EHR, cxxi. 490 (Feb. 2006)

English Historical Review Vol. CXXI No. 490 
© Oxford University Press 2006, all rights reserved

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     Viking Empires ,  by  Angelo Forte, Richard Oram, and Frederik  Pedersen 

(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005; pp.  447 .  £25).   

  H ere  is yet another diffuse Viking book, by three authors who prefer not to 
reveal who wrote what, although their voices are not as concordant as those of 
the Andrews Sisters used to be. Nevertheless, they have a theme, which is almost 
a thesis: that the Nordic peoples have been closely connected with Continental 
cultures from Roman times and even earlier, and that their reactions have taken 
forms of which the viking raids and overlordships ( ‘ empires ’ ) were intermediate 
or transitional between the relatively peaceful situation of  c .500 to  c .750, and 
the Christian or crusading activity of  c .1050 to  c .1250. Before  750 ,  these  peoples 
developed nautical skills and an upper class of rulers and retainers; the damage 
these infl icted on Christian countries thereafter led to the counter-offensive of 
the German and Anglo-Saxon churches which diverted the raiding impulse 
into crusades against the heathen of the Baltic coastlands. The dynamic in each 
case came not from within, as a result of over-population, silver-shortage, or 
wanderlust, but from tonic interactions with what the authors lazily describe as 
Europe. So it was either a case of outsiders doing it to them or their doing it to 
outsiders, but either way it was in some sense much the same sort of thing — the 
image of the self-propulsion of the ingesting jelly-fi sh springs to mind. 

 This intellectual blur extends to the concept of viking empire. Sometimes it 

means dominion of places outside Scandinavia by Nordic rulers like Canute, 
sometimes by emigrant Scandinavians, sometimes of the wildernesses of Iceland, 
Greenland and Newfoundland by colonists: a confusion lessened by the decision 
to drop the Rus entirely, because  ‘ the time is not yet ripe to embark on assessment 
of eastern activity ’ , and the book is quite long enough as it stands. That means 
that there is not much about Swedes or Gauts either; the emphasis is on the deeds 
of Danes and Norwegians inhabiting what are treated as fully defi ned,  even 
centralised, countries called Denmark and Norway almost from Roman times. 
Centralised seems to mean areas within which power is wielded from several 
centres rather than one, although this usage is not actually explained as it should 
be in a book for non-specialists. It is not presented as original scholarship and 
research, despite the high qualifi cations of the contributors, and the references 
are often to national and general histories of similar type, which gives a rather 
prefabricated air to some of the chapters. Where the references are to sources they 
are too often carelessly handled. Using the Heimskringla legend of Harold Fairhair 
to shed light on ninth-century Norway is an old habit, but inadvisable; here, it 
leads to his being credited with a fi fty-year reign beginning  c .880, although his 
supposed expulsion of Rollo of Normandy is put at  876  on the unreliable evidence 
of Dudo. We are assured that Harold  ‘ is generally described by later sagas as the 
cause of the Scandinavian exodus to the West because of his militant Christianity ’ , 
an assurance evidently unconnected with a reading of those sagas; and the Anglo-
Saxon Chroniclers also seem to have laboured in vain, as the authors ascribe to the 
chronicle reports of  ‘ an orgy of looting and burning ’  by the Danes in  869 , a battle 
at Marlborough in  870 – 71 , the mortal wounding of king Ethelred I on that fi eld, 

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and the  ‘ stiff Welsh resistance ’  to the raiders from Chester in  894 , none of which 
appear in any published text. Similar inaccuracies appear in later chapters on the 
post-conversion history of the Danes, which is less familiar to most readers. These 
are mere details, but credibility in small things is needed to reinforce such large 
ones as the claim that Scandinavian settlers in the West  ‘ established one of the fi rst 
multi-cultural societies in Europe, and the relative ease of their integration 
provided an important strand of tolerance in the European psyche ’ . 

 By contrast, the chapters on seafaring ( 4 ,   11 ,   12 ) and on Ireland and Scotland 

( 4 ,   8 ,   9 ,   10 ) offer more reliable résumés of current scholarship and theories, 
ranging from the impact of  ‘ rogue waves ’  on timber ships and the improbability 
of navigation by wooden sun-compasses, to the nature of Irish Sea politics from 
the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Oram’s  Lordship of Galloway  (Edinburgh,  2000 ) 
and  David I  (Stroud,  2004 ) evidently lie behind the unravelling of Orkney and 
Scots affairs, whoever the unraveller is in this case. The narrative is in places 
dense, but there is reason to be grateful for a clear account of the interplay of 
forces between the  1130 s and the  1270 s which resulted in the Scots supremacy over 
northern Britain at the expense of the rulers of Orkney, the Isles and Norway. It 
is well said that  ‘ the  “ Viking ”  character of (earl) Thorfi nn (of Orkney)’s rule that 
 Orkneyinga Saga  presents gives a misleading picture of the cultural development 
of the earldom in the eleventh century ’ , since his authority rested less and less on 
raiding and more on taxation within the homeland and co-operation with his 
bishop; but the overlordship and government he left behind him was simply not 
strong enough to compete on equal terms with Norway or the king of Scots, or 
manipulate rivalries of the greater powers to its own long-term advantage. Shorn 
of Shetland by the Norwegians, of Caithness and Sutherland by the Scots, the 
thirteenth-century earls also lost their grip on their own churches and the chance 
to pursue an independent foreign policy. It is refreshing to learn that changes like 
that were  ‘ not simply a result of Scandinavian Orkney’s fuller integration into the 
political and cultural mainstream of Europe ’ , but can be attributed to the fact that 
in  1200 , by a process of elimination,  ‘ only two viable kingdoms remained ’  within 
the British Isles. Yet the work ends with a chapter which attempts to wind the 
threads of this  ‘ defi nitive new account of the Viking world ’  into a nebulous unity 
of integration, assimilation and Euro-osmosis, as if the good stuff in previous 
chapters had struck a false note. This is a pity, because the prospective purchaser 
may well ask in what ways is this three-man job superior to the  Oxford Illustrated 
History of the Vikings , a collection of articles edited by Peter Sawyer for OUP in 
1997? The intermittent concentration on two themes,  ‘ empire ’  and colonisation, 
rather than many, is a potential advantage, but on the whole this book has no 
right to say to the Oxford one, with Lamb’s poor relation:    ‘ Madam, you are 
superannuated ’ . †

      Summertown,  Oxford      

 E.     CHRISTIANSEN

        

 

EHR, cxxi. 490 (Feb. 2006) 

† doi:10.1093/ehr/cej008