The Hammer and the Cross

Oct 23, 2024 11:26 PM

Author:Robert Ferguson

For those living outside Scandinavia, the Viking Age effectively began in 793 with an attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne, a characteristically violent harbinger of what was in store for Britain and much of Europe from the Vikings for the next 300 years, until the final destruction of the heathen temple to the Norse gods at Uppsala around 1090.

Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what he calls 'the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in Viking Age history'. His long familiarity with the literary culture of Scandinavia - the eddas, the poetry of the skalds and the sagas - is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries and the evidence of picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered all over northern Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait of the Viking Age in any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges from Scandinavia itself to Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to Iceland, Greenland and the north American settlements in the west. Beyond its geographical boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a misty region inhabited by Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the Plagiarist, in which literature, history and myth dissolve into one another.

Reviews

Ferguson adds another layer to our perception of our origins in this compelling and often poignant account of a pagan warrior society faced with Christianity on the march

—— Independent

[A] confident and fascinating history of Britain... Masterful... It is a volume that speaks well to our own sense of Britain today as a globalised, trading island retreating back to the edges of power... damned good

—— Tristram Hunt , Observer

This single-volume history manages to combine a balanced new survey of the past with a rousing declaration of the historian's moral obligations... This is a very good book to have on the shelf

—— Christian Tyler , Financial Times

I thoroughly recommend the book, written by a collection of top-hole experts in their field... Excellent

—— A. N. Wilson

[A World By Itself] tells how a small group of islands on the rain-swept edge of the Roman Empire came to shape the civilised world, effectively inventing parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, free trade and globalisation, as well as bequeathing to posterity the greatest body of literature on earth

—— Dominic Sandbrook , Daily Telegraph

A massive work of scholarship

—— Guardian

Compelling

—— Scotsman

Impressive

—— History Today

A Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura

—— John de Falbe , Daily Telegraph

She has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence

—— Economist

The story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples

—— John Mullan , Times Literary Supplement

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