Far the book's best passages are those most closely tracking the course of the carnelian bead presented as its unifying theme - ie mainly the earliest & final chapters. The latter are particularly strong & inspiring.

Elsewhere much of the more generic, "usual" Viking material brings the book a little too close to yet another of the many annoyingly thematic - as opposed to chronological - general intros to the Viking age. Merely here with a cleverer & fresher organising theme.

The title however, River Kings, is also top-notch. Indeed I wish the author had spent still more time elaborating her exactly correct insistence that mastery of river navigation, both in the West & East, remain the missing, because even now too underexposed, key to Viking strategy, expansion, & success. ( )

An interesting way of interpreting Viking history, by tracing the route a traded item likely took to reach its found location. The analysis of the trading posts it would’ve transited along the way reads like a murder mystery. I enjoyed going along as the puzzle was unraveled. ( )

An interesting way of interpreting Viking history, by tracing the route a traded item likely took to reach its final location. The analysis of the trading posts it would’ve transited along the way reads like a murder mystery. I enjoyed going along as the puzzle was unraveled. ( )

Ok. What did I learn from this book that I didn't already know? Well, a few things. I learned that basically the Danish vikings went to England and Wales; the Norwegians also to England and Wales but also south to France and the Mediterranean. And the Swedes travelled east via the rivers deep into central Europe ..eventually reaching Constantinople and Baghdad. Though Cat pushes the envelope quite a lot and demonstrates that there was a fair bit of interchange in all of this (Swedish in Britain, Danes on the Rivers of Central Europe etc.. She also goes to great pains to point out that women also travelled with the dragon boats.....whether as soldiers or wives or slaves. Maybe she overdoes the story about the role of women....it did seem a bit of a "hard-sell" to me. But, then, maybe their role has been systematically "undersold" in the past. I've recently read a book about the Celts and it covers a lot of the same ground but one of the points made by Alice Roberts in "The Celts" was that the Viking presence is generally understood as ruthless raids involving rape and pillage.....but there were also long periods of peaceful trading and settlement ......in Britain anyway. And the same thing seemed to happen along the rivers and trading settlements with the great rivers of Europe.
Given the great debates that are currently running in Australia about Constitutional changes to recognise the indigenous people and give them a voice to our various parliaments, I found myself musing about my own "Viking" heritage. It seems that I have about 10% Scandinavian genes. And it seems that people with about this same percentage of aboriginal genes are able to claim they are "aboriginal".... (acceptance by the community appears to be the most significant criteria). So I found myself wondering If, using the same logic, that I could claim to be Scandinavian ....or a descendant of the Vikings. Maybe, even, my ancestors in Ireland were the victims of rape or other heinous crimes. So I should be entitled to compensation, Right? Maybe a share of the Norwegian Sovereign Fund? .....It's just a thought!
Cat, cleverly ties her tale into a forensic analysis of an orange carnelian bead that ended up in a jumble of viking bones in England. And, she traces, the probable origin of this bead, back to India.......traded across the middle East to Badhdad or Constantinople.......thence along the rivers...... traded for slaves or furs or weapons. Maybe to one of the big exchange centres in the Baltic: Gotland or Birka. And thence to England in somebody's purse or around their neck etc..
I was reminded about the importance of beads in the economy of the people of East Malaysia.....in Sabah and Sarawak. Carnelian beads were items of currency there. Maybe of Indian origin but also produced in Burma. They are popular still today. So the trade went both east and west.
I learned that carbon dating has a few tricks to it. For example the marine gap, which causes dates to show about 200 years older than they really are. And the reason is that if the diet of the people is marine based (fish) then the carbon from the sea has been floating around for maybe 200 years before it gets consumed by a fish and then by a human. Whereas, if the human is eating grains or plant based foods from on-land...then the chances are very high that the carbon involved will have been fixed very recently. So you can get big errors in the assay if you don't take this into account.
I also learned that by isotopically analysing the teeth of human remains, Archeologists can determine (with reasonable accuracy) where the human had grown up or spent a lot of time. Hence, Cat was able to identify a few individuals in her samples from England, who seemed to have travelled to the middle East or grown up there. Fascinating!
I would have liked to have seen a bit more analysis of the economic effort that went into producing a Dragon Boat. I recall from visiting the viking ship museum in Roskilde, Denmark......that a huge commitment of community resources went into making one of these boats. And the resources that went into producing the resin by distilling pine trees was immense. This is just skipped over lightly by Cat. Mentioned but not noted as significant. An implication being that the community needed to get some return for the investment. (Either in terms of defence or trade, or plunder).
And, am I mistaken or is there a slightly "pro-viking" stance taken by Cat. Maybe she is right in terms of trying to get some semblance of real-balance into the narrative but the vikings were certainly very big in the slave trade ...especially enslaving the slavic people......who loaned their name to the trade. And certainly, they did a lot of things to deserve their reputation as not "nice-guys".
I think Cat may have been writing her book to emphasise the point that the vikings were not just active in Europe and the North Sea....which might be the impression one has if you're English or Irish. But I guess, I was well aware of their movements down the great Rivers of Eastern Europe. So this was no surprise.
Oh, the other thingI learned was that there was a very good chance that the vikings brought smallpox with them from the middle East to Europe, Iceland, and the Americas. (Thanks guys!).
On the whole an interesting book and beautifully written. I give it four stars. ( )

Taking as inspiration a carnelian bead found in a burial in Lincolnshire, Jarman traces the history and geography of the Vikings moving from England to India. This is an alternative approach to Viking history and a particularly appealing one. Each section is based on geographic location and then explores the lives and history of the those areas. There is a strong emphasis on the place of women in Viking society and interpretations of research into customs based on bioarchaelogical evidence. Very approachable and readable but obviously containing lots of research. ( )