The Vikings: A New History by Neil Oliver

BOOK REVIEW
The Vikings: A New History by Neil Oliver

The most comprehensive and well researched book on this subject I have ever read.
I loved and was thrilled to find such a compendium of history chronicling the impact and far reaching consequences of the Vikings. 

Excerpts:
The men and women we call Vikings came not from one country but from three, namely Denmark, Norway and Sweden. To add to the confusion, they emerged into the wider world at a time before those countries had labels. Part of all that resulted, from the so-called ‘Viking Age’, was the very creation of those states — or at least the laying down of their foundation stones.



Viking Scandinavian
The truth of the matter of course is that most of the people who populated Scandinavia between the eighth and eleventh centuries spent no more time sailing, raiding and pillaging than anyone else in Europe. The vast majority of people in Denmark, Norway and Sweden were peaceable farmers, working only to provide for their families and to meet their obligations to those above them in a clearly defined hierarchical society. In general physical appearance the Viking Age population was little different to that in Scandinavia today.



Over-population in the Scandinavian homelands. The Vikings were well known to have an insatiable appetite for women after all, and it therefore made sense to imagine that too many couplings had fathered more offspring than could usefully be absorbed at home. All those illegitimate sons and daughters had had to go elsewhere in search of living space and land to farm. Added to over-breeding has been the idea that naked, barbaric aggression by peoples ignorant of Christianity simply inspired the pagans to put to sea in their thousands in search of Godly people to terrorize.