Robert Ferguson, The Vikings: A History

Of all the fifty-odd books I have read on the Vikings, I think this 2009 volume by Robert Ferguson is my favorite. Several times over the past month I have gotten onto the train in a grouchy mood, opened this book, and been immediately transported out of my world and into the distant past. This is a narrative history, and it does not include detailed sociological material on the organization of clans, family life, agriculture, or the like. There is some analytical material, and nice but short sections on Norse paganism and law, but in the main this is a chronicle of events. It covers the northern world between 793 and 1100 or so, with glances into later times to take in the demise of the Greenland colony and the fall of the Icelandic republic. There are sections with more detail than most people will want, for example on Danish royal politics and the Viking invasions of England. But some of this material really is necessary to understand what happened in those times and the legacies the Vikings left. Ferguson knows all the written sources and is up to date on Viking archaeology and other specialized topics, like place-name study. The writing is excellent.

What makes this book great is that even when treating political topics that become dust in other writers' hands, Ferguson never loses sight of the wonder and terror that draw people to the Vikings. He loves the names of Viking heroes -- Ivar the Boneless, Erik Bloodaxe, Unn the Deep-Minded -- and pauses to examine many of them, inquiring into their origins and what they might mean. He has a keen eye for the dramatic episodes, and he gives by far the best telling I have read of several famous events. His account of the conversion of Iceland to Christianity includes snippets of the insulting verses that missionaries and pagan priests hurled at each other. He makes several fascinating speculations about hitherto unexplained events, but he always marks them off as speculation. My favorite was his notion that the anti-Christian savagery of the first Viking raids on Britain may have been retaliation for the anti-pagan savagery of Charlemagne's war against the Saxons, which was going on at the same time as the Viking attacks on Lindisfarne and Iona. Another concerns the famous ruling of the Icelandic lawgiver Thorgeir, who decreed that the whole island would convert to Christianity. One way to consider Thorgeir's act is rational and invokes the need for all the people on this lightly-governed island to have the same law; another looks at the details of what Thorgeir actually did, which was to spend 24 hours huddled under his cloak in silence. This was the traditional pose of an Icelandic poet or pagan priest seeking inspiration from the gods. Ferguson notes other episodes in which northern people converted to Christianity after consulting pagan oracles. Perhaps Thorgeir received inspiration from his meditations, or perhaps pagan Icelanders accepted his ruling because they believed that he had. This kind of sensitivity to what the sources actually say, and what the acts and words they relate might have meant to people of the time, is the essence of great history, and this book is history at the highest level.