| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Vikings for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Professor Peter Sawyer
A beautifully written history of the Vikings.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The Vikings hold a particular place in the history of the West, both mythologically and in the significant impact they had on Northern Europe. Magnus Magnusson's indispensable study of this great people presents a rounded and fascinating picture of a nation who, in modern eyes, would seem to embody striking contradictions. They were undoubtedly pillagers, raiders, and terrifying warriors, but they were also great pioneers, artists, and traders - a dynamic people, whose skill and daring in their exploration of the world has left an indelible impression a thousand years on.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Sir Magnus Magnusson has always been closely associated with archaeology: having written and presented on the subject many times during his career. However, he was probably most famous for presenting the tv quiz "Mastermind" from 1972 to 1997. At its peak in the 1980s, he got the chance to present his own series - the Vikings. This a new adaptation of the book which accompanied the series.
As one might expect of a book dedicated to the revisionist historian Peter Sawyer, it is a balanced and intelligently drawn study. Magnusson's study of this great people presents an account of a nation that is perceived with striking contradictions (remember Tim Robbins in "Erik"?). To be a Viking was strictly to be a pirate (from the Old Norse "vikingr", a pirate or raider) but Magnusson shows how it is misleading to describe more than three centuries of northern history just as an age of raiders. They were undoubtedly pillagers, raiders and terrifying warriors, but they were also great pioneers, artists and traders.
This book is an excellent account of how the Vikings' vibrant warrior culture transformed the north Atlantic and much of Russia through trade and settlement.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Very Interesting and well written history of the vikings. It deals with the development each of the viking countries before covering the diferent parts of the UK. Very informative and it helps to dispel many of the myths surrounding the Vikings.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a very lengthily but never boring and always interesting book covering pretty much the entire history of the vikings, it covers all the key periods from the origins of the scandinavian countries, the myths behind their pagan beliefs, their development of seafaring boats, all the major explorations to Iceland, Greenland and Vinland, the invasion years of Anglo-Saxon England, including the decades of raids upon Gaul/Frankia (modern day France), the founding of Normandy by the Viking Rollo, the history and founding of Sweden, Norway and Denmark with all their turbulent royal histories, ultimately leading to the year of 1066 featuring William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, Harold Godwinson, brief King of England and Harald Hardrada, King of Norway.
It has some fantastic colour photographs in the middle of great historic archeological finds and discoveries and of recreated longships and fjord landscapes.
Anyone interested in Vikings at all should read this book because you do learn a whole lot more that you might imagine. It is highly recommended.
It has some fantastic colour photographs in the middle of great historic archeological finds and discoveries and of recreated longships and fjord landscapes.
Anyone interested in Vikings at all should read this book because you do learn a whole lot more that you might imagine. It is highly recommended.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
vikings
In this excellent book the author tries,with much success,to dispel the commom belief that Vikings were only plunderers,rapists and murderers (a vtew put forward by monks who were... Read more
Published 6 months ago by G. I. Forbes
academic, wordy and overall disappointing
While this book is very well researched and detailed, it is hard going. Too much content on the various types of construction of viking ships, it failed to excite me in viking... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Sean Taylor
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
