The Vikings

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

The Vikings are of huge popular and academic interest, but 'Viking' is a nebulous concept: in different contexts, Vikings have been marauders, merchants, manufacturers, poets, explorers, democrats, statesmen, or warriors. It is also a relatively recent concept. Originally used to refer only to pirate activity, it came to be used as an ethnic term to refer to a whole people, and then as a chronological label, giving its name to the Viking Age. With this fluidity it didn't mean the same in tenth-century Scandinavia, fifteenth-century Iceland, and nineteenth-century England. In fact, our modern usage of Viking owes more to later re-inventions than any original reality.

This Very Short Introduction presents all that is new and exciting about Vikings in a short and accessible volume. It reviews who they were, where they came from, and why, and it also seeks to demonstrate why they have retained their importance to historians. Focusing particularly on archaeological discoveries of the last thirty years, it examines what is known about the peoples who emerged from Scandinavia in the ninth and tenth centuries. Initial hit-and-run raiding parties became armies of thousands of warriors, and the quest for portable wealth in the form of silver and slaves turned into the quest for land and full-scale colonisation. As Viking colonists sailed out across the North Atlantic, they settled new lands, leaving a permanent legacy. This volume investigates that legacy, with an emphasis on changing perceptions of Vikings and their relevance for a modern audience.

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