Customer Reviews

The Origins of Beowulf: and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia

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Anyone interested in the history of Vikings and Norsemen should read this book.It kept me reading long into the night.The action sequences were well written and it goes without saying that it should be read before veiwing the movie.If you enjoyed 'Eaters of the Dead' by Michael Crichton you will enjoy this.

I wish I had read this in high school or college. Sam Newton may or may not be right, we will never know, but he is very credible when he suggests that Beowulf accurately describes the comings and goings of one group of late Migration Age or early Vendel Age Geats through and across the Danish islands of Fyn and Zealand. Newton's take on Beowulf should interest anyone who is also interested in what a contemporary account of one event in the Migration Age might have looked like.

One has no trouble imagining that the description of Beowulf and his Geats in Beowulf is pretty much what had been going for the better part of the millennium before about 500 CE. In Beowulf they returned to Götland, but the conclusion is inescapable that at other times similar groups likely left southern Sweden bound for Zealand and then went east and became Goths, or any one of the other east Germanic tribes; or went west and became Jutes,Frisians and Danes; or went south and became Saxons, Franks or any one of the other west Germanic tribes. It also lends support to impression that in the late Iron Age, the terms "Denmark" and "Danes" likely described all of the land and all of the people in southern Sweden, Norway, Jutland and the islands of Fyn and Zealand (Sjelland). If you read this, keep in mind that distance across the Oresund between southwest Sweden and Zealand in Denmark is less than two miles at Heslinger (Elsinore)-Helsingborg and about 5 miles between Malmo and Copenhagen. It has been demonstrated that the locals had been able to build paddle powered boats capable of making this journey, and big enough to carry a war-party of at least 20, since at least the middle of the Iron Age.

The Sutton Hoo burial does suggest that the same kind of people were living in East Anglia, Denmark, southern Norway and Sweden, south of Norrköping, in the Vendel era.