Using the Oseberg ship (one of three Viking age longships discovered in southeast Norway in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries) as a springboard for an examination of Scandinavian culture and society, the author moves into a lamentably brief and cursory discussion (more on this in a moment) on the causes of the Viking Age, before tracing the Viking diaspora from Scandinavia to Britain, Europe, and the East, and into the North Atlantic and the eastern shores of North America. The text is organized largely in chronological fashion and covers the period from the late 780s/early 790s until the late eleventh/early twelfth century.

Ferguson succeeds in creating a reasonably comprehensive and engaging study that meets its stated aims while simultaneously presenting some rather dubious interpretations of the homogeneous nature of Scandinavian society and the existence of a 'northern Heathendom' that stood in opposition to its counterpart, western Christendom, with which it frequently found itself in conflict. 1įerguson's stated aim in this book is to 'provide an intelligent general reader who has an interest in the Viking Age with a study that might satisfy his or her interest without burdening it with an account of the innumerable controversies that cover every field of study of the period' (p. Robert Ferguson's The Vikings is a recent addition to a large pool of general studies on the subject that includes such classics as Gwyn Jones's History of the Vikings, Peter Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, and Else Roesdahl's The Vikings, as well as Richard Hall's splendid The World of the Vikings.

The Vikings by Else Roesdahl