Read A History of the Vikings 107

Read A History of the Vikings

Read A History of the Vikings 107 ↠ An utterly splendid book uite the most brilliantly written balanced and explanative general work on the Vikings ever to appear in English or in any language Scandinavian StudiesThe subject of this book is the Viking realms Denmark Sweden and Norway their civilization and culture and their many sided achievements at home Om; the trading and military ventures to the Slav and Muslim worlds and to Byzantium; and the western voyages of discovery and settlement to Greenland Iceland and America Numerous photographs maps and drawings contribute to Gwyn Jones's rounded portrait of Viking civilization and vividly evoke the importance in their culture of religion art and seafarin. I would give this book three and a half stars if I couldThe first few chapters are solid two star chapters; the author's style defines the word orotund and sentence after sentence takes up half a page to convey the simple attitude of we just don't know However once the book gets into the historical period Jones does an excellent exhaustive job of cross referencing sources and because this is an older work every single one of them is cited in a footnote The footnotes in fact are so copious as to be distracting In a history work this is a good thing; in a narrative it is less so Unfortunately Jones is unable to split the difference as effectively as many authors and rather than gather the entire footnote material into endnotes the publisher has elected to leave them as footnotes There is one other significant and jarring addition compared to other books of this type and class and that is in line line drawings Some of the drawings such as maps of Hedeby or the archaeological dig plans for Brattahlid are excellent Some of them however are jarringly bad line art and they do not appear with any explanation so it is impossible to tell if they are a rendition of an original source many are or are the results of a six year old helping illustrate the manuscript many look like this is a possibility I feel that either elaboration or an omission of the line art would have been an improvementI feel I must note the scholarship in this work At the time it was written it was very much state of the art That was fifty years ago with a revision twenty years ago so much of it is severely out of date and the references are mostly to 19th and mid 20th Century scholarship rather than modern work off the top of my head the design of the buttresses at the Trelleborg longhouses comes to mind the consensus has moved on from the drawings in this book However Jones is a standard work in the field and is therefore something of a must have in a reference library even if the field of Norse studies has grown past this book