I am a Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham and have been teaching, researching, and writing about all aspects of the Viking Age and its aftermath for many years. My particular expertise is in the poetry, sagas, and runic writings of medieval Scandinavia. To understand these, it has been important to me to follow in the footsteps of the Vikings from the Baltic to North America, to see the places they were familiar with, and to experience the traces of their culture in those places. These books tell the stories which will guide the armchair traveller on the same voyages.
The Viking Diaspora presents the early medieval migrations of people, language, and culture from mainland Scandinavia to new homes in the British Isles, the North Atlantic, the Baltic, and the East as a form of ‘diaspora’. This book is the first to explain Scandinavian expansion using this model, and presents the Viking Age in a new and exciting way for students of Vikings and medieval history.
Rather than the movements of armies, the book concentrates on the movements of people and the shared heritage and culture that connected them. The book highlights in detail significant forms of cultural contact including gender, beliefs, and identities.
From its majestic Neolithic monuments to its 21st-century potential for alternative energy solutions, Orkney has always attracted entrepreneurial immigrants. The Vikings arrived in the 9th century during their invasions and settlements of large parts of Britain and Ireland. Orkney and Shetland remained a part of the Scandinavian world until the middle of the 15th century. This 13th-century Icelandic saga tells the story of the feuds, killings, and other machinations of the Norse rulers of these archipelagoes. It’s a story of ruthless high politics, occasionally leavened with outstanding poetry, Christian devotion, and black humour.
Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, the Orkneyinga Saga is an intriguing fusion of myth, legend and history. The only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action, it tells of an era when the islands were still part of the Viking world, beginning with their conquest by the kings of Norway in the ninth century. The saga describes the subsequent history of the Earldom of Orkney and the adventures of great Norsemen such as Sigurd the Powerful, St Magnus the Martyr and Hrolf, the conqueror of Normandy. Savagely powerful and poetic, this is…
North of Britain, the Vikings encountered the uninhabited Sheep Isles, or the Faroes, before they went on to discover their better-known settlement of Iceland. Connections remained close, and in the 13th century, an unknown Icelandic author wrote this swashbuckling tale of the wealthy merchants and farmers who lived in these small and craggy islands in the Viking Age, their inter-island rivalries, and their tricky relationships with the rulers of their Norwegian homeland.
What other nation can boast that it has a written account of the first people to inhabit it? Iceland was an uninhabited, volcanic island until the arrival of Vikings from Scandinavia and elsewhere in the 870s. This book, written in the 13th century, is a catalogue of some 3000 individuals who link the settlement period to the time of writing. Of these around 400 (including 13 women) are remembered as the landnámsmenn or original ‘land-takers’ who settled, distributed, named, and cultivated this empty land. In amongst the lists and genealogies are wonderful short anecdotes about their families, feuds, and adventures in their new-found land.
The laws of Mediaeval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.
Two islands and two texts for the price of one! These sagas tell the story of the medieval Icelanders’ settlement of Greenland, where they stayed for nearly 500 years. From there they voyaged even further westward, to what is now Newfoundland and possibly other places in North America. As well as describing voyages of shipwreck and discovery, these sagas tell fantastic tales of ghosts, disease, magic, treachery, and encounters with new landscapes and new peoples.
The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga contain the first ever descriptions of North America, a bountiful land of grapes and vines, discovered by Vikings five centuries before Christopher Columbus. Written down in the early thirteenth century, they recount the Icelandic settlement of Greenland by Eirik the Red, the chance discovery by seafaring adventurers of a mysterious new land, and Eirik's son Leif the Lucky's perilous voyages to explore it. Wrecked by storms, stricken by disease and plagued by navigational mishaps, some survived the North Atlantic to pass down this compelling tale of the first Europeans to…
According to this medieval tale, the Baltic island of Gotland was once so enchanted that it sank into the sea during the day and rose up again at night. From these mythical origins, this short saga, written in the special dialect of the island, tells how Gotland became populated, how some of them went east to Russia and Byzantium, how they exchanged their heathen idols for the Christian religion, and their relationship with the King of Sweden. It’s a rare literary insight into the Vikings’ eastern settlements and adventures.
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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