The Vikings

Through an intelligent use of various literary sources - inlcuding skaldic poetry, sagas, and the Nestorian Chronicle, which is a history of the Scandinavian princes of Kiev - Arbman attempts to guess at the ideas and ambitions of the men involved in a movement that, as Binns writes, "tends to be seen as an incomprehensible explosion of human energy which in the course of three centuries dissipated itself," leaving behind a few place-names, dialect words, and heroic stories.