The Vikings, Neil Oliver
The Vikings, Neil Oliver
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
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The Vikings
A New History

Author: Neil Oliver

Narrator: James A. Gillies

Unabridged: 11 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/28/2017

Synopsis

The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloodthirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the West and as far as Baghdad in the East. As the Vikings did not write their own history, we have to discover it for ourselves; and that discovery, as Neil Oliver reveals, tells an extraordinary story of a people who, from the brink of destruction, reached a quarter of the way around the globe and built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years.

Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.

About Neil Oliver

Neil Oliver is a Scottish archaeologist, historian, broadcaster, and writer. He is perhaps best known as the charismatic presenter of the award-winning documentary series Coast, as well as his two critically acclaimed landmark BBC history series, A History of Scotland and A History of Ancient Britain. He lives in Scotland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Nicky on May 19, 2017

It’s a rather odd experience, reading this soon after reading Francis Pryor’s work. Where Pryor minimises the impact of folk migration, Oliver highlights at least half a dozen occasions where the Norsemen did, in fact, invade or colonise. From apparently the same sources, they argue completely diffe......more

Goodreads review by Cameryn on June 05, 2015

The Vikings was a bit meandering. It included a lot of personal anecdotes about the author, and a lot of historical information about times WAY before and after Vikings that are only tangentially related to the actual history of the vikings.......more

Goodreads review by Caroline on April 04, 2014

I didn't watch the BBC documentary series this book is designed to accompany - in fact, I've never seen any of Neil Oliver's documentaries. And call me a snob, but I try on the whole to avoid history books designed to accompany television programmes - by and large they tend to skim the surface of th......more

Goodreads review by Michael on August 17, 2017

Very quick, very fun read - I basically sped through it while in the garden, enjoying this heatwave. A lot of this stuff I already knew, I daresay if you know a lot about the Vikings then very little of this will be new, but I also learned some things. And Neil Oliver is a very good and personable,......more

Goodreads review by Carolina on February 13, 2014

The Viking era is said to have ended with 1066 but it didn't, the Vikings have been portrayed, often very erroneously in popular culture and contemporary and later sources that were also the product of bias, in the latter religious bias. Notwithstanding the Vikings spread wide, as far as to the Amer......more

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