New Book: Myths and Realities of the Viking Berserkr

 My new book will be published on 24th December 2021. It is available for preorder now, currently with 20% discount on the Routledge website. Even with that discount, the hardback is eye-wateringly expensive, but the e-book may be a more realistic solution for most. There is also a Kindle edition that is heading towards cheap enough, if you prefer that format. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of academic publishing that prices are through the roof and that the author does not benefit from those costs. I doubt I shall earn enough from the royalties to pay the licensing costs for the images I used. Still, it will be nice to finally have this book out there. I've worked with this material far longer than is healthy! I should note that there will also be a paperback edition available one year after the publication of the hardback. That is likely to be the most realistic prospect for those interested in hardcopy.

The book is substantially a reworking of my PhD thesis and draws largely the same conclusions. It refocuses the thesis, brings the research up to date so that the most recent academic work, as of mid-2021, is addressed, and expands some of the sections to make my reasoning clearer. It is clear from responses to my thesis online that this was needed. I have also used this opportunity to add a short discussion of approaches to researching this sort of topic that I hope will prove useful to future researchers.

In the book I demonstrate that most of what we believe about berserkir is a product of later research and is not actually reflected in the primary sources. I show that not everything written about berserkir should be taken literally. Those who wrote the sagas down were perfectly capable of using figurative language, hyperbole, etc. and often did; any reading of the sagas shows that many of them were adept with words and storytelling. I also demonstrate that the medieval audience for these sagas would not have understood the action in the same way as we do now. All of this affects how we interpret the Viking Age berserkr, and I use my analysis to create a model of the Viking Age warriors who went by that name.

Publisher blurb:

The viking berserkr is an iconic warrior normally associated with violent fits of temper and the notorious berserksgangr or berserker frenzy. This book challenges the orthodox view that these men went ‘berserk’ in the modern English sense of the word. It examines all the evidence for medieval perceptions of berserkir and builds a model of how the medieval audience would have viewed them. Then, it extrapolates a Viking Age model of berserkir from this model, and supports the analysis with anthropological and archaeological evidence, to create a new and more accurate paradigm of the Viking Age berserkr and his place in society. This shows that berserkir were the champions of lords and kings, members of the social elite, and that much of what is believed about them is based on 17th-century and later scholarship and mythologizing: the medieval audience would have had a very different understanding of the Old Norse berserkr from that which people have now. The book sets out a challenge to rethink and reframe our perceptions of the past in a way that is less influenced by our own modern ideas.

So, what do I need to say here, as this is a gaming blog? For the wargamer, this work may appear too focused on language and meaning. However, words mean things. The way they are used affects how we interpret the past. Without analysing what the words mean, we cannot understand who and what these men were, or where they fitted into Viking Age society. That, in turn, affects how we model them on the tabletop. About the time that my thesis was published online, I wrote a blog post addressing my views on how berserkir should be depicted on the tabletop, and I am largely satisfied with that post still.

It's hard to reframe and reassess things we have grown up with and that are so much a part of our daily existence. This applies as much to the vocabulary we use as it does to the broader questions of our identity and lives. The word 'berserk' is so inextricably linked to ideas of loss of control these days that it is almost impossible to imagine it meaning anything else. I know that it took me a while, even after I had begun my research, to question whether berserkir went berserk or not, and to realise that no one had seriously asked that question and researched it. The question arose as I examined the less commonly read primary sources and looked at broader usage of Old Norse berserkr beyond the most commonly read sagas.

When you combine this underlying assumption with translations that unthinkingly use the word 'berserk' in the modern English sense and that favour readability over accuracy, you have a recipe for serious misunderstanding of what is going on in the narrative. This problem is further compounded by the fact that some of the texts I have analysed are not available in translation. How do you analyse the meaning and usage of a word when you cannot access the literature it is written in?

I don't suppose I shall convince my critics who deploy (often older and unreliable) translations of sagas as evidence that I am wrong. I do hope that my new book will help people question those ingrained ideas anyway and approach reading the sagas afresh, learning to question better what they read. I also hope that it leads to Viking army lists with no 'lunatic nudists' (to quote Bernard Cornwell) and wargames figure ranges with no naked berserkir, but I suspect it will be some while before that can happen. Sometimes the legend is just too popular, and, to be honest, in a fantasy context I would deploy them too, complete with (fictional) mushroom pot.