Time is a corrosive force. For as much as its passing allows us to order and contextualize our lives, lending structure to the narrative of existence, its abrasiveness erodes the landmarks of culture and civilization we erect in honor of ourselves and our achievements. Of course, certain substances stand up better to time's rigors. Stone, for instance,has underpinned some of our longest-lasting edifices. But though stone has permitted structures like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid to exist for thousands of years, untroubled save for the occasional damaging earthquake, even these achievements serve only to demonstrate time's power. For the paper upon which these societies may have transcribed the meaning for such structures have disintegrated with the passing of millennia, forcing us to only guess at the beliefs and the motives, the methods and the practices, that lent meaning to these monuments and to the cultures who built them.
Oral cultures suffer most grievously at time's hand. For they rely upon story and song to hand down their accumulated knowledge, eschewing the relative permanency of paper and stone for the intimacy of the poetical word, so rich with metaphor and meaning. Nonetheless, any number of calamities, manmade and otherwise, have the power to sever this rich, cultural inheritance and leave priceless stores of knowledge lost forever. Few peoples have suffered the consequences of this truth more than the Vikings. Mr. Ferguson explains in this engaging history.
Today, the Vikings are best remembered for their fearsome appearance, their violent practices and their captivating ships which grimly sailed the Atlantic seas in search of conquest and bounty. Efforts by cultural authorities in Denmark and Sweden, to claim these legendary raiders as their own, have only accentuated their mythology, obscuring the truth that the Vikings were far from the united monoculture depicted in modern renderings. A loose confederation of clans and families, warbands and self-styled monarchs, they were the warlike face of Scandinavia during the dying days of the Norse religion. For 300 years, from roughly the midpoint of the eighth century, through to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 which sounded the death knell for their power, the Vikings imprinted themselves upon western Europe, imparting their genetics, their gods, their culture and their ideals upon those too soft for their axes and arrows.
But as much as they were slavers and pirates, the Vikings were also explorers and colonizers. They sailed to unknown shores and, in as much as they could, compelled their cultivation. A hardy people steeled by bone-numbing winters, they were pragmatic and forceful, willing to do whatever it took to survive until Ragnarok, an armageddon born of doctrine at which their gods would die. They accepted that they lived in a world of chaos beyond their control. And so they adhered to a code that, though brutal by our standards, kept them alive and independent in a world of ice and stone.
Though limited in its scope, The Vikings is an edifying examination of pre-Christian Scandinavia and the warriors, customs and politics it produced. Though much of the finer details are lost to us, Mr. Ferguson deploys the research of geneticists and archaeologists to reconstruct a fairly thorough portrait of Viking life. He is at his most illuminating, though, when elucidating the fractured and factious nature of this warrior culture and the extent to which this disunity energized many of their efforts at colonization. The author also effectively communicates the fearsome strength of the soldiers produced by this culture, unyielding men who managed, at various times, to conquer swaths of Germany, France and pre-feudal England. Consequently, the quick histories Mr. Ferguson provides for the houses of Charlemagne and Godwin are handy and informative.
For all its virtues, The Vikings suffers from a dearth of cultural detail. Mr. Ferguson does yeoman's work dredging up what he can, but is account is nonetheless inflicted by that most pervasive of diseases common among cultural histories, an obsession with the deeds of kings and the rise and fall of dynasties, neither of which contribute much to our understanding of Viking life and cause our eyes to blur over with fatigue and dislocation.
Notwithstanding its drawbacks, The Vikings is a fine work that does what it can to animate a fascinating people in a troubled time. (3/5 Stars)
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