Vikings: Culture of Discovery and Plunder

Vikings: Culture of Discovery and Plunder

Osprey Publishing 2026

Viking books are the daydream of AI. The subject is of course inherently interesting, what with invincible warrior-poets howling out of the norther seas and turning into werewolves and such. And the era is neatly, conveniently bracketed: Lindisfarne is raided in AD 793, and Harald Hardrada takes six arrows to the head and throat at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 – C’est cela! And there’s both an evocative mythology (gods who know they’re mortal) and that gorgeous body of Icelandic literature. And the artifacts themselves are likewise gorgeous: long, lethally-designed war boats, delicate hair-pins, dragon’s-hoards of unearthed swords and axes that look like they could kill you right now. It’s all so contained and well-documented; you imagine it would take only a handful of AI prompts to generate a book like Vikings: Culture of Discovery and Plunder, a new production from Osprey Publishing.

Long-time fans of Osprey books will know them as pretty nearly anti-AI, incredibly detailed labors of love. Readers will recognize them: a seemingly endless library of slim white paperback volumes, each one devoted to a very specific little sliver of military history: the Indian Army from 1947 to 1999, the Imperial armies of the Thirty Years’ War, a whole bunch of volumes on the various periods of the ancient Roman military machine, and so on forever, each book filled with original artwork, battlefield breakdowns, and extremely conscientious approximations of what the messes looked like, what the tents looked like, what the equipment and the uniforms looked like. These are the Bibles of historical re-enactors; they fill the personal libraries of historical fiction authors; but they can be mighty inconvenient.

So it’s a genuine cause for bookish joy that something like Vikings: Culture of Discovery and Plunder should appear. This volume is a hardcover collection of a whole bunch of those slim original issues, all dealing with Vikings: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior, Viking Warrior vs Frankish Warrior, Weapons of the Viking Warrior, The Vikings, Viking Hersir, and Viking Longship, all meshed together and hybridized into one sturdy and far more convenient volume, complete with plenty of the original fantastic illustrations by Gerry Embleton, Peter Dennis, and the great Angus McBride, whose men are always valiant and whose women are always undaunted, reaching for a weapon when things get dicey.

It's a delight to see these great reference works assembled here. And the Vikings themselves never disappoint.

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