The Viking experience

Resource Information

The work The Viking experience represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in City Libraries, City of Gold Coast. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The Viking experience

Statement of responsibility

Marjolen Stern & Roderick Dale

Creator

• Stern, Marjolein

Contributor

• Dale, Roderick

Author

• Dale, Roderick
• Stern, Marjolein

Subject

• Vikings -- Europe -- Influence
• trueEurope -- History -- 476-1492
• Nonfiction

Language

eng

Summary

The impact of the Vikings is impossible to overstate. A people apparently condemned to a marginal existence in the remote wastes of Dark Age northern Europe, they burst onto an unsuspecting continent with extraordinary consequences. Initially they were pirates and raiders of astounding ferocity. In a matter of decades, they had laid waste much of the coastal British Isles and had penetrated deep into France, threatening to snuff out for good an emerging Christendom. They launched raids against Muslim Iberia and then into the Mediterranean. They pushed east across the Baltic and from there south along the river-systems of western Russia to the Black Sea and Byzantium, establishing themselves as traders and slavers. They discovered and exploited sea-routes deep into the North Atlantic, and finally to America itself. They initiated routes of oceanic exploration that would be unmatched until Columbus five centuries later. This book, accessible and vivid, sheds new light on the Viking Age. It examines their gods and belief systems, their technological advances, their craftsmanship, their social organization, their success as colonizers, their political coups, their military might, their commercial nous, and their remarkable self-belief. It provides a compelling portrait of a world decisively shaped by the Viking initiatives and imperative

Cataloging source

NJB

Dewey number

948.022

Illustrations

• illustrations
• portraits

Index

no index present

Literary form

non fiction

Target audience

adult