentiation is still made between the Viking occupiers and 'the Englishmen living under the Danes.'

The theme of the religious other as threat is particularly developed by Asser in his Vita Ælfredi or Life of Alfred the Great. Although modern translations invariably use 'the Vikings' for ease of continuity and understanding in a modern audience, Asser himself repeatedly refers to the Vikings simply as 'The Heathens' or 'The Pagans'. In contrast, the English armies which face them are routinely described as 'The Christians'. This is a clear stylistic choice, one which openly invites comparisson between Alfred's Wessex and other feats of Christian resistance in the face of 'heathen' armageddon, such as Charles Martel at Tours, or events like the Battle of Roncevaux Pass which would later go on to form the basis of Chansons de Geste - literally Songs of Deeds - such as the Song of Roland.