Viking Weapons & Warfare
The history of the Viking Age is one of the best-represented aspects of early medieval history. The Vikings’ raids and attacks throughout Europe, their discovery of new lands in the North Atlantic, and, more recently, their more benign influence as traders and settlers, have all received a great deal of both scholarly and popular attention. Throughout this wealth of scholarship, however, the military history of the Viking Age has often been neglected. Early scholars in the field were content to describe the lurid details of the Vikings’ raids as reported by their victims; subsequent scholarship has attempted to provide a more balanced view, but in doing so, it has often glossed over the hard facts of many of the Vikings’ interactions with their European neighbours. Given this essential aspect of the history of the Vikings, a book addressing the weaponry and tactics of the Viking Age would be a welcome addition to the scholarship in the field. It is unfortunate, then, that Viking Weapons & Warfaredoes not satisfy this need.
The reasons for this failure are not hard to identify: at its heart, Viking Weapons & Warfare may be taken as a guide for members of re-enactment and living history groups. The author, J. Kim Siddorn, is the founder and national organizer of the English re-creation society, Regia Anglorum, and he has more than two decades’ practical experience in the field. This wealth of personal knowledge is evident throughout the book, and although Siddorn states in his Preface that his goal is to pass on his first-hand experience with the subject matter “for the re-enactor, the academic and the general reader in an accessible way” (10), he may be judged to have come close to the mark with the first of these groups only.
Following an introductory chapter, Siddorn provides a brief discussion of the principal resource used in Viking weaponry, iron. He follows this up with chapters dealing with specific aspects of Viking military hardware: spears, shields, armor, swords, scabbards, and helmets. (A significant omission of the first edition of this book is a chapter on axes: this material is addressed in the revised edition.) The book concludes with chapters discussing money, ships, and the sea. Although the division of the subject matter into these chapters appears at first glance to be reasonable, Siddorn does not follow the divisions, and information regarding particular topics often appears in more than one chapter. This arbitrary placement of information is most evident regarding the division of the nautical material into two chapters: information regarding construction techniques, design particulars of the various vessels used by the Vikings, the history of their overseas explorations, and the performance of modern replica vessels appear in both, with little method evident in the placement. With regard to the history of warfare, two particularly significant aspects of Viking maritime history are given only cursory attention: the ability of the Vikings to travel over the open ocean, and the impact that technological developments in shipbuilding had on the history of the Viking Age as a whole.
The lack of focus evident in this work is compounded by a host of other problems. Typographic errors are frequent, and range from spelling and punctuation errors to the misnumbering of illustrations and figures. A glossary lists only nautical terms, and technical terms found elsewhere in the book are often unexplained. A more serious difficulty is the almost complete lack of any useful references to primary or secondary sources. Primary sources are mentioned by title only, with no way to identify where in the text the information cited comes from (54), and for secondary sources, authors’ names are provided infrequently, and are often unaccompanied by titles or page references (42, 86, 90). Archaeological sources, when they are identified, are generally given catalogue numbers only (41). In addition, many of the sources mentioned in the text do not appear in the bibliography.
These are serious shortcomings. For academics, the apparent lack of scholarly research supporting the statements made in this book, and the over-reliance on the personal experiences of the author, render it effectively useless as a work of historical research. This is a shame, as a considerable amount of interesting information is presented. For the general reader, the lack of focus and organization and the emphasis on technical details make it difficult to gain a clear understanding of the subject matter. And while re-enactors would certainly find the many illustrations and the depictions of construction techniques and battle formations useful, even this group would have to have a considerable base of knowledge to fully appreciate the technical material presented here. In the end, while Siddorn’s accounts of his experiences as a modern-day Viking warrior are certainly interesting, Viking Weapons & Warfare has value principally as a guide to and history of the modern re-enactment of the period, not as a military history of the Viking Age itself.