Living History

A thousand year ago Viking longships carried traders, settlers and raiders west to America, south to Italy and east to Russia. Scandinavia's power would never be greater.

In time, the expeditions dwindled and the Vikings joined Christian Europe, but their ways live on in parts of the former Viking dominion. Vikings tend to get a bad press with Christian monks depicting Vikings in apocalyptic terms.

Yet the past 30 years has showed a new side to the Vikings. Archaeologists have exposed intimate details of the Vikings' daily lives, down to the oatmeal gruel they ate.

Many scholars now clam that the Vikings actually enriched, rather than eroded European civilization. In a casually brutal age Vikings were simply better brutes. They raided monasteries because that was where the money was.

"In a casually brutal age Vikings were simply better brutes"

But the Vikings were also astute merchants and politicians who expanded European horizons. They were craftsmen, shoemakers, blacksmiths, poets and aesthetes who designed ships of noble proportions.