Vikings
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 was much 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 deeply interesting period of time and add necessary complications to our understanding of their culture and exploits. I enjoyed the book immensely – and it left with interesting reflections on the great variety of world views humans can come up with.
“The Vikings 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.”