The Vikings: A History

I can not recommend this book for its intended audience, general readers, because the book is so one-sided. The author clearly despises the people whose history he tells, calling them not just killers, but "overkillers", whose cruelty was in a class of its own. When a "good" Viking shows up

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(Ohthere), the author seems to have trouble accepting that this Norwegian merchant and farmer doesn't want to stop on his voyage for some casual plundering.

Part of the problem may be that the author heavily depends on Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and continental sources: material written by the victims of the Vikings. Some scholars now deprecate the atrocities described in these texts. Use of sources from Viking lands and by Viking people might have suggested to the author that perhaps more than a few of the Viking people were like Ohthere.

When the author does choose to use Scandinavian and Icelandic source materials, he seems not to understand them. Just one example: the author writes that saga hero Grettir Ásmundarson was a coal-biter, a lazy idler who lounged at home with his head near the fire (p. 45). In fact, the saga author writes the opposite, commenting that Grettir was not an idler (Grettis saga, ch. 14).

Some of the author's statements and suppositions are just plain wrong. For example, he says that heathen Vikings had a loose conception of the calendar (p. 357) and that little is known of how heathens measured time and kept the date (p. 265). Clearly, keeping an accurate calendar was important to the Norse people. Heathen Icelanders instituted a calendar reform (Íslendingabók ch. 4) to keep the calendar in sync with astronomical observations. The Icelandic law codes (Grágás) are filled with examples that date from the heathen era which require certain actions to be completed by a certain date of the year, or result in penalties. These examples suggest a very strong interest in the calendar.

Last, the references cited in the endnotes are disappointing and include popular magazines and hobbyist websites.

One needn't apologize for Viking activities, but one ought to recognize the positive contributions made by the Norse people during the Viking era. The author has chosen to focus on the atrocities and ignore the rest. General readers interested in the Viking age should choose a more balanced narrative of Viking history.

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Overall boring with occasional flashes of fascination: viking sacrifices, the conversion of Iceland, colonisation of Vinland, etc

Very interesting book but a rather difficult read. Early Middle Ages were very dynamic times where rulers and local warlords rose and fell in a matter of months. As a result you end up with multitude of characters and it takes pretty good concentration and focus to discern who is who at what time.

I

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read few reviews of this book and they said that book was sensationalistic in terms that it would bombard readers with pretty bizarre descriptions of torture. I agree that these are not things you would usually ind in historical texts but again these are all things that were common for the period. Brutal, yes they are [especially in our times] but they were common at the time.

Interesting book, highly recommended to anyone interested in Early Middle Ages or Vikings themselves.

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Robert provides a detailed study of the Vikings. His writings show evidence of his extensive research and scholarly readings. The level of detail is often beyond my level of interest but there is a lot of information that Robert provides that is interesting. I recommend the book to any serious

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historian of the Vikings.

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Excellent book about Viking history. Ending less than compelling but book is a must-read if interested in the subject. Of course. it was a slow read, at least for me, since I didn't have a basic familiarity with the time period.

I found the reviews of this a bit surprising- I guess it is a bit hard to read at times, with all those names flying around, but given that Ferguson was trying to be a responsible historian, there's not much else he could have done. Viking history has to be seen from the outside, because outsiders

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were the ones who recorded that history for us. Stranger still are the complaints about his use of the word 'heathen,' a product, I can only assume, of peoples' bizarre inability to understand that when you're writing about the way something is perceived, you have to use the language of the perceivers. As for the goodreads reviewer who said Ferguson is 'obviously a Christian' who somehow has it in for the Vikings... uh... huh?

The central oddity of this book is Ferguson's insistence that 'The Viking Age' of marauding and rapine was a kind of clash of civilizations between Christian and Heathen, in which Charlemagne's violent imposition of the former religion provoked the Scandanavians (who are taken to be not 'primitives', but just as civilized as the nations to their south, east and west) to burn churches and murder priests. It's timely, I guess, but the best evidence he can martial suggests just as much that the Vikes attacked churches because that's where the money was, and murdered priests and nuns to spread terror, which is a pretty sound military strategy. These civilized gentlemen pretty quickly converted to Christianity and assimilated wherever they settled. But note that Ferguson's presentation is perfectly objective; his reading of the archaeological, literary, and dendrochronological evidence, as well as all sorts of other stuff) never overwhelms his presentation of that evidence.

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Excellent book about Viking history. Ending less than compelling but book is a must-read if interested in the subject. Of course. it was a slow read, at least for me, since I didn't have a basic familiarity with the time period.