“After an indecisive skirmish with the Scots at Largs” is all it says about what we locally call the Battle of Largs (1263), and that in an entry under “Scotland, Vikings in”, not even its own: still, any excuse for a theme park, and the enthusiastic endorsement of Vikingaar at Largs by my two grandsons is evidence enough for me; not to mention the knowledge gained there: do you know how Odin came to have only one eye? The seven‐year‐old does, and proudly told me. If you do not know how Odin came to lose an eye, it is one of the many things you can look up in this excellent and remarkably comprehensive reference book.
The Vikings are fascinating: we all know the stories about pillage and rape. The pillage was real enough, but the rape apparently was either so commonplace as not to require mention or actually quite rare. There have been trends in history which have tried to show the Vikings as really quite peaceful (and presumably much misunderstood) traders and agriculturalists. Their achievements in art and their settlements, as well as their widespread trading, were real enough; but so, too, were the pirate raids. Like all people, they were far more complex (and so even more interesting) than their stereotype, and their exploits in travel and settlement, as well as their mythology and eventually literature, all make up a people of great significance (and attraction at this safe distance of several centuries). We all know about Eric Bloodaxe and Eric the Red, but then among many other characters from the list of those covered here we note as apparently typical of our preconceptions the likes of Thorfinn Skullsplitter, Svein Forkbeard, Sigurd the Mighty or Erik the Victorious. Magnus the Good and Hakon the Good, not to mention Olaf the Peaceful, seem unlikely Viking epithets; Aud the Deep‐Minded even less so, but her exploits are in fact widely known from the Laxdaela Saga.
It is all here: the people, the sagas, the mythology, the topics (a good wide range, including agriculture, children, marriage and divorce, sex, slavery, towns, trade, women, and many more), and the places, from the Mediterranean to Russia and America. I have only read the sagas in English translation but have always failed to see how their account of Vinland/America could be considered anything other than eye‐witness. The entries here for L’Anse aux Meadows and Vinland present the evidence, and the unresolved difficulties; if one of those is an over‐enthusiastic description of the new‐found land, we have only to look west to the deliberately over‐optimistic description of one of the world’s less hospitable lands as Greenland.
An introduction sets the scene concisely and presents Viking history in it broadest outlines; thereafter the arrangement is alphabetical. There are plenty of cross‐references, a chronology, list of rulers, and further reading, but no index. The whole work takes full account of modern research and varying reinterpretations and boils it all down into concise, but adequately detailed, readable entries. Layout and production are excellent, with plenty of well‐reproduced relevant monochrome illustrations. John Haywood is an historian with several reference titles to his name. There is no scholarly apparatus of notes or references, but that makes the entries that much more accessible and confirms this as a popular reference book in the best sense of the term.
There are numerous books available on the Vikings, but for its broad coverage, accessible and readable texts, range of illustration, and distillation of modern scholarship, all for a very reasonable price in a single compact volume, this title is certainly worth a place in both general and history reference collections.
