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. 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 of the other reviews, this felt 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 of 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 modified 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. Nonetheless, this book has increased my interest in the subject, and I'm glad I read it. ( )

For a short book it was hard to read. A little bit too academic. A lot of our ideas about Vikings come from fiction and operas and films. Horned helmets is from Wagner. I still like their myths and the runes! Will read more. ( )

I love this series, the books are exactly what they purport to be. A *very* short introduction which serves as a jumping off point for further reading. This one has a friendly, witty tone to boot. ( )

Como dice el titulo corta introducción, da un pantallazo rápido, tal vez demasiado detenido en las excavaciones, y hubiera merecido un poco más de relato de la vida de la época ( )

I found this book with a bookmark in the middle, probably indicating that I'd read a substantial portion of it years ago, but I still started back at the beginning because I had little to no recollection of that. While this does broadly cover the history and settlement patterns of the Vikings, I'd hoped to get more of Viking culture and tradition out of it, so it was a bit of a mismatch between expectations and reality. Still, it was an interesting survey, and I particularly liked the 'Reinventing the Vikings' chapter that explored the 19th–21st century rebirth of interest in the Vikings and confronted some of the racial issues tied up in that. ( )