Book description
For those living outside Scandinavia, the Viking Age effectively began
in 793 with an attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne. The attack on
Lindisfarne was a characteristically violent harbinger of what was in
store for Britain and much of Europe from the Vikings for the next 300
years, until the final destruction of the heathen temple to the Norse
gods at Uppsala around 1090. Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what
he calls ?the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in
Viking Age history?. His long familiarity with the literary culture of
Scandinavia ? the eddas, the poetry of the skalds and the sagas ? is
combined with the latest archaeological discoveries and the evidence of
picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered all over northern
Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait of the Viking Age in
any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges from Scandinavia itself to
Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to Iceland, Greenland and the
north American settlements in the west. Beyond its geographical
boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a misty region inhabited by
Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches,
Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the Plagiarist, in which literature,
history and myth dissolve into one another. Robert Ferguson is one of
the world's leading scholars in Scandinavian studies. After studying in
London under Peter Foote, co-author of the classic Viking Achievement,
he emigrated to Norway in 1984. At the invitation of the Norwegian
Government he has lectured on aspects of Norwegian and Scandinavian
history and culture at embassies, universities and other cultural venues
in St Petersburg, New Delhi, Mumbai, Oslo, Bergen, Prague, Warsaw, Riga,
Edinburgh, Vasa, New York and at the Library of Congress in Washington.
His previous books include biographies of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun,
and in 2002 his Viking Age novel Siste kjærlighet (Last Love), based on
the 13th century Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, was published to
critical acclaim in Norway. The Hammer and the Cross was written between
2002 and 2009 in Oslo and on the Isle of Cumbrae.
