Being fearless warriors doesn't necessarily mean that you're good warriors. And the idea of the Vikings as fearless warriors comes largely from Norse sources which naturally want to aggrandise their heroes, or from contemporaries who want to exaggerate the ferocious barbarism of their enemies in order to make their own eventual victory all the more glorious.

Norse 'Viking' warfare in the early medieval period is actually predicated on being fearful, not fearless. Typical Norse strategies, seen mostly in the Danish attacks on England and France from the late 8th century onwards, are actually based on avoiding fair fights as much as possible. Rather, the strategy is based on highly-mobile light warfare, designed to confuse and exhaust opponents, overwhelming individual garrisons and avoiding pitched battles with larger, slower formations until the enemy is worn down entirely. In his Vita Ælfredi, the Anglo-Saxon bishop and chronicler Asser notes that in 871, Wessex was being bled dry of its manpower by the need to maintain a vast array of tiny garrisons and fight a thousand small skirmishes against marauding Viking raiding parties. As a result, the main army led by Alfred and his brothers is much smaller than it could otherwise have been, and its men exhausted from constant marching about, fighting over a dozen battles in 871 alone. While the English do still win the majority of the pitched battles they fight against the Danish that year, Asser makes it clear that the current rate of exhaustion and losses is unsustainable.

The English reforms of the 9th and 10th centuries led by Alfred and his children are directly designed to counter these Norse strategies. The system of fortified burhs established from the 870s onwards provides a series of fortified garrison sites at 40-mile intervals at prominent bridges, fords, crossroads, landing sites and other transport nexi, linked both with each other and with smaller, regional fortifications with a sophisticated network of signalling stations and watchtowers. This fortified presence consolidates English control of these vital routes and denies their use to the Danes, severely limiting their ability to rapidly manoeuvre. The garrisons, comprised of a seasonal fyrd militia can then use those same transport links to respond rapidly to encroaching Viking threats, to cut them off and surround them. In notable examples, the Devonshire fyrd destroyed a Viking invasion of Devon designed to coincide with the attack on Chippenham in 878, King Alfred outmanouvred and routed a Danish army attempting to lay siege to Rochester in 891/2, and the Battle of Tettenhall in 911 saw Æthelred of Mercia lead the combined Mercian and West-West Saxon fyrds to victory against a Danelaw army which assumed that the region would be undefended as King Edward's army was campaigning against a Danish invasion in East Anglia.

Where the Vikings excel is in integration with host communities, as seen in the English 'Danelaw' and the Normandy peninsula. By the 870s, the Danish settlers of 'Danelaw' East Anglia were already promulgating the English cult of St Edmund the Martyr, and by the 880s, Norse trading communities were producing copies of Alfred's London-issued coinage to try and streamline economic integration between the two neighbouring communities.