Viking Britain: A History

A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields. Britain in the Viking Age was a turbulent violent place, and the war-lords of the age have names that fire the blood and stir the imagination Alfred the Great and Ivar the Boneless, Edmund Ironside and Erik Bloodaxe, Macbeth and Thorfinn Skullsplitter (to name but a few). The way in which their stories intersect with real places offers potential for a richly textured narrative. By drawing together narrative history, new academic research and first-hand experience, Tom Williams offers a vital evocation of a forgotten world, its echoes in later history and its implications for the present. A 'Viking Britain' truly existed, and its historical and cultural footprint is in many ways broader and deeper than Rome's. Between the conventional beginning of the Viking Age in the...