The Vikings and their World: A Global History

在二十一世纪初，经济、政治、信息和旅行正变得不可分割地全球化。这本书是一部新世纪维京人的历史，对他们在750年至1500年间作为欧洲第一批全球行动者所扮演的角色进行了广泛的描述广告。它横跨了北欧广阔的疆域，东起伊斯兰世界的边疆和亚洲大草原，西至北美。挪威人在纽芬兰的L’anse aux Meadows建立了殖民地，这是自上一个冰河时代以来欧亚大陆和美洲人类首次有记录的接触，是一件壮观的世界事件。但这一成就被瑞典罗斯人在东部的日常活动所抵消，甚至可能超过。通过建立一个连接波罗的海、里海和黑海的贸易体系，罗斯人使自己成为黑暗时代欧洲和富裕的亚洲之间的调解人，从巴格达的伊斯兰哈里发国一直延伸到中国边境。这种全球视角提供了一个大范围的框架，其中更熟悉的斯堪的纳维亚掠夺和定居的情节被整合在一起，为读者提供了一个维京世界作为一个相互联系的整体的理解，由横跨三大洲的过程形成。基于新的研究，包括历史、考古学、人类遗传学、语言学和文学研究，这本书跟随维京入侵者、殖民者和商人从他们的斯堪的纳维亚家园到加洛林法兰克、俄罗斯、爱尔兰和不列颠群岛，然后与他们一起进入北大西洋，冰岛、格陵兰岛和仍然神秘的文兰岛。故事中穿插了详细的案例研究，这些案例研究是基于我的原始研究和最新的关于维京人主要活动和经历的历史思考，比如血仇、城镇建设、北欧妇女的世界，以及从异教到基督教的转变。在提供新材料和详细解释的同时，这本书也是早期中世纪立体摄影受到相对较新的“世界史”学科影响的第一部作品。这是一种令人兴奋和创新的方法，对过去在广泛的地理和时间框架上探索大规模主题，最近通过贾里德·戴蒙德的《枪，细菌和钢铁》（Chatto & Windus, 1997）和《崩溃》（Viking Penguin, 2005）获得了主流关注。虽然更侧重于方法，这本书将使用一些世界历史的思想和方法来重新评估横跨欧亚大陆，北大西洋，北极和北美东海岸的北欧人在大约七个世纪。北欧定居者、商人和探险家需要被理解为欧洲的第一批全球行动者，他们不仅在物理上连接了三大洲（欧洲、亚洲和北美），而且还在世界体系之间进行调解，他们的角色导致了在瑞典发现印度佛像，在爱尔兰发现伊拉克白银，在约克发现中亚丝绸，在基督教欧洲发现格陵兰岛和加拿大北极的象牙。最后，全球进程，如气候变化和生态，也被以一种更综合的方式纳入叙述，而不是以前在单卷历史中所做的。

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, economies, politics, information and travel are becoming inextricably global. This book is a history of the Vikings for the new century, providing a wide-ranging account of their part as Europe's first global actors between c.750 and c.1500 AD. It spans the vast horizons of the Norse, stretching from the borderlands of the Islamic world and the Asian steppes in the east, to North America in the west. The founding of the Norse colony at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the first documented contact between humans in Eurasia and the Americas since the last Ice Age, was a spectacular world event. But this achievement was balanced and perhaps even surpassed by the everyday and largely anonymous activities of the Swedish Rus in the east. By creating a system of trade that linked the Baltic with the Caspian and Black Seas, the Rus made themselves into the mediator between Dark-Age Europe and the riches of Asia, stretching from the Islamic Caliphate of Baghdad to the borders of China. This global perspective provides the large-scale framework into which the more familiar episodes of Scandinavian raiding and settlement are integrated, offering to the reader an understanding of the Viking world as an interconnected whole, shaped by processes sprawling across three continents. Based on new research, and including history, archaeology, human genetics, linguistics and literary studies, the book follows Viking raiders, colonists and traders from their Scandinavian homelands to Carolingian Francia, Russia, Ireland and the British Isles, before striking out with them into the North Atlantic, to Iceland, Greenland, and the still-mysterious Vinland. The story is punctuated and given depth by detailed case-studies based on my original research and the latest historical thinking on key Viking activities and experiences, such as bloodfeuds, town-building, the world of Norse women, and the conversion from paganism to Christianity. While offering new material and detailed interpretations, this book is also one of the first works of early medieval stereography to be influenced by the relatively new discipline of 'world history". This is an exciting and innovative approach to the past exploring large-scale themes over broad geographical and chronological frameworks and has recently achieved mainstream attention through Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' (Chatto & Windus, 1997) and 'Collapse' (Viking Penguin, 2005). While more focussed in approach, this book will use some of the ideas and methods of world history to reassess the Norse across Eurasia, the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the eastern seaboard of North America over some seven centuries. Norse settlers, traders and explorers need to be understood as Europe's first global actors, not only physically linking together three continents (Europe, Asia and North America), but also mediating between world-systems, roles that led to Indian buddhas being found in Sweden, silver from Iraq in Ireland, central Asian silks in York, and ivory from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic in Christian Europe. Finally, global processes, such as climate change and ecology, are also brought into the narrative in a more integrated way than has been done before in a single-volume history.