Ebook: A History of the Vikings

The subject of this book is the viking realms, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, their emergence and development, civilization and culture, and their many-sided achievement at home and abroad. It is an extensive field to survey. For even when we set aside the almost trackless millennia of my opening pages, there remain a thousand years of history to be charted in an area of Norse activity extending from the North Cape and White Sea to the Pillars of Hercules, from Newfoundland and Baffin Island to the Volga Bend and Byzantium. However, my concern is primarily with the "Viking Age" proper, equated as this generally is with the three-hundred-year period c. 780-1070 — the period, that is, of the so-called "Viking Movement" overseas. ("Introduction")