The North Sea Earls: The Shetland/Viking Archaeological Expedition

The Earls who give this book its title were Norsemen. "Orkneyinga Saga" tells how their Viking longships were wrecked in the Shetland Islands north of Scotland, in the middle of the twelfth century. The book is not an academic treatise on them, but an informal account of detective work carried out in Shetland by an expedition made up of amateur divers with some professional leadership. They looked into the circumstances of the wrecking, and followed one of the Earls, Rognvald, to Sumburgh at the southern tip of the islands, where the Viking settlement of Jarlshof stands as one of the most remarkable archaeological sites of the British Isles. There, soon after the wreck, Rognvald again found himself in peril on the sea.