Journal of World History

Robert Ferguson's The Vikings is a recent addition to a large pool of general studies on the subject that includes such classics as Gwyn Jones's History of the Vikings, Peter Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, and Else Roesdahl's The Vikings, as well as Richard Hall's splendid The World of the Vikings.¹

Ferguson's stated aim in this book is to "provide an intelligent general reader who has an interest in the Viking Age with a study that might satisfy his or her interest without burdening it with an account of the innumerable controversies that cover every field of study of the period" (p. 8). Ferguson succeeds in creating a reasonably comprehensive and engaging study that meets its stated aims while simultaneously presenting some rather dubious interpretations of the homogeneous nature of Scandinavian society and the existence of a "northern Heathendom" that stood in opposition to its counterpart, western Christendom, with which it frequently found itself in conflict.

The text is organized largely in chronological fashion and covers the period from the late 780s/early 790s until the late eleventh/early twelfth century. Using the Oseberg ship (one of three Viking age longships discovered in southeast Norway in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries) as a springboard for an examination of Scandinavian culture and society, the author moves into a lamentably brief and cursory discussion (more on this in a moment) on the causes of the Viking Age, before tracing the Viking diaspora from Scandinavia [End Page 163] to Britain, Europe, and the East, and into the North Atlantic and the eastern shores of North America. The story then returns to Scandinavia in the age of conversion, which not only brings the story full circle from a geographical perspective but also provides a sense of conclusion to the Viking age, since, for Ferguson, conversion to Christianity clearly delineated the end of the Viking age: As he remarks, "perhaps the starkest symbol of the demise of one culture and its replacement by another was the adventure of the Norwegian King Sigurd, known as Jorsalfarer, the Jerusalem Traveller, who led a crusade to the Holy Land in 1108 and was the first European ruler to do so" (p. 381). As is to be expected in any study of the Vikings, the author integrates a wide range of diverse source material, both documentary and nondocumentary in nature, from well-known and frequently cited chronicles, annals, letters, and diplomatic documents to Icelandic sagas and Eddas, and from archaeological finds to linguistic and modern scientific evidence. One message of the book for the discerning reader will certainly be the remarkable range of material required to reconstruct the history of the Viking diaspora. Ferguson proves himself well acquainted with recent archaeological and scientific material throughout.

Adopting a chronological approach for the book does have its downside: namely, the rather artificial separation of regional events over long periods of time. Thus, for example, the reader interested in, say, Viking raiding and settlement in the British Isles will need to flip from chapter 4 ("The Devastation of All the Islands of Britain by the Heathens") to chapter 7 ("The Danelaw I: Occupation") to chapter 11 ("The Danelaw II: Assimilation"). Similarly, readers interested in tracking the Viking expansion into the North Atlantic must do so across two chapters widely separated by a diverse range of intervening material. Still, such an approach is effective and probably desirable for what is in effect an introductory text; works that proceed on a thematic basis, such as Peter Sawyer's Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, for instance, are susceptible to the criticism that they lack precisely the narrative context and background that Ferguson provides here. So, full marks for readability and above average marks for comprehensiveness. As a general study, then, Ferguson has certainly hit the mark and the book will be read with profit by his intended audience.

One area where the text may be found wanting compared with some of its competitors (e.g., Sawyer, Hall) is in the realm of maps and illustrations. Where both of the aforementioned works are well illustrated throughout with clear and detailed maps and illustrations (both color and black and white), we are presented here with thirty-two black-and-white illustrations sandwiched into a plate section in the middle of the [End Page 164] book, while a few grayscale maps complement the text at various and appropriate places. (A factual error in the text appears in the caption to illustration 29, where the small figurine from Baffin Island, commonly interpreted as a Thule Inuit representation of a European by virtue of the apparel as well as the cross incised on the chest, is said to be carved from walrus ivory when in fact it is carved of wood.)

