Books about Scandinavia

This text discusses the Vikings and their realm; the lands of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It includes a discussion of their civilization and culture, and their many sided achievements at home and abroad. A narrative follows their development, from pre-historic legend to symbolic defeat in 1066.

Composed towards the end of the first millennium of our era, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is a Northern epic and a classic of European literature. In this new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is true, line by line, to the original poem.

Proclaimed as one of the finest Icelandic sagas, this text was written in about 1280 and refers to events a couple of centuries earlier. It is full of the details of everyday life, as well as the social structures of the society in which they take place.

Prose Edda was designed as a handbook for poets to compose in the style of the skalds of the Viking ages. It is an exposition of the rule of poetic diction with many examples, applications and retellings of myths and legends.

Surveys the pre-Christian beliefs of the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples.

Egil's Saga tells the story of the long and brutal life of tenth- century warrior-poet and farmer Egil Skallagrimsson: a morally ambiguous character who was at once the composer of intricately beautiful poetry, and a physical grotesque capable of staggering brutality.

The biography of one of the most remarkable and memorable of the Medieval kings of Norway.

Whilst on a mission up the Volga, a representative of the ruler of Baghdad meets a Viking chieftain who has been summoned back to Scandinavia by his besieged relatives. The two men journey together northwards to engage in mortal combat with the dark, hairy brutes who threaten to empty the land.

One snowy day in Copenhagen, six-year-old Isaiah falls to his death from a city rooftop. The police pronounce it an accident. But Isaiah's neighbour, Smilla, suspects murder. She embarks on a dangerous quest to find the truth, following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.

This novel follows the lives of three generations of women.

Far from being just 'wild, barbaric, axe-wielding pirates', the Vikings created complex social institutions, oversaw the coming of Christianity to Scandinavia and made a major impact on European history through trade, travel and far-flung consolidation. This study brings together the research on Viking art, burial customs, jewellery, and kingship.

The Vikings hold a particular place in the history of the West, both mythologically and in the significant impact they had on Northern Europe. Magnus Magnusson's indispensable study of this great people presents a rounded and fascinating picture of a nation who, in modern eyes, would seem to embody striking contradictions. They were undoubtedly pillagers, raiders, and terrifying warriors, but ...

In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - will change his life forever.

Part of the classic series, this title follows the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck. The body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern. Three months later, all that Inspector Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people.