Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North

A journey of discovery though two millennia of Scandinavia's history, culture & society, "told with deep knowledge & an intoxicating passion" (BBC).

Scandinavia is the epitome of cool: we fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system & their healthy outdoor lifestyle; we glut ourselves on their crime fiction; even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, commonsensical acceptance of life's vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider's view of Scandinavia, & how accurate our picture of life in Scandinavia today?

Scandinavians follows a chronological progression across the Northern centuries: the Vendel era of Swedish prehistory; the age of the Vikings; the Christian conversions of Denmark, Norway, Sweden & Iceland; the unified Scandinavian state of the late Middle Ages; the sea-change of the Reformation; the kingdom of Denmark-Norway; King Gustav Adolphus and the age of Sweden's greatness; the...