The Viking Age: New Perspectives on History and Culture

by Jennifer Paxton

The Vikings evoke striking images of horned helmets, battle axes, and merciless coastal raids. Remembered for their shocking brutality and impressive naval prowess, these marauding pirates from the North have inspired poetry, fantasy novels, plays, symphonies, and even comic book heroes over the last 12 centuries. But do any of these enduring tropes reflect reality? Who were the Vikings really? What do we know about the period that bears their name?

Explore these questions and more in The Viking Age: New Perspectives on History and Culture, a 12-lecture course that corrects the record on a transformative period in world history. Professor and prolific Viking Age scholar Jennifer Paxton will be your expert guide. Together with Dr. Paxton, you will use archeological, textual, and literature evidence to unpack the scope and scale of Viking exploits in Europe. You’ll examine and investigate what it meant to be a Viking by analyzing burial sites, teeth, bones, and historical annals. You’ll get to know the Viking women who broke out of their ascribed gender roles and affected change in politics, through trade, and on the battlefield. You’ll investigate whether Vikings deserve their bloodthirsty reputation by exploring the ideas that underpinned war and violence in Scandinavia and across Europe at large. And you’ll look at how the Norse religion and Christianity alike informed politics, society, and everyday life across the Viking world.

Along the way, you’ll also:

Evaluate the Vikings impressive global reach by zooming away from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway and towards the Viking outposts near and far;

Follow raiders, traders, and settlers across sea and river routes;

Study early raids in Estonia, trade settlements in Kyivan Rus, and the Varangian Guard in Constantinople;

Track beaded, silver, and silk goods as they moved from the Islamic Caliphate and East Asia and into Viking households;

Determine how Viking sailors navigated their way across choppy Atlantic Ocean waters to set up settlements—both permanent and temporary—in North America; and

Reevaluate Viking exploits in England, Ireland, and France using archeological techniques like stable isotope and ancient DNA analysis.

And in doing all of this, you’ll challenge prevailing views of the Vikings and their world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Audiobook

Audible Audio

Published November 8, 2024

About the author

Dr. Jennifer Paxton is Professorial Lecturer in History at Georgetown University, where she has taught for more than a decade, and Visiting Assistant Professor of History at The Catholic University of America. The holder of a doctorate in history from Harvard University, where she has also taught and earned a Certificate of Distinction, Professor Paxton is both a widely published award-winning writer and a highly regarded scholar, earning both a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellowship. She lectures regularly on medieval history at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and has also been invited to speak on British history at the Smithsonian Institution and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. Professor Paxton’s research focuses on England from the reign of King Alfred to the late 12th century, particularly the intersection between the authority of church and state and the representation of the past in historical texts, especially those produced by religious communities. She is currently completing a book, Chronicle and Community in Twelfth Century England, that will be published by Oxford University Press. It examines how monastic historians shaped their narratives to project present polemical concerns onto the past.

Jennifer is the daughter of well-known folk singer Tom Paxton.

Reviews

[Dennis Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Viking Age: New Perspectives on History and Culture by Jennifer Paxton is a great course, but in a bittersweet way. For the longest time, the Great Courses has increasingly shifted away from narrative, chronological, or political history toward a mixture of cultural history and historical sociology. While the lectures may keep a timeline in order, the course does not. Paxton's course on new perspectives of the Viking Age is a great one, but I can't help but take notice of its much shorter length and that its subject matter seems mostly indifferent to chronology. There's a beginning and an end, all that is in-between is a sort of meandering soup organized by geographic or social theme. Major characters and events are referenced as if the listener is already aware of their significance, and only a handful of focus is given to any particular causal linkages in terms of events. The Vikings in England is the area where Paxton puts the greatest amount of emphasis on, which, again, shows just how great this course would have been if it could have blended an overarching narrative with his social historical elements. Instead, as good as this one was, you should probably start with Kenneth Harl's History of the Vikings and then return to Paxton's course later on.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Professor Paxton‘s courses, and this one was decent. A little bit too short and brief to adequately cover the subject matter, but still interesting.

[Ryan Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of the Viking Age, but too short! Fortunately, there is another Great Courses series on the Vikings by Kenneth Harl--it is good too.

The lecturer does a good job bringing in archaeology to supplement the sagas and other historical texts.

[Jessica Murillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

New perspective? YAWN...