The Viking Age: A Reader (review)

The editors of this hefty volume announce their reader as a comprehensive collection of primary documents relating to the Viking Age (p. xiii). That is indeed the case. The volume, which is intended for instructors, students, and also the general reader, contains fifteen chapters with texts on the Scandinavian homelands and society, on their religion and beliefs; women in the Viking Age and its warriors, weapons, and ships; Viking attacks and raids; the Viking excursions to the East and into the western ocean, including Vinland; Viking life and death; the Christian conversion and state building; and the end of the Viking Age. In the introduction, the authors point out that our understanding of the Vikings is based on "many texts and documents from many different regions and periods, and written in many different languages" (p. xvi), and the Reader includes Islamic and Russian documents in addition to Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin texts. The authors' aim to highlight "the geographic, historical, and linguistic diversity of primary-source materials relating to the Viking diaspora" (p. xvi) is certainly fulfilled in the breadth of the texts found in the volume.

The selection of readings cannot be faulted, and I am hard put to think of any text that I might want to use in a course on the Vikings that is not found here. The volume includes runic inscriptions from Orkney and the Isle of Man (pp. 293-95), on the Jelling Stone (p. 440), and, in the chapter on the Viking road to the East, the eleventh-century inscriptions on the Piraeus Lion, now in Venice (pp. 302-3). The texts conveying funerary practices include Ibn Fadlan's famous account of a Rus' funeral (pp. 106-10), Snorri Sturluson's history of burial practices in Heimskringla (p. 110), and his account of Baldr's death in Gylfaginning (pp. 111-13). The Reader offers a glimpse into ninth-century Scandinavia through a lengthy excerpt (pp. 42-74) from Rimbert's Vita Anskarii, the life of St. Anskar, the "apostle of the North."

In a preface to the chapter on Scandinavian society, the authors point out that the corpus of post-Viking Icelandic sources must be used with care, since "they are rooted in oral tradition, and it is difficult to know to what extent the saga literature is an accurate reflection of the Viking Age, and to what extent it reflects the society of the age in which it was written—mostly the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" (p. 17). The warning is well taken. The Reader is just that, a reader, not a textbook, and without notes as guidance one wonders, for example, what conclusions about pagan sacrifice a general reader might draw on the one hand from Adam of Bremen's account of the temple at Uppsala and its rituals (pp. 102-3) and on the other hand from the account in Eyrbyggja saga of Thorolf Mostrarskegg's temple (pp. 103-4). The problem is that our textual sources on the Viking Age are diverse, including among others historiography, mythography, chronicles, annals, legendary fiction, poetry, and, of course, the Icelandic sagas, and their usefulness as reliable witnesses of the Viking Age can vary greatly.

Not unexpectedly many selections from the sagas contain skaldic poetry. While each reading is prefaced by a brief introduction identifying the text and its personnel, there are no other explanatory notes. In some instances the texts beg for additional information, however, such as on the importance of skalds and the function of their stanzas in the Kings' sagas as uniquely authentic testimony from the time when the events took place. A selection from Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar contains the fairly long account of King Olaf's battle on the island of Svölð (pp. 204-14). Interwoven into the account are stanzas by Halldórr ókristni (the pagan), Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld (the troublesome poet), Skúli Þorsteinsson...