num_pages: 416
description: A new narrative history of the Viking Age interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials settlements and battlefields.Britain in the Viking Age was a turbulent violent place and the war-lords of the age have names that fire the blood and stir the imagination  Alfred the Great and Ivar the Boneless Edmund Ironside and Erik Bloodaxe Macbeth and Thorfinn Skullsplitter (to name but a few). The way in which their stories intersect with real places offers potential for a richly textured narrative. By drawing together narrative history new academic research and first-hand experience Tom Williams offers a vital evocation of a forgotten world its echoes in later history and its implications for the present.A Viking Britain truly existed and its historical and cultural footprint is in many ways broader and deeper than Romes. Between the conventional beginning of the Viking Age in the late eighth century and its close in the eleventh Scandinavian people and culture were involved with Britain to a degree that has left a permanent impression on these islands. They came to plunder and ultimately to settle to colonize and to rule. By the time of the Norman Conquest much of Britain might justifiably be described as Viking and in language literature place-names and folklore the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt. Indeed the Vikings have been a powerful cultural force in modern times. Their representation in paintings novels and operas  from the music of Elgar to the writing of Kipling Morris and Tolkien  has had a profound impact on the British psyche. Much of what we imagine when we think of the Vikings  even the word Viking itself  grew not form the Viking Age itself but from the political literary and artistic currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here too a Viking Britain came alive.
language: English
title: Viking Britain
publisher: William Collins