The Vikings: A History
Written by Robert Ferguson
Narrated by Michael Page
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
Scandinavians who have become familiar to history as Vikings never lose
their capacity to fascinate, from their ingeniously designed longboats
to their stormy pantheon of gods and goddesses. Robert Ferguson is a
sure guide across what he calls "the treacherous marches which divide
legend from fact in Viking Age history". His long familiarity with the
literary culture of Scandinavia is combined with the latest
archaeological discoveries to reveal a sweeping picture of one of
history's most amazing civilizations.
Robert Ferguson
Robert Ferguson was born in the UK in 1948 and left school in 1966. He worked at a number of jobs including postman, hospital porter, deckhand on a trawler, factory worker, cook, driver etc before enrolling at UCL, London in 1976 and taking a course in Scandinavian Studies. He graduated in 1980. In 1983 he emigrated to Norway and has made his home there since. He began his literary career as a radio dramatist, translating and adapting for radio works by Knut Hamsun and Henrik Ibsen for the BBC. He has also written eleven original radio plays and twice won the BBC Methuen Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Drama, in 1984 and 1986. His first literary biography was Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Best Biography Award in 1987. It also won the University of London J.G.Robertson Award. In 1996 Enigma was dramatized as a 6-part television series by NRK (Norwegian State Television) As well as literary biographies and a history of the Vikings, Ferguson has written two novels, published only in Norwegian.
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Reviews for The Vikings
11 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Robert provides a detailed study of the Vikings. His writings show evidence of his extensive research and scholarly readings. The level of detail is often beyond my level of interest but there is a lot of information that Robert provides that is interesting. I recommend the book to any serious historian of the Vikings.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very interesting book but a rather difficult read. Early Middle Ages were very dynamic times where rulers and local warlords rose and fell in a matter of months. As a result you end up with multitude of characters and it takes pretty good concentration and focus to discern who is who at what time.
I read few reviews of this book and they said that book was sensationalistic in terms that it would bombard readers with pretty bizarre descriptions of torture. I agree that these are not things you would usually ind in historical texts but again these are all things that were common for the period. Brutal, yes they are [especially in our times] but they were common at the time.
Interesting book, highly recommended to anyone interested in Early Middle Ages or Vikings themselves. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
I found the reviews of this a bit surprising- I guess it is a bit hard to read at times, with all those names flying around, but given that Ferguson was trying to be a responsible historian, there's not much else he could have done. Viking history has to be seen from the outside, because outsiders were the ones who recorded that history for us. Stranger still are the complaints about his use of the word 'heathen,' a product, I can only assume, of peoples' bizarre inability to understand that when you're writing about the way something is perceived, you have to use the language of the perceivers. As for the goodreads reviewer who said Ferguson is 'obviously a Christian' who somehow has it in for the Vikings... uh... huh?
The central oddity of this book is Ferguson's insistence that 'The Viking Age' of marauding and rapine was a kind of clash of civilizations between Christian and Heathen, in which Charlemagne's violent imposition of the former religion provoked the Scandanavians (who are taken to be not 'primitives', but just as civilized as the nations to their south, east and west) to burn churches and murder priests. It's timely, I guess, but the best evidence he can martial suggests just as much that the Vikes attacked churches because that's where the money was, and murdered priests and nuns to spread terror, which is a pretty sound military strategy. These civilized gentlemen pretty quickly converted to Christianity and assimilated wherever they settled. But note that Ferguson's presentation is perfectly objective; his reading of the archaeological, literary, and dendrochronological evidence, as well as all sorts of other stuff) never overwhelms his presentation of that evidence. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I was hoping for better from Robert Ferguson's The Vikings: A History. A picture of how Vikings lived, the motivation for their exploration and raiding, a description of what they believed about the universe and life and death would have made this an outstanding book. Unfortunately, what I got was mostly lists of battles and a very medieval Christian, Western European view of the Vikings. In the end, there's just not that much known about the Vikings outside writings by their victims and enemies - with all the problems that come from trying to understand a culture through unfriendly eyes. So I suppose it's not Ferguson's fault that the book is dull as dishwater. Still, I hoped for better.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Overall boring with occasional flashes of fascination: viking sacrifices, the conversion of Iceland, colonisation of Vinland, etc