Viking Empires

Viking Empires, by ANGELO FORTE, RICHARD ORAM, and FREDERIK PEDERSEN (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005; pp. 447. £25). HERE is yet another diffuse Viking book, by three authors who prefer not to reveal who wrote what, although their voices are not as concordant as those of the Andrews Sisters used to be. Nevertheless, they have a theme, which is almost a thesis: that the Nordic peoples have been closely connected with Continental cultures from Roman times and even earlier, and that their reactions have taken forms of which the viking raids and overlordships (‘empires’) were intermediate or transitional between the relatively peaceful situation of c.500 to c.750, and the Christian or crusading activity of c.1050 to c.1250. Before 750, these peoples developed nautical skills and an upper class of rulers and retainers; the damage these inflicted on Christian countries thereafter led to the counter-offensive of the German and Anglo-Saxon churches which diverted the raiding impulse into crusades against the heathen of the Baltic coastlands. The dynamic in each case came not from within, as a result of over-population, silver-shortage, or wanderlust, but from tonic interactions with what the authors lazily describe as Europe. So it was either a case of outsiders doing it to them or their doing it to outsiders, but either way it was in some sense much the same sort of thing—the image of the self-propulsion of the ingesting jelly-fish springs to mind

Ancient history · Art · Offensive · Population · Sociology · Theme (computing · Demography · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History