Dig through the layers of time to find the Viking past beneath our city streets. Shipbuilding, praying, raiding, trading and playing - Viking customs and habits are brought to life in this richly illustrated account of the beginnings of Dublin town. Viking Dublin was a vibrant, multicultural centre of commerce in early medieval Europe. Now Dublin is unique in the world for its enormous stock of preserved archaeological and written records. Together, they reveal intimate details of life in the city and bring us beyond the myths to a people who developed a small coastal settlement into a bustling hub of trade and craft. Fully illustrated with photographs, drawings and new maps, Dublin and the Viking World takes readers into the streets and homes of a major Viking city. Expert authors explore the acclaimed Dublinia exhibition experience and the latest in world-class scholarship to show readers the realities of the world of Viking Dublin.

In Dublin, the Wood Quay-Fishamble Street archaeological excavations were a constant media story throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when the threat of official destruction brought thousands of protestors into the streets. Although this highly-publicized protest failed to "Save Wood Quay," it did force the most extensive urban excavations ever undertaken in Europe that yielded more unprecedented data about town layout in Dublin 1,000 years ago than about any other European Viking town of the time. Dozens of often nearly intact building foundations, fences, yards, pathways, and quaysides, as well as thousands of artifacts and environmental samples, were unearthed in the course of the campaign. In this book, Dr. Pat Wallace, the chief archaeologist who directed the Wood Quay and Fishamble Street excavations, provides a detailed examination of the implications of these discoveries for Viking-Age and Anglo-Norman Dublin by placing them in their national and international contexts. Lavishly illustrated with over 500 color images, maps, and drawings, together with detailed descriptions and analyses of the artifacts, this pioneering study gathers all the finds and discusses them in the context of parallel discoveries in Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia, and northern Europe, with the historical, economic, and cultural milieu of Hiberno-Scandinavian Dublin as the background. *** "This marvelous work memorializes a major archaeological discovery unearthed in Dublin between 1974 and 1981. Structural remains from 840 through 1169 CE, the most extensive for any site north of the Alps, were excavated by Patrick Wallace, who now analyzes his finds from Wood Quay, Fishamble Street, and related sites. A lively text and numerous photos enliven the hundreds of buildings unearthed.... Highly recommended." --Choice, Vol. 54, No. 4, December 2016 [Subject: History, Archaeology, Viking Studies, Medieval Studies, Art History, Irish Studies]

The relationship of Ireland with the Viking World is one of the enduring themes of the study of the Viking Age. The Fifteenth Viking Congress addressed key issues in the debate, including Viking-Age Ireland, the colonization of the North Atlantic, weapons and warfare, and the development of urbanism. This book, comprising papers by more than fifty of the world's leading Viking specialists, presents a broad range of ideas and approaches to these studies, supported by archaeological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence. --Book Jacket.

Among the subjects covered in this celebration of medieval Dublin are: cross-cultural processes between Scandinavian settlers and the native Irish; spiritual and secular aspects of the city; and representations of Viking and medieval Dublin in texts and maps.

How the Vikings dominated one of the most important stretches of water surrounding the British Isles

In the tradition of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, Brown lays to rest the hoary myth that Viking society was ruled by men and celebrates the dramatic lives of female Viking warriors “Once again, Brown brings Viking history to vivid, unexpected life—and in the process, turns what we thought we knew about Norse culture on its head. Superb.” —Scott Weidensaul, author of New York Times bestselling A World on the Wing "Magnificent. It captured me from the very first page." —Pat Shipman, author of The Invaders In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history, and literature to imagine her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined. Nancy Marie Brown uses science to link the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines her life intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as The Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor’s short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data, but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, law, saga, poetry, and myth carry weapons. These women brag, “As heroes we were widely known—with keen spears we cut blood from bone.” In this compelling narrative Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.

Viking-Age trade, network theory, silver economies, kingdom formation, and the Scandinavian raiding and settlement of Ireland and Britain are all popular subjects. However, few have looked for possible connections between these phenomena, something this book suggests were closely related. By allying Blomkvist’s network-kingdoms with Sindbæk’s nodal market-networks, it is argued that the political and economic character of Viking-Age Britain and Ireland – my ‘Insular Scandinavia’ – is best understood if Dublin and Jórvík are seen as being established as nodes of a market-based network-kingdom. Based on a dataset relating to the then developing bullion economies of the central and eastern Scandinavian worlds and southern Scandinavia in particular, it is argued that war-band leaders from, or familiar with, ‘Danish’ markets like Hedeby and Kaupang transposed to Insular Scandinavia the concept of polities based on establishment of markets and the protection of routeways between them. Using this book, readers can think of interlinked Dublin and Great Army elites creating an Insular version of a Danish-style nodal market kingdom based on commerce and silver currencies. A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain will help specialist researchers and students of Viking archaeology make connections between southern Scandinavia and the market economy of the Uí Ímair (‘descendants of Ívarr’) operating out of the twin nodes of Dublin and Jórvík via the initial establishment of Hiberno-Scandinavian longphuirt and the related winter-camps of the Viking Great Army.