The best and most enlightening Dark Ages and Viking books

I studied magic, sorcery, and spirit possession as a student anthropologist for a few months in Indonesia in the late 1980s. Thirty-odd years later, when I came to write a series of novels about Viking warriors being possessed by the spirits of bears and wolves, which they believed lent them a berserk frenzy in battle, I drew on my own meagre experience and on the far more impressive work of Neil Price, a professor of Archaeology at Uppsala University and expert on the pre-Christian religions. In The Viking Way, Price explains Viking belief systems and tackles occult subjects such as seithr, shamanism, and the supernatural empowerment of aggression eloquently and extensively. I couldn’t have written my novels without his illumination.

Cornwell is the godfather of modern historical fiction. And his masterful Arthurian trilogy, which begins with The Winter King, is the finest of his many fine works. This was the series that inspired me to become a historical fiction writer, along with many others. I was moved to tears by his tragic tale of the doomed warlord Arthur, a Welsh-speaking Briton, trying to bring peace and justice to a strife-torn 5th-century England, while fending off the encroaching alien culture of the Saxons. The names of the characters are all Welsh, which takes some getting used to, but the story, narrated by half-Saxon, half-British warrior Derfel, is bloody, brutal, and beautifully written, and irresistibly sweeps the reader along. This trilogy is the pinnacle of historical fiction.

Kristian was also inspired by Bernard Cornwell, and this elegiac Arthurian novel openly proclaims his debt. Set in the same 5th-century world, Kristian tells the story of the famous love triangle from the perspective of the dashing wife-stealer, Lancelot.

The language he uses is poetic and poignant; and while we know in our hearts it will all end tragically, you can’t help cheering for Lancelot and his love Guinevere, and feeling sympathy for poor Arthur, and hoping it will all work out happily somehow.

Nelson’s masterly biography of Charlemagne is a dense, scholarly but still gripping account of one of the most interesting and influential monarchs in European history. I struggle to think of any figure who has has a greater impact that the King of the Franks and, later, Emperor of the Romans, who drew the boundaries of the continent as we know them today. This was my most reliable go-to source on Charlemagne and his long wars with the pagan Saxons, which is the subject of my own series.

No list of influences on our knowledge and enjoyment of Dark Ages and Viking culture would be complete without a mention of Tolkien. He has made obscure, dusty, half-forgotten North European myths mainstream in the 21st century and pretty much invented the fantasy genre. My Viking novels are historical, but they have all been massively influenced by Tolkien’s works. Every hero I write is compared in my mind to Aragorn; every villain measured against the treacherous Grima Wormtongue; each decent, humble everyman is a Hobbit. Tolkien’s enormous shadow still falls over every novel set in the Dark Ages or the Viking period—and I suspect it always will.