Viking britain Thomas WilliamsA wonderful book on Viking Britain, both its contemporary history and its effect on the land and imagination, highly recommended. This is my personal review, as it’s a topic I’m highly interested in, and a more professional review will appear on Shiny New Books, coming soon.

Thomas Williams – “Viking Britain”

(14 August 2018 – from the publisher)

Williams opens this book with a marvellous appeal to take the Vikings seriously. He sets out the idea that they’re seen as one-dimensional and cartoonish, a stereotype listed alongside gladiators, pirates, knights-in-armour and even dinosaurs,” contrasted with our attitude to the Romans as civilised and worthy of study. He shares a review of the Vikings: Life and Legend exhibition at he British Muesum, which he curated, which slams it for having no “gory recreation” and not appealing to fans of “Horrible Histories”. Would this person criticise an exhibition on the Romans for not making them more exciting and appealing to children? He thinks not. He sets out his intention to rehabilitate this attitude, and to share

the story of how the people of the British Isles came to reorient themselves in a new and interconnected world, where new technologies for travel and communication brought ideas and customs into sometimes explosive contact, but which also fostered the development of towns and trade, forged new identities and gave birth to England and Scotland as unified nations for the first time. (p. xvi-xvii)

He says, “I hope this book may help to restore to the Vikings some of the dignity that they have too often been denied,” (p. +xix) and I think he succeeds in this. He also states that it’s not supposed to be an academic or a definitive book; as a non-academic book I appreciate the care he still puts into the referencing.

Williams writes fascinatingly of the way in which the Vikings slotted in to a place between the past, when they encountered their enemies at barrows and ancient sites, and the future, where the writers of the 19th century studied and spoke about them and formed our current view of these people, right through to now, when so many of the sites and words we see and use hark back to these times. He uses contemporary or near-contemporary texts, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and others, to describe the events from the first raids on the East Coast to the Norman Conquest, carefully and meticulously comparing and evaluating his sources. He discusses the way in which the breadth of the cultural and historical changes the Vikings wrought in Britain and around the world have been reduced by

half-digested Icelandic sagas, Wagnerian wardrobe cast-offs, classical ideas of barbarian virtue and a good dose of romantic nationalism (p. 43)

and in the process have lost the detail and ambiguity – why, he asks later, were both Viking-style and traditional Northumbrian boots being made in York at the same time and what can we tell from that about the mix of the cultures (not much: he’s always careful not to make assumptions).

Once he’s covered the later reincarnations of the stereotypical Viking warrior, we get down to the often convoluted history of the happenings from the first raids onwards. He examines events from different viewpoints where he can – which is fascinating. Scotland and the north get their own treatments, even though the history of Scotland in particular has got lost in the mist of time – again, it’s very clear when we just don’t know who someone was or what happened somewhere. He talks about the Danelaw and Ragnarok with equal authority and is a completely trustworthy companion through this maze of history, never putting a foot wrong.

One curious and I thought very well-done feature is short pieces of creative writing or translation, gleaned from the sources and stitched together, and – I THINK – written only in language that would have had its roots in the times he’s discussing – so no Latinate words. This is a risk, placing fiction in a non-fiction book, but it’s clearly marked and I think it comes off.

I loved the little pieces of pop culture that Williams weaves in, not in the rather odd way that some references were made in “Sacred Britannia” but wryly popped in in a way that doesn’t disrupt the narrative but enhances it – Tolkien and William Morris are mentioned, of course, with their readings of Norse culture and the like, but Douglas Adams’ Slartibartfast and his liking for fjords comes in, and he even manages to compare the somewhat morose writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles to Marvin the Paranoid Android, also from Hitchhiker’s.

I also liked the little bits of personal narrative – not so much as in MacFarlane’s works, for instance, but giving a really raw and present sense of being in the landscapes of the Viking age now – which is, after all, one of his points, that a lot of the places and the feelings of being in those places exist now, too. He’s not afraid to insert his own opinions on current as well as older scholarship and I like this bravery and sense of him being very much on his subjects’ side even when he’s being clear-eyed about their cruelties and flaws. I really liked it when he bewailed the fact that the Manx lawspeaker declaims the year’s laws in Manx Gaelic and English (“But not, alas, in Old Norse” (p. 221) – exactly the reaction I would have had).

I loved the little notes pointing to the breadth and depth of the author’s knowledge, which sometimes feel like little personal rejoinders to those of us who have studied the Norse world ourselves, for example an aside on p. 168 when talking about a war banner raised in a battle:

There is a great deal that might be said about ravens and banners, weird sisters and weaving, and their place on the Viking Age battlefield.

I’d like very much for him to say that one day, and will be on the lookout for more books.

Many thanks to the publisher, William Collins, for sending me this review copy in return for an honest review. A slightly different review will appear on Shiny New Books in due course: I wanted to be able to share a more personal review as well as a more professional one.