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 Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 2:01 pm |
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http://oldnorsenews.org/2009/11/a-new-history-of-the-viking-age/
"For those living outside Scandinavia, the Viking Age effectively
began in 793 with an attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne. The
attack on Lindisfarne was a characteristically violent harbinger of
what was in store for Britain and much of Europe from the Vikings for
the next 300 years, until the final destruction of the heathen temple
to the Norse gods at Uppsala around 1090. Robert Ferguson is a sure
guide across what he calls ‘the treacherous marches which divide
legend from fact in Viking Age history’. His long familiarity with the
literary culture of Scandinavia – the eddas, the poetry of the skalds
and the sagas – is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries
and the evidence of picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered
all over northern Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait
of the Viking Age in any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges
from Scandinavia itself to Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to
Iceland, Greenland and the north American settlements in the west.
Beyond its geographical boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a
misty region inhabited by Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald
Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the
Plagiarist, in which literature, history and myth dissolve into one
another."
David Christainsen |
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