Undiscovered Scotland

 

The Vikings are one of the best known groups to have emerged from the early medieval era . Yet despite being so often portrayed in in fact and fiction - and in writing, TV and films - they are also one of the most misrepresented of peoples. Or perhaps it's simply because they've been depicted so often and for so long that clichés have grown up that have become hard to change. The story of the Vikings is not just a story of rape, pillage and horned helmets. And the horned helmets part of that is probably entirely a modern invention. As for the reputations of the Vikings as feared raiders, it's far from being the whole story, though even the author of this book can't resist making use of the idea: 'I hope you enjoy reading this work and thank you for buying it. Or perhaps you simply stole it from a coastal monastery; now that would be fitting."

"Forgotten Vikings: New Approaches to the Viking Age by Alex Harvey" is a fascinating and thought-provoking book that I'd strongly recommend to anyone with more than a passing interest in the Viking Age. In his introduction the author - who is a postgraduate archaeology student at the University of York - says: "I wrote this book because it is the Viking Age book that I have always wanted to read... Forgotten Vikings aims to provide a chronological narrative starting in 536 and ending somewhere in Greenland a thousand years later. This is the story not just of 'the Viking Age' between 793-1066 but also the period before and after." It's well written and intensively researched: the "further reading" list at the back of the book runs to 46 pages. It certainly left me feeling much better informed by the end of the book than I had been at the start of it: which is all I could really ask for.

You get a good sense of the book from the publisher's description of it: "Forgotten Vikings provides a chronological overview of the Viking Age (793–1066) and quite a lot of history either side of these arbitrary dates. Arbitrary? This book aims to explore the phenomenon of ‘the Vikings’ from new angles, forged out of recent academic breakthroughs largely unexplored in popular history books; the Viking Age viewed as a longer, discrete period from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries. Focusing on lesser-known aspects of the period, Alex Harvey taps into more obscure regions of the world these people visited, more obscure characters, and more obscure cultural elements. Examples include the evidence for viking activity on the Azores and Madeira, thirteenth-century Baltic raids, and the presence of viking armies in the Netherlands long before they became a threat to England. Offering unfamiliar perspectives, Forgotten Vikings will change the way you see these often misunderstood people, and unearth a forgotten history."