“This then is the speculative political history of the Viking Highlands,” says author Kelday in his Introduction.

The story of the Vikings in Scotland—and in the Celtic areas of Britain and Ireland in general—has intrigued me for a long time. If D. Rognvald Kelday’s formidable book The Viking Highlands – The Norse Age in the Highlands raises awareness of that story, it will have done us a service, in spite of some flaws.

It’s true enough, as most of us know, that the Norse dispossessed many native people, robbed churches and strongholds, and took many slaves. But it’s also true (as Kelday stresses) that the places where Celtic culture and traditions survived, after the Celtic kingdom of Alba was transformed into the Anglicized kingdom of Scotland, were those parts that remained longest under Norse rule. The clans Gunn (Gunnar), McAuliffe (Olaf), McManus (Magnus), McLeod (Ljot) and McDonald (descended from Somerled, a Celto-Norse lord with a Viking name, Somerlidi) all look back to the days of the Norse jarls who ruled under something like the Scandinavian republican system.

But it’s not only Scots who’ll find material of interest here. So closely entwined were the Scots Norse with the Irish Norse, the Hebridean and Isles Norse, and the Galway Norse, that those stories come into it too. I remember that when I was working on my novel The Year of the Warrior, I searched in vain for information on the Irish in Dublin which is spelled out clearly in this work.

The Viking Highlands is not without flaws, and serious ones, many of them common in e-publishing. Better proofreading would have been welcome. The author doesn’t seem to know the different between “compliment” and “complement,” and has never mastered where to place the apostrophe (or not) in “its” and “it’s.” He also exceeds the scholarly limit for exclamation marks in historical works (most historians stop at one or two, and then as expressions of incredulity).

Indeed, I would be interested to know the author’s credentials as a historian. Not that it would disqualify him if he lacks them—many valuable works have been written by amateurs—but Kelday is bold in his speculations—though I must note that he’s always honest and open about his guesses, and gives the other side its rebuttal time, something historians don’t always bother to do.

But I’m not familiar enough with the specialized field of the Celtic Norse to judge how well he handles his sources. I do know that in one area within my expertise, he stumbles at the very beginning by stating flatly that the Viking Age was caused by overpopulation. This is not only not proven, but known to be unlikely on the evidence of archaeology. Most historians at least offer a couple alternative causes, of which there are several.

It should also be noted that this book is very, very long. Although I found most of it pretty interesting, my enthusiasm flagged toward the end, and I felt a little as if I were talking to some bore at a party who wouldn’t shut up. Readers might want to read the book in sections, and refresh their palates with something else before going back to it.

Still, if you’ve been looking for material on this too-often-overlooked aspect of medieval history, you could do much worse than read The Viking Highlands. You’ll get value for money.