The Vikings

Thoroughly updated and with a new foreword 

"The Viking Age is shot through with the spirit of adventure. For 300 years, from just before AD800 until well into the eleventh century, the Vikings affected almost every region accessible to their ships, and left traces that are still part of life today."

Far from being just "wild, barbaric, axe-wielding pirates," the Vikings created complex social institutions, oversaw the coming of Christianity to Scandinavia, and made a major impact on European history through trade, travel, and far-flung consolidation. This encyclopedic study brings together the latest research on Viking art, burial customs, class divisions, jewelry, kingship, poetry, and family life. The result is a rich and compelling picture of an extraordinary civilization.

Else Roesdahl is Professor Emerita in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and an honorary doctor of Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of York. She was special Professor in Viking Studues at the University of Nottingham from 1989 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2003. She has traveled and lectured across most of the Vikings' world and has taken part in many excavations in Denmark and elsewhere. She is a Knight 1st Class of the Order of the Dannebrog.

Roesdahl was a consultant for the 1981–1982 joint British-Danish exhbition "The Vikings in England" and co-editor of the catalogue, and she has also written The Viking Age of Denmark, a full accout of the Vikings in her own country. She was the Academic Coordinator of the XXIInd Council of Europe exhibition "From Viking to Crusader: Scandanavia and Europe, 800–1200," shown in Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen, for which she also edited the catalog. In 1988 she was awarded the Soren Gyldendal Prize for the Danish edition of The Vikings.

She was married to an economist, has a son, and likes to sit in the garden with family and friends.