Harald will not cut his hair until he is KING!

 I can't really say what prompted me to pick up this particular book other than that I had just finished a fiction book and was therefore perusing my unread nonfiction shelves. I think I was looking for something short-ish and unrelated to modern politics. 

 

I had bought A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans? by Jonathan Clements for six bucks at a Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale in... oh, dear, it was 2015. I've got some books from that warehouse sale that have really been piling up for an embarrassingly long time, and I haven't even gone since last winter's. 

 

Anyway, this book is a pretty short (clocking in just under 250 pages, excluding notes), readable overview of Viking raids and settlements, starting earlier than a lot of other Viking histories, with the abandonment of Britain by the Roman Empire. It covers both Viking activity in Scandinavia and the British Isles -- places that usually garner the bulk of attention as the "Viking world" -- but also discusses Viking presence in Russia, down into Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and out into Greenland and North America. Clements draws most heavily on Scandinavian sources, like the Heimskringla, but also refers to references to the Vikings in the writings of other cultures -- most interestingly, Inuit sagas about fighting Viking Greenlanders that might be even more violent than Viking sagas about fighting everybody else.

 

While the tone can be a little dry, it's not particularly dense, and there are a lot of interesting characters crammed into the little volume. Clements also has many opinions about the opinions of earlier chroniclers of Viking exploits, especially Snorri Sturluson, the 13th century Icelandic author of the Heimskringla, and discusses briefly how cultural ideas about the Vikings have changed over time.

 

This book was enjoyable in and of itself but it also really reminded me that I have a copy of The Sagas of Icelanders that I picked up for a dollar and haven't read yet. I think that book might have to wait until the winter; it really seems like a deep winter read. I'm also afraid that while I had fun while I was reading, I don't feel like I've retained a whole lot? This might not be entirely the book's fault; it's been a very stressful past week or two, with the magazine deadline and all. I shouldn't try to read nonfiction during deadline week.

 

Still. Short, accessible, full of Vikings. A very decent read.