History

RIVER KINGS

A NEW HISTORY OF VIKINGS FROM SCANDINAVIA TO THE SILK ROADS

CAT JARMAN

Wm Collins, 336pp, £25

As a 17-year-old, Financial Times reviewer William Dalrymple was one of ten diggers who made an important archaeological discovery in a vicar’s garden near Repton Abbey, namely the charnel of 264 bodies with trophies buried by a band of Viking raiders. Ranging from Greenland and the Baltic to Kiev, Constantinople, Baghdad and beyond, Jarman traces a carnelian bead to its source in Gujarat, western India. ‘Jarman likes her Vikings violent,’ wrote Dalrymple, and her book ‘is at least as lively as any Netflix Viking romp, and a great deal more intellectually satisfying... It helps that she has an enviable gift for turning dry archaeological data into thrilling human stories as she weaves cutting-edge science with chronicles, histories and Nordic sagas, moving effortlessly from laboratory readings of strontium and carbon-14 to the tales of the Icelandic bard Snorri Sturluson and legends of the Valkyries.’

He said that ‘just as Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad reminded us that the eastern front of WW2 was of far greater consequence than its western theatre, so Jarman shows how the westward trading and slaving voyages of the Vikings were only half the story. The real source of Viking wealth lay far to the east.’ Dalrymple concluded by saying that it is ‘one of the most thrilling works of archaeological detective work I have ever read... will cast a spell on any reader who enjoys their history well-written and clearly argued.’

‘Tiny trills of detail give way to pounding drums of drama’

Gerard DeGroot, in the , was similarly ‘held captive by that single orange bead’ and echoed Dalrymple’s judgement that ‘in addition to being a wonderful writer, Jarman is a skilled bioarchaeologist’. It is ‘a tale told by objects – lead weights, gaming pieces, iron nails, fragments of silk, a prosthetic