The Axe and the Longship

For three centuries, from the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 to the slaughter at Stamford Bridge in 1066, a scattering of seafaring peoples from the cold rim of northern Europe did something out of all proportion to their numbers. In their swift, beautiful longships they raided and traded and settled across a quarter of the world — from the monasteries of Ireland to the markets of Baghdad, from the fjords of Norway to the shores of North America five centuries before Columbus — and they left their language, their blood, and their dynasties across Europe.

This is the whole sweep of the Viking Age in a single volume: the harsh northern homelands and the brilliant, doom-haunted world of their gods; the explosion of the raids and the conquest of half of England; the founding of Dublin and of Normandy; the astonishing eastern adventure that carried Swedish Rus down the rivers of Russia to Constantinople and gave a nation its name; the great leap across the open Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland; the runes, the sagas, and the art; and the slow closing of the Age as the Northmen became Christians and were folded into the Europe they had terrorized.

Vivid, sourced, and clear-eyed, this is a popular history that gives the raids their drama and the voyages their daring — and that never forgets the enslaved and the women on whose unrecorded lives the legend was built, or that the horned helmet never existed. It tells the story of how a poor and quarrelsome people from the edge of the map briefly held the world in awe, and why, a thousand years on, their long shadow still falls across our language, our nations, and our imagination.