Foreword

Until recently the Vikings were consigned by most writers to a brutal and stormy period of history known as the Dark Ages, in which nothing of benefit to the civilized world was supposed to have happened. Against this black landscape, the Viking warriors were thought to have sprung up suddenly to commit their violent deeds, and then equal suddenness and with no significant effect, to disappeared.
Yet it was the Vikings who discovered America, dominated much of Western Europe for three centuries (800-1100), and who established the first royal house of Russia. The Viking King Canute was at one point king of England and Norway as well as of his native Denmark. Viking art (many examples of which are included in this book) and Viking literature are among the brightest and most original of Europe’s cultural treasures. Furthermore, the Viking spirit — a willingness to fight lustily without fear of death — is the ideal of all embattled people.
Certainly in their own time the Vikings were an irresistible and undeniable force for change. Chieftains from the Northland took advantage of the chaos in Europe to conquer fertile territories for themselves and their sons, thus creating a common Viking lineage for much of Europe’s nobility. Viking traders forced open blocked trade routes for their cargoes of slaves and plunder. Viking explorers added Iceland and Greenland, and hints of lands even farther west, to world maps.
But the greatest effect of what is now called the Viking Era was on the Vikings themselves. When the era began, they were a primitive people who possessed, chiefly, pagan vitality, remarkable native ships, and hunger for riches. At the end of it they had become devout Christians, law-abiding Europeans, and early capitalists. The Swedish King Eric IX (1150-60), who centralized his government’s administration and worked closely with the princes of the Church, was a whole civilization removed from Ivar the Boneless, whose bowmen executed King Edmund of East Anglia in 867.
Like one of their own tapestries, the Vikings’ history is fiercely colorful, and rich with meaning.

THE EDITORS