As we head toward The Swedish History Museum’s massive door-buster exhibition on the Vikings (set to open early 2021, when last heard of), there are reviews of two recent books on the topic. The Silver Key reviews Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, in which Shippey rebuts the ‘shy, sensitive antiques dealers’ image of the Vikings that is currently purveyed by academics…

I didn’t realize the extent to which this re-evaluation of the Viking character was working overtime in the halls of academia. Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (2018, Reaktion Books) is Shippey’s semi-bombastic rebuttal to the revisionists and whitewashers. It’s not that Vikings weren’t also great traders, or slowly shifted from raiders and slave-takers to land-owners and eventually settlers, but Saga literature and even the archaeological record paints a picture of savagery and warrior ethos that can’t be so easily explained away.

The Russell Kirk Center reviews How the Vikings Saw Themselves, which takes more of a hard archaeological and ‘material culture’ view, also informed by the latest research on the religious practices…

“Price, a professor of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden, has added a simultaneously authoritative and accessible account to the rapidly growing and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Vikings. … Through the Vikings’ material culture, he discovers a civilisation thoroughly invested in the stabilising force of monarchical rule. Despite the Vikings’ pursuit of power abroad, they had a firm sense of tradition and stability within their own realms. … It builds on his innovative work in The Viking Way (2002), which delves in great scholarly detail into the spiritual lives of the Old Norse speaking peoples.”