Vikings & Anglo-Saxons!
We are a hardy race, being independent booksellers, so of course we are interested in those Norse entrepreneurs who made Europe a lively place in the so-called Dark Ages.
One of the standard-setting writers about medieval Scandinavia was Nobel Prize-winning Sigrid Undset. I have assembled all her works that we carry on this page, even though they technically do not involve Viking culture and history (a few are even contemporary to Undset’s own time). Other than that, she needs no defense as one of the greatest of historical novelists.
Many books have emerged on the conflicts, the tensions, and the meldings between the Vikings and the inhabitants of what would become the British isles, so I have expanded the topic to include the Picts, the Druids, and Anglo-Saxons.
The Birth of the Anglo-Saxons: Three Kings and a History of Britain at the Dawn of the Viking Age
The Birth of the Anglo-Saxons: Three Kings and a History of Britain at the Dawn of the Viking Age
A brilliant, profound, and authoritative history of the golden age of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Britain.
For too long, the eighth century has been a neglected era in British history: a shadow land between the death of Saint Bede and the triumphs of King Ælfred and the eventual unification of England.
But before the victories of King Ælfred against the Viking invaders, the kingdom of Mercia—spread across a broad swathe of central England—was the reigning power that exercised central political authority for the first time since the Roman Empire. This authority was used to construct trading networks and markets; to develop strong economic, cultural, and political links with the Continent; and to lay the foundations for a system of defense that would be invigorated and reinvented by Ælfred at the end of the ninth century.
Two kings, Æthelbald (716–757) and Offa (757–796), dominated the political landscape of the rising power of Mercia. During their reigns, monasteries became powerhouses of royal patronage, economic enterprise, and trade. Offa constructed his grandiose dyke along the borders of the warlike Welsh Kingdoms and, more subtly, spread his message of political superiority through coinage bearing his image. But Æthelbald and Offa between them built something with an even more substantial legacy—a geography of medieval England. And these two kings engineered a set of tensions between kingship, landholding, and the church that were to play out dramatically at the dawn of the Viking Age.
In this illuminating history of Early Medieval Britain, Max Adams reconnects the worlds of the three kings—Æthelbald, Offa, and Ælfred—in an absorbing study of the landscape, society, and politics of a fascinating century of change.