I suppose it’s inevitable that a series like the Very Short Introductions should be rather hit-or-miss. Coming from Cunliffe’s introduction to the Celts, which I found to be very well-written, this volume on the Vikings was more difficult to get through.1 No doubt Richards possess a great amount of knowledge about the subject, but he’s perhaps not the right person to distill it into a short 140 page volume for beginners.
Agreeing with some other folks, it read much more like a survey of archaeological finds relating to the Vikings—Richards goes on for pages about different excavations and the objects found within them. Yet in most cases one doesn’t really come to understand which of those objects are significant and indicate a Scandinavian presence in that area, and what kind of continuity exists between Scandinavian expansion across different areas. There’s a noticeable lack of the kind of overarching discussion I enjoyed in The Celts: Richards occasionally makes the scant effort to summarize the finds, but these bits come off as half-effort transitions to the next chapters more than anything else. The result is that one doesn’t get much of a sense of who the Vikings were or in what their daily lives consisted, only with what they might have been buried. Nor, though he offhandedly mentions them a few times, does one come to understand how reality relates to the Scandinavian sagas.
The final two chapters were the strongest, I felt, in that I received something of an overall picture of the Greenland and North American colonies, and the discussion on how Viking identity has been altered and used in more recent times is exceptionally interesting.
As usual, the list of further readings is well appreciated—hopefully those may lead to some more focused introductions.