History of the Vikings Through Nine Real Lives

You love the Norse world, but most Viking books give you raids, axes and kings. You want to know how these people actually lived, what they ate, how they built their ships and what they believed when the feast fires burned low.

This history of the Vikings follows nine real or carefully reconstructed lives, one per chapter. You sit beside a Norwegian farmer at the start of the planting season, watch a shipwright split oak for a new hull, ride the rivers with a silver trader bound for Constantinople, and stand with a woman who holds the keys to her farmstead. You also meet an enslaved captive and a settler facing the first Greenland winter. Every scene rests on archaeology and the sagas, and the narration tells you plainly where the evidence ends and educated guessing begins.

Over six to eight tightly edited hours, the Viking Age becomes a world of law, trade, family and faith that you can picture clearly. Press play and step into the longhouse.