Readability and comprehensiveness notwithstanding, aspects of the work are problematic and unlikely to find general acceptance among scholars working in the field. As noted above, the chapter dealing with the causes of the Viking age is far too brief for such a complex topic, amounting to a mere seventeen pages. Dispensing in summary fashion with the important factors to which scholars have traditionally looked for the beginnings of Viking activity in Europe, Ferguson proceeds far too quickly to an alternative interpretation that is shaky at best. This is what might be described as the "pagan reaction" hypothesis, originally advanced by the Norwegian archaeologist Bjørn Myhre but also developed by Ferguson himself in an article in BBC History Magazine.² This hypothesis essentially regards the Viking diaspora as a new stage in an "ongoing religious war" (p. 57) between Christians and non-Christians in northern Europe, with the Viking assaults on Christian holy sites like churches and monasteries and the Viking penchant for torture and murder of monastic inmates essentially representing a reaction against aggressive European Christian expansion in the eighth century, led by the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (d. 814)—in essence, self-defense. Numerous objections might be raised to this view. Richard Fletcher succinctly reminded us (with an abundance of good evidence to support the view) in his study of The Conversion of Europe³ that pre-Christian Scandinavian religion was neither aggressive nor intolerant (p. 374), and we have frequently been reminded that Viking attacks on ecclesiastical sites were motivated by a quest for portable wealth and slaves, not by religious ideology or anti-Christian sentiment. The "pagan reaction" hypothesis also presupposes far too much unity on the part of the inhabitants of Scandinavia to be able to mount a coherent [End Page 165] "resistance" to this aggressive Frankish expansion. As James Barrett has reminded us in an exemplary examination of the topic in his article "What Caused the Viking Age?"⁴ there is no question that the causes of the Viking age are complex and multifaceted, and there can be little doubt that a variety of factors were at work, particularly given the vast area and diverse topography of Scandinavia. As Barrett remarks, "to explore the causes of the Viking Age one must give equal emphasis to sweeping processes of the longue durée and rapid, contingent, developments."⁵ On this important topic Barrett's essay forms a necessary corrective to Ferguson's limited analysis.

In fact, Ferguson's Vikings seem to be possessed of a high degree of cultural homogeneity. This is strikingly and frequently expressed in the work through the consistent use of the term "Heathen" (with a capital H) to describe the world of the early medieval Scandinavians. As noted above, chapter 2 is titled "The Culture of Northern Heathendom," and the term recurs throughout the text, with Ferguson developing a notion of this region seemingly standing in polar opposition to Western Christendom. Such usage and the conception that lies behind it fly in the face of much that has been written about the nature of what might more conventionally be called pagan (or, better still, traditional or pre-Christian), Scandinavian culture. With particular reference to pre-Christian Scandinavian religion and belief, scholars have tended to be extremely cautious about assuming homogeneity across the Scandinavian world, in large measure for methodological reasons relating to the nature and distribution of the primary source materials and their reliability as tools for understanding Viking belief. To what extent, for example, can we extrapolate information on Scandinavian religion, belief, and practice derived principally from texts produced in Iceland to other corners of the Scandinavian world? To what extent can we assume a uniformity of religious experience from Greenland to Orkney to Sweden to Russia? Was the worship of gods like Odin and Thor universal across the Viking world? To what extent may we use the eyewitness testimony of the tenth-century Arab diplomat and writer Ibn Fadlan as a window into "Scandinavian" belief when the people he describes may have had time and opportunity to assimilate aspects of the belief and practice of the various peoples, including Slavs, with whom they came into contact in the East? Ferguson's conception of "northern Heathendom" is all the more puzzling given that the author [End Page 166] is no stranger to scholarly debates on many aspects of the Vikings, as amply demonstrated throughout the text and in the notes. Part of the problem may be a simple lack of explanation or definition for Ferguson's use of the term "Heathen" (with a capital H). We cannot deny that the Vikings were for the most part "pagans" before the Viking diaspora brought them into closer contact with western Christendom—but the use of the term "Heathen" consistently throughout seems to suggest that all Scandinavians were part of a coherent "northern Heathendom" which stood in opposition to contemporary "Christendom." The complexity of the situation is developed much more effectively in Nordic Religions in the Viking Age by Thomas A. DuBois⁶—and note the use of the plural "religions" in the title.

Ferguson's study enters a field that is well served with many excellent works, and although this book is well written, engaging, and comprehensive, it is unlikely to replace any of them. While undergraduate students and interested general readers will undoubtedly read it with profit, its utility for scholars will probably remain limited.