Viking Britain: A History

A new narrative history of the Viking Age
Interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.

To many, the word ‘Viking’ conjures red scenes of rape and pillage, of marauders from beyond the sea rampaging around the British coastline in the last gloomy centuries before the Norman Conquest. It is true that Britain in the Viking Age was a turbulent, violent place. The kings and warlords who have left their mark on the period bore names that fire the blood and stir the imagination:

• Svein Forkbeard
• Edmund Ironside
• Ivar the Boneless
• Alfred the Great
• Erik Bloodaxe
• Edgar the Pacifier

Evidence of their brutality, dominance, avarice, and pride is still unearthed from British soil with stunning regularity.

But this is not the whole story.

In Viking Britain, Thomas Williams draws on his experience as project curator of the British Museum exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend to show how the people we call Vikings came not just to raid and plunder, but to settle, colonize, and rule. Their impact on these islands was profound and enduring, shaping British social, cultural, and political development for hundreds of years.

In language, literature, place-names, and folklore, the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt. Their memory—filtered and refashioned through the writings of figures like J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris, and G.K. Chesterton—has transformed the western imagination.

This remarkable book makes use of:

• New academic research
• First-hand experience
• Relics and landscapes fashioned and walked by the Vikings and their contemporaries, including runestones, ship burials, settlements, battlefields, poems, and chronicles

The result is a vital evocation of a forgotten world, its echoes in later history, and its implications for the present.