Philip Parker
Norse Code
Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas
By Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough
Oxford University Press 317pp £25 order from our bookshop
The Vikings entered history with a bang. The year 793, marked by their unheralded attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne, where they descended like ‘stinging hornets’ and ‘fearful wolves’ to enslave or slaughter the defenceless monks, has become a somewhat predictable prelude to most histories of these Scandinavian raiders. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough’s new entry into the genre is no exception, but Beyond the Northlands soon diverges from its more run-of-the-mill companions. For this is history as the Vikings might have told it, not from the dusty annals of their victims, but through the medium of the sagas, those collections of boastful tales forged in the harshness of northern winters, in which heroic misdeeds and judicious exaggeration were often privileged over narrative rigour or the small matter of facts.
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