Becky Bookworm Book Review: Viking Britain by Thomas Williams

 

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.

Britain in the Viking Age was a turbulent violent place, and the war-lords of the age have names that fire the blood and stir the imagination – Alfred the Great and Ivar the Boneless, Edmund Ironside and Erik Bloodaxe, Macbeth and Thorfinn Skullsplitter (to name but a few). The way in which their stories intersect with real places offers potential for a richly textured narrative. By drawing together narrative history, new academic research and first-hand experience, Tom Williams offers a vital evocation of a forgotten world, its echoes in later history and its implications for the present.

A Viking Britain truly existed, and its historical and cultural footprint is in many ways broader and deeper than Rome’s. Between the conventional beginning of the Viking Age in the late eighth century and its close in the eleventh, Scandinavian people and culture were involved with Britain to a degree that has left a permanent impression on these islands. They came to plunder and, ultimately, to settle, to colonize and to rule. By the time of the Norman Conquest, much of Britain might justifiably be described as ‘Viking’, and in language, literature, place-names and folklore, the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt. Indeed, the Vikings have been a powerful cultural force in modern times. Their representation in paintings, novels and operas – from the music of Elgar to the writing of Kipling, Morris and Tolkien – has had a profound impact on the British psyche. Much of what we imagine when we think of the Vikings – even the word ‘Viking’ itself – grew, not form the Viking Age itself, but from the political, literary and artistic currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, too, a Viking Britain came alive.

Viking Britain by Thomas Williams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I started reading this book several years after the amazing Vikings exhibition at the British Museum in the decade of 2010. It gave me delight to read and hear from someone who was directly involved in the curation of the exhibition. His own passion for the subject came through strongly from the start and each chapter was informative yet easy to digest. It was a wonderful coverage of the remarkable impact and legacy the Vikings left on our island continent, covering of course the infamous moments such as Alfred the Great burning the cakes through to 1066 a year of 3 battles. But he didn't leave anything else out, providing plenty of details and insights into events before and after such occasions. Highly recommend for anyone with an interest in Viking History on the Britain.
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