The Vikings: A New History - Softcover

Anyone interested in finding out more about these real-life raiders will enjoy everything Oliver reveals.

Scottish archaeologist Oliver explores the vast influence of the relatively short Viking Age. The author has studied his sources in depth and provides a great chronicle of these nation-shapers who stretched the limits of the known world.

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 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 a thousand 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.