In Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson returns to the Viking homeland, Scandinavia, highlighting such key aspects of Viking life as power and politics, social and kinship networks, gifts and feasting, religious beliefs, women's roles, social classes, and the Viking economy, which included farming, iron mining and metalworking, and trade. Drawing of the latest archeological research and on literary sources, namely the sagas, Sigurðsson depicts a complex and surprisingly peaceful society that belies the popular image of Norsemen as bloodthirsty barbarians. Instead, Vikings often acted out power struggles symbolically, with local chieftains competing with each other through displays of wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts, rather than arms. At home, conspicuous consumption was a Viking leader's most important virtue; the brutality associated with them was largely wreaked abroad. Sigurðsson's engaging history of the Vikings at home begins by highlighting political developments in the region, detailing how Danish kings assumed ascendency over the region and the ways in which Viking friendship reinforced regional peace. Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings then discusses the importance of religion, first pagan and (beginning around 1000 A.D.) Christianity; the central role that women played in politics and war; and how the enormous wealth brought back to Scandinavia affected the social fabric—shedding new light on Viking society.

The Viking Age was a period of profound change in Scandinavia. As kingdoms were established, Christianity became the encompassing ideological and cosmological framework and towns were formed. This book examines a central backdrop to these changes: the economic transformation of West Scandinavia. With a focus on the development of intensive and organized use of woodlands and alpine regions and domestic raw materials, together with the increasing standardization of products intended for long-distance trade, the volume sheds light on the emergence of a strong interconnectedness between remote rural areas and central markets. Viking-Age Transformations explores the connection between legal and economic practice, as the rural economy and monetary system developed in conjunction with nascent state power and the legal system. Thematically, the book is organized into sections addressing the nature and extent of trade in both marginal and centralized areas; production and the social, legal and economic aspects of exploiting natural resources and distributing products; and the various markets and sites of trade and consumption. A theoretically informed and empirically grounded collection that reveals the manner in which relationships of production and consumption transformed Scandinavian society with their influence on the legal and fiscal division of the landscape, this volume will appeal to scholars of archaeology, the history of trade and Viking studies.

A major reassessment of the vikings and their legacy The Vikings maintain their grip on our imagination, but their image is too often distorted by myth. It is true that they pillaged, looted, and enslaved. But they also settled peacefully and traveled far from their homelands in swift and sturdy ships to explore. The Age of the Vikings tells the full story of this exciting period in history. Drawing on a wealth of written, visual, and archaeological evidence, Anders Winroth captures the innovation and pure daring of the Vikings without glossing over their destructive heritage. He not only explains the Viking attacks, but also looks at Viking endeavors in commerce, politics, discovery, and colonization, and reveals how Viking arts, literature, and religious thought evolved in ways unequaled in the rest of Europe. The Age of the Vikings sheds new light on the complex society, culture, and legacy of these legendary seafarers.

Follow an epic story of the Viking Age that traces the historical trail of an ancient piece of jewelry found in a Viking grave in England to its origins thousands of miles east in India. An acclaimed bioarchaeologist, Catrine Jarman has used cutting-edge forensic techniques to spark her investigation into the history of the Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now over one thousand years old, she can determine childhood diet—and thereby where a person was likely born. With radiocarbon dating, she can ascertain a death-date down to the range of a few years. And her research offers enlightening new visions of the roles of women and children in Viking culture. Three years ago, a Carnelian bead came into her temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace the path of this ancient piece of jewelry back to eighth-century Baghdad and India, discovering along the way that the Vikings’ route was far more varied than we might think—that with them came people from the Middle East, not just Scandinavia, and that the reason for this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, all the way to Britain. Told as a riveting history of the Vikings and the methods we use to understand them, this is a major reassessment of the fierce, often-mythologized voyagers of the North—and of the global medieval world as we know it.

This book explores households, social organization, and rituals in Viking Age Scandinavia through a study of dwellings and their doorways.

In Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson returns to the Viking homeland, Scandinavia, highlighting such key aspects of Viking life as power and politics, social and kinship networks, gifts and feasting, religious beliefs, women's roles, social classes, and the Viking economy, which included farming, iron mining and metalworking, and trade. Drawing of the latest archeological research and on literary sources, namely the sagas, Sigurðsson depicts a complex and surprisingly peaceful society that belies the popular image of Norsemen as bloodthirsty barbarians. Instead, Vikings often acted out power struggles symbolically, with local chieftains competing with each other through displays of wealth in the form of great feasts and gifts, rather than arms. At home, conspicuous consumption was a Viking leader's most important virtue; the brutality associated with them was largely wreaked abroad. Sigurðsson's engaging history of the Vikings at home begins by highlighting political developments in the region, detailing how Danish kings assumed ascendency over the region and the ways in which Viking friendship reinforced regional peace. Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings then discusses the importance of religion, first pagan and (beginning around 1000 A.D.) Christianity; the central role that women played in politics and war; and how the enormous wealth brought back to Scandinavia affected the social fabric—shedding new light on Viking society.

In this book a MacArthur Award-winning scholar argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages. Overturning the received narrative of Europe's military and religious conquest and colonization of the region, Anders Winroth contends that rather than acting as passive recipients, Scandinavians converted to Christianity because it was in individual chieftains' political, economic, and cultural interests to do so. Through a painstaking analysis and historical reconstruction of both archeological and literary sources, and drawing on scholarly work that has been unavailable in English, Winroth opens up new avenues for studying European ascendency and the expansion of Christianity in the medieval period.