Audiobook11 hours
The Vikings: A New History
Written by Neil Oliver
Narrated by James A. Gillies
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloodthirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the West and as far as Baghdad in the East. As the Vikings did not write their own history, we have to discover it for ourselves; and that discovery, as Neil Oliver reveals, tells an extraordinary story of a people who, from the brink of destruction, reached a quarter of the way around the globe and built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years.
Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.
Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.
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Reviews for The Vikings
Rating: 4.153333356 out of 5 stars
4/5
75 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absolutely loved it. It was a brilliantly written and performed book full of details and information that I never knew but it never teetered on the dry, boring territory that so many histories do.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Great amount of detail and analysis. Fantastic chronology of the people, events and discoveries
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Easily readable with good photographic visuals. I enjoyed it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A comprehensive account of the Vikings travel around the northern hemisphere from the UK, and to Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and into Russia and the med. A well written tie in to the TV series.
Their skill was in the navigation techniques that enabled them to cross the Atlantic ocean and all around the European coast, The Swedish Vikings want along the river systems of the Russian mainland, and formed the Russian state.
Whilst they could be horrifically violent, their primary reason for travel was barter and trade. Where that didn't work, they would reach for the axe to enforce their point of view.
Well worth a read1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A serviceable popular history of the Vikings in all their glory; Oliver provides good background on the range and scope of Viking exploration and a decent overview of their cultural practices. Oliver's enthusiasm for the topic is obvious and infectious, and he's able to weave in tales from his own travels and experiences in a way that works well with the narrative. It's made me want to go off and read some books from his bibliography, and that's always a good sign.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This history of the Vikings is, I think, a good introduction to the subject. The author's passion for his subject comes through and he's obviously done a lot of research. Yet, for all that, I found the book a little light and only rarely got a feel for what life in Viking times would have been like.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5You may know Neil Oliver as a rather irritating presence on TV, strutting about preening himself. This book is also irritating, being a shallow 'book of the series' with far too much of the author and not enough of the Vikings. It takes work to make Ragnar Hairybreeks, Ivarr the Boneless and Eirik Bloodaxe (not forgetting Gorm the Old) boring, but Oliver manages it.