Viking Empires (review)

One wonders for whom this book is written. It is trumpeted on the jacket as 'a definitive new account of the Viking world' but that statement is misleading on several (indeed all) counts. The three authors by whom it is written are respectable historians of different fields, none of which relate, however, to the turbulent history of Northern Europe in the Viking Age. Not one of them has ever written anything on the Viking Age previously—as is evident from the Bibliography, where there is not a single reference to any publication by Angelo Forte, to only one article by Frederik Pedersen, and to four works by Richard Oram, all peripheral to the main theme of this book which they have boldly undertaken together. It is an ambitious enterprise and one has to admire the authors for attempting to do the impossible! They may have taught undergraduate courses on the Vikings but is that enough to equip them to publish a full-scale study of a huge and complex period of North European history? Well, yes and no. They have produced a superficially impressive volume rather like the curate's egg, good only in parts.

There may be room on the undergraduate shelves for this book, (to take a more positive attitude than the TLS reviewer of the same book!) but even undergraduates will find that the three authors do not provide them with some of the basic elements of what they need to know in order to study and understand what the Viking Age is all about. For one thing it is no guide to up-to-date reading, or indeed basic reading: Anna Ritchie's book Viking Scotland is not listed in the Bibliography as neither is Loyn's The Vikings in Britain or Lawson's The Reign of Cnut or P.and B. Sawyers' Medieval Scandinavia to name just a few significant publications. For another, the archaeologial component is minimal, suggesting that there is no real understanding of its significance; while the whole broad spectrum of Norse 'culture' (literature, language, place-names, and many other important topics like 'thing'/assembly sites) is very patchily treated (again despite the claims on the jacket). The range of the index is impressive, giving the impression that this book covers just about everything. But looking up the relevant pages one finds that the subject is sometimes barely touched on and rarely explored in a consistent or useful way.

So what does this large tome (447 pages) provide for the reader, informed or uninformed, who wishes to learn about the achievements and impact of the Viking peoples on the rest of western Europe in the early middle ages? (the absence of any focus on the eastern Viking world of Russian trade routes is excused as being due to 'the time not being ripe for such a venture', thereby axing another very important part of the Viking international 'achievement'). The 'global perspective'—again trumpeted on the back cover—is therefore rather less than global, and the focus is just as tied into national political parameters as most previous books on the Vikings. However, there is one political element which is sadly minimalised, and that is the Norwegian role in the Viking story. Chapter 2, on 'The Beginnings', has a complete fixation on Denmark, as well as a very skewed focus on archaeological finds such as the 1^st century A.D. Hoby burial and the bog deposit of weapons at Illerup Ådal (3^rd-5^th cent. A.D.). Considering how little Viking archaeology is explored in the rest of the book this seems like a lost opportunity unless one wants to know about these marvellous collections of post-Roman archaeology. Their relevance to the origins of the Viking Age in Denmark is not, however, clear. We learn little about the different dynastic polities and nothing about what was happening in Norway or Sweden at this time. Staying with this particular co-author we can also consider his...