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A review by lukerik
River Kings: the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
A really good introduction to the Vikings. All you need are vague ideas about mead and ogre horns and you’re good to go. It’s not a narrative history, but rather Jarman moves area by area picking out salient facts to build a picture. There’s a focus on archaeology and she’s particularly good at explaining the science in a way that even I can understand. She begins with a carnelian bead dug up in Repton in 1982. She was the first person to examine it in 2017. There’s a particularly interesting piece-to-camera by Guy de la Bédoyère here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFPRlQFJS5E
where he discusses the sometimes shameful delays between discovery and examination of artefacts.
Jarman traces the bead’s probable route all the way to India. There’s some really interesting stuff along the way. Particularly so the possibility that the Scandinavian öre was created in such a way to facilitate easy exchange with the dirham of the Islamic Caliphate. The theory makes perfect sense but later she perhaps takes its application a little too far and I can’t say I agree with everything she says. She quotalises Ibn Fadlan:
‘”Round their necks, they wear torques of gold and silver, for every man, as soon as he accumulates 10,000 dirhams, has a torque made for his wife. When he has 20,000, he has two torques made and so on. Every time he increases his fortune by 10,000, he adds another torque to those his wife already possesses, so that one woman may have many torques round her neck.”
Ibn Fadlan’s observation demonstrates two things: first, that silver was used as a portable currency among the Rus’, in a way that made an overt statement about your relative wealth (although the 10,000 is likely an exaggeration, as this would make each necklace weigh around three kilograms). In Scandinavia, arm rings often cut up as hacksilver were used in exactly the same way. Second, it confirms that the rings had a weight-based value that directly corresponded to a number of dirhams.’
I would suggest that it confirms no such thing and it seems like an exaggeration because Ibn Fadlan is not saying that Vikings put literally all their money round their wives’ necks. They kept some back for the mead. What if your wife had a massively fat neck? Would she have very thin rings so they would go all the way round?
Some other interpretations may be controversial in Russia because Jarman identifies the Rus’ as the Vikings. Apparently some Russians don’t like to think they are descended from the Vikings. Quite frankly, if the Russians had managed to avoid that they would be the most inbred people in Europe after the Hapsburgs.
All in all, engaging written, very thought-provoking and a good state-of-play book.
There are some problems. There is no bibliography. The references are a strange collection of things and not everything is referenced. As Jarman is a professional archaeologist I’m sure she knows how to reference properly so I blame the publishers. It’s like they’ve given her a footnote limit and she’s left in what she can. Also, the book is well illustrated but if you have the ebook you won’t know it until the end because they’ve collected all the pictures together there like a plate section instead of linking them to the relevant parts of the text.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFPRlQFJS5E
where he discusses the sometimes shameful delays between discovery and examination of artefacts.
Jarman traces the bead’s probable route all the way to India. There’s some really interesting stuff along the way. Particularly so the possibility that the Scandinavian öre was created in such a way to facilitate easy exchange with the dirham of the Islamic Caliphate. The theory makes perfect sense but later she perhaps takes its application a little too far and I can’t say I agree with everything she says. She quotalises Ibn Fadlan:
‘”Round their necks, they wear torques of gold and silver, for every man, as soon as he accumulates 10,000 dirhams, has a torque made for his wife. When he has 20,000, he has two torques made and so on. Every time he increases his fortune by 10,000, he adds another torque to those his wife already possesses, so that one woman may have many torques round her neck.”
Ibn Fadlan’s observation demonstrates two things: first, that silver was used as a portable currency among the Rus’, in a way that made an overt statement about your relative wealth (although the 10,000 is likely an exaggeration, as this would make each necklace weigh around three kilograms). In Scandinavia, arm rings often cut up as hacksilver were used in exactly the same way. Second, it confirms that the rings had a weight-based value that directly corresponded to a number of dirhams.’
I would suggest that it confirms no such thing and it seems like an exaggeration because Ibn Fadlan is not saying that Vikings put literally all their money round their wives’ necks. They kept some back for the mead. What if your wife had a massively fat neck? Would she have very thin rings so they would go all the way round?
Some other interpretations may be controversial in Russia because Jarman identifies the Rus’ as the Vikings. Apparently some Russians don’t like to think they are descended from the Vikings. Quite frankly, if the Russians had managed to avoid that they would be the most inbred people in Europe after the Hapsburgs.
All in all, engaging written, very thought-provoking and a good state-of-play book.
There are some problems. There is no bibliography. The references are a strange collection of things and not everything is referenced. As Jarman is a professional archaeologist I’m sure she knows how to reference properly so I blame the publishers. It’s like they’ve given her a footnote limit and she’s left in what she can. Also, the book is well illustrated but if you have the ebook you won’t know it until the end because they’ve collected all the pictures together there like a plate section instead of linking them to the relevant parts of the text.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Child death, Death, Sexual assault, Slavery, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail