Book Review: The Wolf Age

Informative, Readable, and Inspiring

Last fall, I read a book I had purchased some time before that has become one of my all-time favorite nonfiction reads. It’s called The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire. Written by Tore Skeie and translated into English by Alison McCullough, it’s a delightful read for several reasons. I’ll mention a few here:

Reason #1: Subject Matter. I am a hobby medievalist/historical Germanic linguist. I love this stuff enough to have gotten a master’s degree in the subject and read books like this for fun, but I dislike stress and writing papers too much to go for a PhD so I’m not anywhere near an expert. As a result, I found this book wonderfully informative. I knew bits and pieces of the history relayed within its pages but I had no idea of the details or scope of the interactions and conflicts in the sub-titular North Sea empire. I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about it through this book.

Reason #2: Readability. I love history, but as a reader primarily of fiction, I do find some history books difficult to get through. This was not one of them. The author gives a lot of contextual details but avoids getting bogged down in them, and the perspective shifts are very clear as he covers the saga (yes, pun intended) from the various points of view involved. The chapters are sometimes long but never feel endless, and even when I went several days between reading sessions (I was in the middle of a huge, life-changing move overseas when I started reading this book, so I was a little busy) I had no trouble remembering where I left off and continuing with the story. This is creative nonfiction at its best, at least for my taste.

Reason #3: Inspiration. This book covers so many aspects of the history it’s conveying. Battles, leaders, cultures, religion - even skaldic involvement and context. I’ve got several pages dogeared (I only do this to nonfiction books) for information of particular interest to me in the chapter “Broad Ancestral Lands,” because it covers the role a skald (Norse poet) might play - and that a few did play - in the political, social and economic events of the day. Bards historically hold a unique role in society, and several things about the skalds’ service to Olaf Haraldsson got my imagination going with potential fictional stories to tell.

Bottom line: The Wolf Age provides a great account of this corner of history for laymen like myself and makes me want to read more books like it, and also to delve into actual research about this and related topics. It filled in a bunch of my knowledge gaps about this region at that time, and it also sparked my imagination as a hobby-scholar and a writer. What more could I ask for?

10 out of 10 recommend.