A History of the Vikings

by Gwyn Jones. Oxford, $10.00, Mr. Jones is an engaging writer, a formidable scholar, and a born detective who obviously enjoys sorting fact from probability from legend from plain mist and moonshine. Having identified all these elements, he mercifully keeps them, so that the reader is not deprived of a number of great, but unhappily false, tales in the course of learning the discoverable truth about the Scandinavian traders and raiders and settlers whose enterprises carried them from Spain to the North Cape, and from Constantinople to Labrador. The influence of Scandinavia deserves more attention than it commonly gets from historians, and Mr. Jones’s book has been needed for years.