Healso reminds us of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of the past, of how much we cannot know, alongside the discoveries that change the landscape of our understanding. And having recently read The Bear and the Nightingale, I was excited to see the Rus' make an appearance. This book provided a comprehensive and detailed account of Viking history that was both informative and engaging.

Dus ook al ging het lezen soms minder vlot, toch heb ik dit boek graag gelezen, en ben een stuk wijzer geworden. I'm done with the constant speculations about finds, followed immediately by cautious caveats about how we can't really know.The first part explores this realm through the Vikings’ sense of self, and of their environment, and begins by delineating the contours of its landscape both on the ground and inside their heads.

Besides being exhaustive, this book is aggressively objective in a manner that I fast grew to appreciate. This is an engrossing doorstopper of a book that covers pretty much every aspect of Viking-Age Scandinavian culture that you can think of. But if we can believe what has come down, the mythology may shed some light on the people’s early life.De qué sociedades anteriores provenían; sus costumbres sociales, sus conceptos de libertad, su organización política y religiosa, sus costumbres sexuales, etc. It's a hefty tome, though, so for your friends whose needs are more for thinner reads, the ebook is a dead cheap choice! Children of Ash and Elm illuminates the brutal realities of Viking raids, of course, but its revelatory power comes from its focus on the culture that built and launched those ships, an industrial feat more impressive than the pillaging.

Royal Armouries Trading and Enterprises Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 07374477 and VAT number 108 2359 28. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more.He just focuses on presenting the Viking’s story as has been told to us in the present by the existing historical and archaeological evidence that has been left behind, and it is neither the story of mere crude seagoing brutes nor anyone that should be put upon any pedestal.

Everyone had their own identity – their self-image – and its outward projection; some of them were familiar to us, others frighteningly alien”. Their dramatic expansion will not be ignored, of course, but its context, its origins, are at the core of what follows. Origin story: Their early stories are hard to establish and the Norse mythology that we know today is largely later reconstruction. It’s a story of a specific group that had their very own unique combination of complexities and contradictions, as all peoples do.

This was the time of the raids and their gradual escalation from isolated attacks to invasions of conquest, in the ever-present context of expanding trade networks. 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. An immense undertaking from an expert who has studied the Vikings for almost 35 years, this is a masterful piece of work that seeks to present the historical Vikings as distinct from the caricatures of pop culture. In de 18e en 19e eeuw werd het beeld, onder invloed van nationalistische en romantische denkbeelden, neergezet van een edele wilde.