I wouldn’t ordinarily review a book that can’t be purchased in this country (though you can get it through this web site, if you’re willing to pay the freight and can pick your way through the Norwegian), but I think this book is genuinely important in its field—and not merely because it has a picture of one of my novels on page 296.

Viking Norway, by Torgrim Titlestad (Professor of History at the University of Stavanger) is important because, to the best of my knowledge, it’s the first English-language book aimed at presenting to a popular audience some “new” theories about Norway and the Viking Age that are being debated in Scandinavia today.

The book attempts to refute two views that have been standard up till now, and offers a new theory about Viking Age Norwegian politics.

The first contested view is the long-accepted story of Norway’s origins as a nation, as learned until recently by every school child in the country.

This standard story (derived largely from Snorri Sturlusson’s [wonderful]) 13th Century book, Heimskringla) tells how Harald Finehair, a petty king from Vestfold in the east of Norway, set out to conquer the other petty kingdoms along the “North Way” sea route.

In fact, as historians have been noting for some time now, the earliest testimony we have to Harald’s career, the poems of his skalds, has nothing to say about Vestfold or eastern Norway at all. In fact, it’s now believed that eastern Norway was under the rule of Denmark at that time.

It now appears that Harald (though he may have had Vestfold roots) was a king in Vestland, the part of the country an American looking at a map would call the southwest.

That would make Vestland the original power center of Norway, and that is central to Titlestad’s thesis.

The second contested view concerns the reasons for the sudden explosion of Viking raids, “out of the blue,” as it seemed, at the end of the 8th Century.

Most books you’ll read on the subject will mention first of all the theory that there was a population explosion in Scandinavia, and that young men without hope of inheritance were forced to look for plunder overseas.

Titlestad points out that not only is there no archaeological evidence for this theory, in fact the data seems to contradict it. He explains its popularity by the fact that it’s essentially a Marxist theory, one that appeals to leftist historians.

He looks further back, to a theory once propounded by both David Hume and Edward Gibbon, that the original Viking raids were in fact a calculated “preemptive strike,” provoked by the aggression of the Emperor Charlemagne.

In 782 Charlemagne won a decisive victory over the heathen German Saxons at the Battle of Verden. Afterwards, according to most accounts (there are some historians who deny it happened), he had thousands of prisoners (4,500 according to some accounts) marched to the river, baptized by force, and beheaded.

It was only eleven years later that Vikings sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, marking the “official” beginning of the Viking Age (though it’s likely there were earlier raids).

According to this theory, the Scandinavians, under the leadership of Denmark (which shared a border with Charlemagne’s empire and was feeling pressure from him) attacked Christian monasteries precisely for the purpose of sending a message—that if Charlemagne wanted a holy war, they knew how to play that game too.

(I’ve known about this theory for a number of years, but have always rejected it, assuming it was born of that reflexive hostility to Christianity that’s so common in today’s academia. I didn’t know that it had 18th Century roots, and that impressed me.

On the other hand, it seems to me it demands that I believe that Scandinavians of that age were organized and cohesive enough, across tribal borders, to cooperate on such a large-scale project. It also depends on the existence of a Franco-English alliance at the time, which has not been proved.

Nevertheless, I’m impressed with the argument as presented here, and will have to give it more respect in the future.)

What this works out to in the general scheme of the book is a view of the Viking Age not as a three-century frat party, but as a period of resistance, by a basically freedom-loving, decentralized culture and political system, to the aggression of a monarchical, top-down ideology that had no love for freedom.

This leads to the new theory about the origins of the Norwegian nation (which is to say, Norway in the Viking Age). Titlestad traces (sometimes, it must be admitted, through generous speculation in the absence of hard evidence) the slow retreat of the old, democratic tradition before the ever-increasing pressure of kings determined to re-make the country according to the European model.

Titlestad’s hero in this story, the defender of traditional rights, the man who stood in the path of history, crying “Stop!” to borrow a conceit from William F. Buckley, was Erling Skjalgsson of Sola.

Who’s the hero of my Viking novels.

And this is precisely how I’ve seen Erling too, since long before I ever read Titlestad.

So I like this book, and want it to succeed.

Another nice thing, in my opinion, is that (unlike most big Viking books published nowadays, and there are a lot of them), the publishers have chosen to illustrate this book with dramatic paintings and photographs, both old and modern. I like pictures of museum exhibits, but I’ve seen them all before, many times).

The book has its flaws. The translation from Norwegian wobbles at points, and the punctuation cries out for a good proofreader. (Though bad proofreading isn’t exactly unusual nowadays.)

The author’s son, who sent me the book, says that those are issues they’d like to address, when and if they can find an American co-publisher who can produce a less expensive edition domestically.

If you work for a publisher who might be interested in this project, or know someone who does, I urge you to contact Saga Bok through the website already linked, or to write to me, and I’ll put you in touch with them.

Update:

I have the following message from the author’s son, who’s living in Chicago and acting as a representative:

Please, if possible, have people contact me directly at sagabok@gmail.com. I will try to set up a website this week at www.sagapublishers.com (I will let you know when the site is up) so that people can order the book directly through me.

That ought to reduce postage costs in any case.