Customer Reviews

Norse Warfare: The Unconventional Battle Strategies of the Ancient Vikings

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I thought I would get a book with a lot more. Instead, I get a book that basically says Vikings used longships and that made them awesome.

I expected military history on the order of Dunnigan or Massie, but instead I got in-depth analysis such as Vikings drank beer before battle to get over their fear.

I only gave it two stars because it has some nice pictures of ships and weapons, although you could easily get the same ones elsewhere.

Stay away from this book. Its lightweight and has nothing new or interesting to say.

An excellent survey of Norse tactics, written from the point of view of someone who understands martial tactics. As a historian, special operations tactical analyst, and former Navy SEAL, I found the book to be a useful secondary source in writing a history of pirate hunting. Highly recommended.

This book is extremely bad. Not only does the author not mention essential elements of Viking stratgey, such as the Hersyrs, the shield wall or the Swynfilking formation, but she says that the Vikings fought from ships in naval battles, for which there is absolutely no evidence. Worst of all, she assumes that the Jomsvikings existed, when much archaeological evidence, and most Viking historians, agree that they were mythical. Neither does she consider in any detail the Housecarls or the Byzantine Varangian Guard, both of which were important components of the Viking war machine. She also says very little about the circular fortifications of the Vikings discovered in several cities in Scandinavia, or the Vikings mastery of seigecraft. And, although she does quote primary sources, she does so without discussing the implications of them, and her selection of quotable material relates little to her topic. Altogether a purile and amateurish job of research from an author who, because she holds an MA, should know better.

Who knew that vikings dominated europe between 600 and 1100 AD ?

The Vikings for their brutality had a surprisingly evolved democratic system and women had equality.

The idea of fighting for money, not land made them an ellusive target. No one was interested [from europe] in battling them on their own turf, because there was nothing to gain, whilst the Vikings had everything to gain - riches and land.

Eventually their undoing was when they settled in the lands they conquered. Whilst mobile, they were deadly. When settled they were useless.

It seemed like parts of the book, re-hashed old stories from previous chapters.

I've read the Sun Tzu and he probably would have identified with their tactics.

This book could have been written 50 years ago. It is just paraphrasing of sagas and older history books despite including newer books in a reference list ?!. It includes some howlers for a bit of light relief but in general is a a drag to read. Spellings are wrong and statements such as 'a tall man, well skilled at arms was best suited for triumph in war'.Hmmph.'A mail shirt would take longer than a year to construct..'Hmph again. Whole chapters are given over to discussing mythical characters from medieval sagas, such as Rollo and the Jomsvikings. Nuff said. Better to buy 'Vikinger I krig' by Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike ..here...[...]

I was able to download this when it was free.

You get a number of mini-biographies of various Norse leaders.

Information on Viking culture and habits. I didn't know that women were as well treated as they were in Viking culture, but I shouldn't have been surprised.

Photos are very interesting.

As noted, you do get some repetition, but I didn't find it too annoying.

A nice book, but watch the price.

My background is in Medieval History, so the Viking period was just a little 'before my time'. I knew enough about the main points to be comfortable reading this book, and it was still unfamiliar enough for me to learn from it as well. I did feel that this wasn't absolutely top-drawer scholarship, but neither was it poor (or just plain bad) research. I think the best way to describe this is that it's written for the layman rather than for the (serious) student of history. My two main gripes are that the title is somewhat misleading - this is more an overview of Viking culture with an emphasis on the military aspect and the use of the longship; and that the examples/citations given in the descriptions are not given chronologically. Frequently the author will cite numerous examples of a certain type of behavior or action from various times during the Viking age (with dates) but not list them in chronological order. I found that somewhat jarring, though I suppose there's no right or wrong way for this kind of list. Overall, I found the book to be quite interesting, just scholarly enough for me to feel that I was learning some valid data about a time I wasn't really familiar with, and yet the writing was accessible enough to make it an easy and enjoyable read.

Note on Kindle fomatting: Very poor. Not bad enough to make it unreadable, but definitely bad enough to slow you down. The main culprit seems to be a lot of extra spaces in the middle of words. The really bad part is that a lot of the words or phrases where this occurs are in Norse, so you don't know what they SHOULD be. Sometimes there's a space between every letter of a word, other times there's just one space in the middle of a word. Definitely a proofing/editing nightmare.

As one of the other reviewers has said, the title of this book is a misnomer. It is really nothing more than a hodge-podge of Viking era political and cultural history, structured mostly in anecdotal form. There is nothing in this book that hasn't appeared in other, better, histories. That is also true of the pictures, clear though they are. I give the book two stars only because it is reasonably well-written. However, if you are interested in the Viking era and own more than three or four of the standard historical surveys of the era, you may well be able to write a better book than this one is. I am sorry I bought it.

Note: I am reviewing based on a skim rather then a close read. While that might not seem fair to readers, I think it is acceptable as long as I frankly admit it.

I got this book because free is a very good price and so I was reasonably pleased. However the title is inaccurate and being so is annoying. Vikings didn't have unconventional battle strategies; they barely had anything that could be recognized as strategy or tactics at all. Vikings had no military system above the level of the primitive war band and armies and fleets were simply large war bands. Nor did they have any systematic science of warfare and or even a particularly sophisticated native style of warfare; battles were bar fights with weapons. The closest thing to "strategies" was the off-the-cuff improvisations of a given warlord which makes an entertaining read but is not really the same thing. This description sounds like the peculiarly militaristic form of intellectual snobbery, except the point is not to disdain, but to warn would be readers not to be deceived as to what they are getting. The book makes up for this with nice if overly glorified descriptions of Scandinavian culture at the time. In fact the book may be best compared with sagas then with military study. To say the former is inferior to the later is as absurd as saying poetry is inferior to science. The point is rather that poetry is not science.

If you want a reasonably good pop-history that is also entertaining(and indeed that is all the Vikings themselves would have asked of a historian)this book is satisfactory. It gives good narrative and quotes from sagas. It is not however a "military history" or a "military study" and indeed could not be.

The prompt service I received from this vendor was remarkable. Within a week of placing my order, it arrived at my house. I'm very impressed.