Forgotten Vikings by Alex Harvey

Forgotten Vikings: New Approaches to the Viking Age

by Alex Harvey

Amberley Publishing 2025

“When you read the word 'Viking,' what do you picture?” asks Alex Harvey at the beginning of tremendously involving new book Forgotten Vikings: New Approaches to the Viking Age. “Horned helmets? Screaming victims?” Harvey, a postgraduate archeology student at the University of York, suspects this is true, and the motivational core of his book is twofold: not only is this indeed the genuine popular conception of the so-called Viking age extending from 793, when a Viking raiding party sacked Lindisfarne and slaughtered every unarmed civilian within arm's reach, to 1066, when Harald Hardrada died in the Battle of Stamford Bridge while he was trying to conquer England, but it's also, somewhat awkwardly, an accurate conception.

In fact, this awkward reality– that Vikings were first and foremost warriors, that Viking trade and cultural exchanges, although real and long-lasting, were initiated at sword-point – has given rise to a wealth of books seeking to broaden and deepen the standard picture Harvey invokes, and as its title indicates, Forgotten Vikings spends most of its time being one of those books. Harvey repeatedly spotlights the kinder, gentler side of the Viking world like the “peaceful émigrés, profiteers and wealthy traders as discovered through the famous Coppergate excavations” (given his own area of study, it's natural that Harvey would have the spectacular Coppergate excavations on the brain). “I wrote this book,” he claims, “because it is the Viking Age book that I have always wanted to read” – always the best motivation to write any book, although his own “Further Reading” section mentions quite a few books that very much fit the same pattern.

Just as it's churlish and incurious for readers to ask the kind of “Do we need another?” question that attends the whole subject of Vikings, it's likewise rude and lazy for authors to write books that provoke that kind of question. Luckily, through his extensive research and lively prose style, Harvey avoids such a question. His wide-ranging portraits of Vikings in non-combat roles do indeed expand the standard hewing-and-hacking concept of horn-helmeted warriors, and he's also excellent at finding Vikings far, far afield of their native fjords or the English valleys they soaked in blood, always grounding these exotic Vikings in both solid research and frequent calls to his fellow historians:

Viking activity across the Iberian Peninsula has seen less modern research, despite being such a core part of the European sphere. Charters record land around Santiago in 996 and the Río Ulla as featuring old fortresses from dies Lordemanorum ('the day of the Northmen'). Irene Garcia Losquiño's work has already revealed various possible sites for viking army camps around Spain and Portugal.

The result of 350 pages of this does gradually fill in the standard picture with added shadings and colors, and this is always a good thing when it comes to such an easily-reducible subject as the Vikings. There was more to them than the wanton bloodletting and the ensuing drinking songs about wanton bloodletting, and books like Forgotten Vikings helps us to remember that.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News