Elizabeth Rowe

The Viking period is still extremely compelling today, partly because it's just so colorful.

It's full of dramatic figures, dramatic events.

Nearly all of the contemporary accounts that we have for the Scandinavians in Western Europe are from the point of the victims of Viking raids and attacks.

Partly it's a problem that in Scandinavia, writing didn't come until the conversion to Christianity, let's say around the year 1000.

And so whatever was written down about the Viking Age was written down hundreds of years after the events that are being told.