I particularly enjoyed reading about these peoples' cosmologies and the Vikings' explorations around the world (they got as far as now-Uzbekistan at some point!

I have always been amazed at how much an archaeological situation can tell us, for example, a Vikings burial holds the tales of a saga. I have been struggling to find anything that I'm in the mood lately, and it really has been a rough time for me, reading-wise, for a while now. In seeking the deeper origins of the Viking age, he deftly connects different times and places all the way back to the fall of the western Roman empire.This spectacular book is more than traditional history, as many of its surprising-often strange-revelations about Viking life come not from texts, but archaeology. Many Viking-era graves have been found containing a large male skeleton with an apparently teenage female skeleton. I enjoyed the book for the most part, appreciated the writing style and the wry humour when it occasionally appears, and learned a lot about the Vikings along the way. Circa 753, Swedes set up a "Wild East" trading post at Staraya Ladoga, by the mouth of the Volkhov river at Lake Ladoga, 100 miles (160 km) upstream (east) of where 1000 years later would be St. He never says away from it, but he qualifies it, he deepens them beyond the surface level pillaging that we know the Vikings for.

Al met al een mooi gebalanceerd overzicht voor iedereen die kennis wil maken met het fenomeen Viking. In the past many histories that give a history of the Vikings view them through the eyes of another culture, and usually with the result of placing the contact culture in the positive light and the Vikings in a negative light. Modern physics knows that empty space is far from empty: virtual processes are going on everywhere at all times: particles and their antiparticles spontaneously popping into and out of existence, moving forward and backward in time.This is often barely mentioned in many histories but is given its proper place in this book together with the violence, misery and distress that this would have caused. Yet others are testament to the remarkable coincidences and connections that make up history: two fragments of silk from two women’s hair caps, one discovered in York, the other in Lincoln, which thanks to a fault in the weave can be traced to the same bale of Persian (or perhaps Chinese) silk. It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, and traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they reshaped the world between eastern North America and the Asian steppe. Polygyny, concubinage, and perhaps female infanticide left an underclass of young men without inheritance or marriage prospects.