I’d like to highly recommend this little book from Benjamin Sheppard, Victoria Kenworthy, Lisa French, Jessica Wilkinson, Beau Windon, Helen Addison-Smith & Rose Michael, seven artists who go in search of a city’s secrets and produce an “Arcade almanac

It is a delightful journey undertaken talented writers, poets and illustrators that captures an idiosyncratic but engrossing journey through Melbourne’s history – both above and below ground.  The authors capture much of the enduring essence of Melbourne – the only element missing, perhaps is music.

Published by Arcade Publications

https://arcadepublications.com.au/

RMIT University.

I didn’t own many books as a child.  We relied on the Coburg Library for great piles of them, but the Saga of Asgard by Sir Roger Lancelyn-Green was often re-read and much loved.  It fed my primary school fantasy that I actually lived in a country with permanent snow and in my imagination I skied to school everyday.  On reflection, I have no idea where I got such ideas from, but perhaps it partly explains my attraction to a certain Bruce Rasmussen, with his Danish heritage, and it almost certainly contributed to a weird feeling that I had come ‘home’ when I finally set foot in Norway -  a feeling that has grown stronger with each subsequent visit.  I also note that I can claim some Scandinavian heritage of my own – almost certainly via my paternal grandmother’s  family who hailed from East Anglia where the Vikings settled in the marshlands that gave that strand of my family its name – Marsh!

So Viking history has always intrigued me and the reason for this post is to recommend a book I have just read, which more than lives up to the blurb below.  The authors wear their deep and wide-ranging research lightly and illuminate a seriously interesting period of time and add necessary complications to our understanding of Viking culture and exploits.  I enjoyed the book immensely – and it left me with interesting reflections on the great variety of world views humans can come up with.

“The Vikings by Neil Price and Ben Raffield provides a concise but comprehensive introduction to the complex world of the early medieval Scandinavians.

In the space of less than 300 years, from the mid-eighth to the mid-eleventh centuries CE, people from what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark left their homelands in unprecedented numbers to travel across the Eurasian world. Over the last half-century, archaeology and its related disciplines have radically altered our understanding of this period.

The Vikings explores why we now perceive them as a cosmopolitan mix of traders and warriors, craftsworkers and poets, explorers, and settlers. It details how, over the course of the Viking Age, their small-scale rural, tribal societies gradually became urbanised monarchies firmly emplaced on the stage of literate, Christian Europe. In the process, they transformed the cultures of the North, created the modern Nordic nation-states, and left a far-flung diaspora with legacies that still resonate today.

Written by leading experts in the period and exploring the society, economy, identity and world-views of the early medieval Scandinavian peoples, and their unique religious beliefs that are still of enduring interest a millennium later, this book presents students with an unrivalled guide through this widely studied and fascinating subject, revealing the fundamental impacts of the Vikings in shaping the later course of European history.”

A long time ago I quoted Alessandro Portelli in an article on ‘The therapeutic function of the commissioned historian – recently published in Circa – the journal of the Professional Historian’s Association.  Today I got to hear him speak with engaging eloquence in the keynote address to the Oral History Association biennial conference at Trinity College.  Amongst other things he demonstrated the power of the anecdote to demonstrate important methodolical insights, the important difference between ‘story’ and ‘testimony’, and the way these can vary depending on who is conducting the interview.  As always there was the conisderation of the way events become memory and acqire meaning for the individual and for the wider community, and the significance of what is not said – or with held - the silences.

The article noted above is Alessandro Portelli, the Peculiarities of Oral History’, History Workshop Journal, Volume 12, Issue 1, Autumn 1981, Pages 96–107, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96

‘Perils can be inventoried and monitored, but beauty must be continually rediscovered.’

Boria Sax, Enchanted Forests: The Poetic Construction of a World before Time.

I haven't enjoyed a book so much for quite a long time. And I've also discovered by happenstance in several unrelated places a new and interesting publisher - Reaktion Books.

I may have found enough tempting books here to keep me occupied for the rest of my life.