The viking berserkr is an iconic warrior normally associated with violent fits of temper and the notorious berserksgangr or berserker frenzy. This book challenges the orthodox view that these men went ‘berserk’ in the modern English sense of the word. It examines all the evidence for medieval perceptions of berserkir and builds a model of how the medieval audience would have viewed them. Then, it extrapolates a Viking Age model of berserkir from this model, and supports the analysis with anthropological and archaeological evidence, to create a new and more accurate paradigm of the Viking Age berserkr and his place in society. This shows that berserkir were the champions of lords and kings, members of the social elite, and that much of what is believed about them is based on 17th-century and later scholarship and mythologizing: the medieval audience would have had a very different understanding of the Old Norse berserkr from that which people have now. The book sets out a challenge to rethink and reframe our perceptions of the past in a way that is less influenced by our own modern ideas. The Myths and Realities of the Viking berserkr will appeal to researchers and students alike studying the Viking Age, Medieval History and Old Norse Literature.
The impact of the Vikings is impossible to overstate. A people apparently condemned to a marginal existence in the remote wastes of Dark Age northern Europe, they burst onto an unsuspecting continent with extraordinary consequences. Initially they were pirates and raiders of astounding ferocity. In a matter of decades, they had laid waste to much of the coastal British Isles and had penetrated deep into France, threatening to snuff out for good an emerging Christendom. They launched raids against Muslim Iberia and then into the Mediterranean. They pushed east across the Baltic and from there south along the river systems of western Russia to the Black Sea and Byzantium, establishing themselves as traders and slavers. They discovered and exploited sea-routes deep into the North Atlantic--to the Faroes, to Iceland and Greenland, and finally to America itself. They initiated routes of oceanic exploration that would be unmatched until Columbus five centuries later. This book, accessible and vivid, sheds new light on the Viking Age. It examines their gods and belief systems, their technological advances, their extraordinary levels of craftsmanship, their social organization, their success as colonizers, their political coups, their military might, their commercial nous, and their remarkable self-belief. It provides a compelling portrait of a world decisively shaped by the Viking initiatives and imperatives.
He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century’s most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author’s childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films influence on modern views of masculinity. McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author’s discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy. This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children’s literature, and auto/biography.
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