Tore Skeie

"The events described in this book played out in an age when the line between reliable historical information on the one hand, and the myths, legends and narratives of later ages on the other, is often blurred, and sometimes impossible to draw clearly for historians. My aim has been to write a coherent, documentable account based on primary sources and on insight from 150 years of historical, archaeological and philological research, without tiring my readers with long clarifications, discussions and reservations. This is a difficult balance to achieve, SINCE ALL OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THIS DISTANT AGE IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNCERTAIN." [emphasis added]

Personally, I would have liked to have had some of those "long clarifications, discussions and reservations".

There's a lot of fascinating material in this text, and it covers a period that I am tremendously ignorant of. The core of the book is an extended comparison and contrast of two great Viking warrior kings, Cnut of Denmark and St. Olav of Norway. I was interested and intrigued to find out that St. Olav was neither saintly not particularly successful at establishing a last Norwegian "regime" - but he benefitted posthumously from poets, historians, and poet-historians who seem to have whitewashed his reputation for posterity and the Christian churches of Scandinavia.

The printed text does include some sketchy source notes - although it is not really possible to connect the material in the text with the original texts which provide historian Skeie with his material.

The edition I read didn't include an index, which would have been very helpful. I also would have liked a geneological family tree.… (lisätietoja)

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded up

The Publisher Says: Thrilling history provides a new perspective on the Viking-Anglo Saxon conflicts and brings the bloody period vividly to life, perfect for fans of Dan Jones

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for.

Tore Skeie ("Norway's Most Important Young Historian") takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.

Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder.

This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This Norwegian historian's viewpoint on the rise and spread of the late-Viking-era North Sea empire. The seeds of this immense stretch of territory coming under one ruler were set in the attacks of Harald Gormsson, King of Denmark, (whom we call "Bluetooth" and yes, he's the source of the name of the wireless connectivity protocol on your phone) on the rich and peaceful (therefore ripe for robbery) Anglo-Saxon Kingdom(s). His wars against the neighboring Saxon Kingdom along the Baltic Sea coast were costly, and even resulted in his loss of control over Norway; much money for rearming and hiring mercenaries was needed and, well, Anglaland ho! Alas, his death came before he could finish a war of conquest in what is today a coastal region of Poland.

Aethelred the Redeless, who fought Harald and Sweyn his whole life, on his coinage
We don't see all that much of Harald in English-language histories, but he was more than the raiding monarch seeking silver to pay for his wars. He was also the one who introduced a centralized coinage for Denmark, guaranteeing its value would always be the same wherever one was paid in it. And one means of assuring that? Go get silver from someone else. The English have lots! And so it came to pass that the immensity of the North Sea became the middle ground between two halves of one empire...in fact, for a brief time, and in imagination for a longer one.

Harald's son Sweyn (opponent of "Saint" Olaf Haraldsson for the title of King of Norway, who is pictured above), after successfully rebelling against him, continued his father's efforts to unite the coasts of the North Sea under his family. A period of uncertainty in his rule before his first reported raid on the murderers of his kinsfolk in their midst (the appalling St Brice's Day massacre!) beginning a long campaign of looting and terror against the English. This campaign turned into occupation; the occupation turned into becoming the King of the English in 1013. Leaving England in the hands of his second son, he hurried off to fight another war...and died before 1015.

He was thus not as successful as was his own son, King Canute as he is known in English and Cnut the Great at home (his coin portrait is above). He ruled all three kingdoms, Norway from 1028, Denmark from 1018, and England from 1015, for twenty years and made a decent fist of it. What happened, as happened to most all territorially great empires, was just the reality of physics. In an era without motorized transport, the chances of maintaining control over a huge swath of territory are not great. Cnut did not overcome the odds, dying in 1035 with England still barely under his control. His descendants continued to cherish hopes of reacquiring England until Edward the Confessor died in 1066, when Harald Hardrada was killed with his army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge defending his, um, very (very) extended family's claim on the wealthy English realm. This was the last gasp of the North Sea Empire as envisioned by Harald Gormsson a century before.

The territorial drive of the father, son, and grandsons wasn't out of character; wasn't unusually violently for the era; and is ripe for reconsideration by English-language readers to account for our lamentable tendency to simply unsee the viewpoints of others on our shared histories. This volume is the first translated, for the most part skilfully, into English. I'd say the one concerning lacuna in this rendering into English of a popular history written in Norwegian is the use of colloquially still prevalent "Anglo-Saxon" in reference to the people, not the culture, of England from the 6th through 11th centuries. It's established through the use of genomics that the people of England are still largely Britons. It's a minor cavil in a work of popular history.

More frustrating to me is the lack of maps in the DRC. There are (see above) very nice black-and-white illustrations at the chapter opens but in my DRC, there weren't maps and, in any history text that discusses battles, that is a serious omission. I am aware that there are indeed maps in your final copies, I hasten to say, but I haven't seen them and can't comment on their effectiveness at conveying information they're meant to. I left off only a half-star in my rating, however, because that lack was both unique to the DRC and somewhat compensated for by the sheer pleasure of reading the skillfully translated text. Alison McCullough deserves much praise. While there is a sense of the original text's depth of scholarship, the primary affect of this book is one of absorbing, intelligent conversation overheard by the reader...not all the references or historical figures will stay in one's mind, available for instant recall, but even at lazier moments when I didn't feel like chasing a reference or an actor in the endnotes, or the "Overview of Persons" as this text charmingly calls the Dramatis Personae, I was carried along by what felt to me like very readable, accessible prose. Enough explanation was offered to my non-specialist brain to enable me to move forward with a real sense of the ethos in which events transpired.

Overall, the point of a book such as this...a lovely illustrated trade-paper edition of popular history about the pre-Norman Conquest world of England...is to please and intrigue the history buff on your gifting list. (Or you, of course.) I feel confident that it will serve that purpose.

Pushkin Press continues its streak of fascinating, unusual in the US, points of view presented in beautiful and pleasurable format.… (lisätietoja)

In a time when little actual history was written down, the exploits of the Norse have been handed down through skaldic poems and sagas. Skeie blends known facts with details from the poems and produces a wonderful tale of the battles across Scandinavia, Europe and England for power and wealth. The narrative is eminently readable and the betrayals and backstabbing are beyond belief but there is much about everyday life and politics in Anglo-Saxon lands as well as the Norse homelands. Managing to be both scholarly and populist, this is a great book.… (lisätietoja)