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A history of the Vikings from Iron Age Scandinavia to the modern myths: Lindisfarne and the sieges of Paris, the slave road, the Great Army and Alfred, Normandy and Iceland, the Rus and the Varangian Guard, Greenland and Vinland, Harald Bluetooth, Cnut and Hardrada, and the sagas that told their story two centuries later. Every quotation comes from a public-domain source, and every era's sources are named.
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Chapter 1
All 30 chapters as high-quality MP3s to download, plus the PDF edition with the full text, a timeline of every era, and every source.
Get the downloadQuotations come from public-domain translations: Caesar (McDevitte and Bohn, 1869), Gregory of Tours (Brehaut, 1916), Einhard (Turner, 1880), the Song of Roland (Scott Moncrieff, 1919), Joinville (Wedgwood, 1906), Froissart (Berners), the trial of Joan of Arc (Murray, 1902), Commynes (Scoble, 1855), Montaigne (Cotton), Saint-Simon (Bayle St. John, 1857), Rousseau (Cole, 1913) and Hugo (Hapgood, 1887). Every page the research opened is listed under its era.
Narrated by an AI voice. Written and fact-checked with the help of AI tools, from published scholarship, museum records and the ancient texts themselves; where scholars disagree, the book says so. Dates before the colonies are approximate. Events of 2025 and 2026 are told from official records and news reports available when the book was finished, in November 2026.
Want to see it? The Viking history timeline has the people and events in this book, with sources.