History of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, Vol. 2 (of 2)

We begin in legend and end in history. This second volume of Samuel Dunham's comprehensive history ventures into the most dramatic chapter of Scandinavian past: the age when Norse seafarers left their fjords in open boats and remade the known world. Here are the sagas made flesh, the raids on monasteries, the surprise strikes across unfamiliar coastlines, the chance discoveries that led to Iceland, Greenland, and a land the sagas called Vinland. Dunham weaves together chronicle and legend, acknowledging that to understand the Norse is to accept that their history and mythology were once inseparable. The establishment of governments in foreign territories, the complex politics of Thing assemblies and royal succession, the gradual Christianization that ended the old ways, all unfold in prose that treats its subject with genuine admiration. This is history written when the Romantic era still believed the past held lessons for the present, when scholars could marvel at Viking audacity without modern irony. For readers who want to understand where the Northmen went, how they lived, and what they left behind.