Vikingology

By tomorrow evening I intend to have highlighted and summarized the lives of all of my Vikings who feature prominently in Heimskringla. So far, I've only finished Rollo and Sigrid.  (Who both take up comparatively little space in this work.)

I’ll never be a Vikingologist. The literature, even just in English, on this subject is enormous, and always growing. I’ll never have time to absorb all there is to know. Only so many of my eminent Scandinavians hail from this gory epoch. Moreover, with so much scholarly attention devoted to it, Vikingology is surely vibrant controversies between rival schools of interpretation. My remarks, therefore, are bound to dissatisfy at least some of the experts. I’m bound to commit inaccuracies, over-generalizations.      

Perhaps the scholarly attention devoted to the Vikings is disproportionate to its actual historical importance. It’s not like they the Mongols, after all, or the British.