The Vikings

The Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature THE VIKINGS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London: FETTER LANE, E.C. C. F. CLAY, Manager
Edinburgh: 100, PRINCES STREET Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO. Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS New York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. All rights reserved
The Gokstad ship
BY ALLEN MAWER, M.A. Professor of English Language and Literature in Armstrong College, University of Durham: late Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Cambridge: at the University Press 1913
Cambridge: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
With the exception of the coat of arms at the foot, the design on the title page is a reproduction of one used by the earliest known Cambridge printer, John Siberch, 1521
The frontispiece is reproduced by kind permission of the photographer, Mr O. Væring, of Christiania; plates II and III are taken from Sophus Müller's Nordische Altertümskunde .


It is in the broader sense that the term is employed in the present manual. Plundering and harrying form but one aspect of Viking activity and it is mainly a matter of accident that this aspect is the one that looms largest in our minds. Our knowledge of the Viking movement was, until the last half-century, drawn almost entirely from the works of medieval Latin chroniclers, writing in monasteries and other kindred schools of learning which had only too often felt the devastating hand of Viking raiders. They naturally regarded them as little better than pirates and they never tired of expatiating upon their cruelty and their violence. It is only during the last fifty years or so that we have been able to revise our ideas of Viking civilisation and to form a juster conception of the part which it played in the history of Europe.