Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in...

From Finland to Newfoundland and Jelling to Jerusalem, follow in the wake of the Vikings--a transformative story of a people that begins with paganism and ends in Christendom. In AD 800, the Scandinavians were just barbarians in longships. Though they held sway in the north, their...

The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloodthirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the West and as far as Baghdad in the...

The definitive history of the Vikings--from arts and culture to politics and cosmology--by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise The Viking Age--from 750 to 1050--saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the...