This book does a pretty good job of surveying the growth of the viking world, both east into modern Russia and west across the Atlantic to Greenland and Vinland, using lots of archeological evidence as well as ancients texts and runes and sagas. The couple of centuries invading, threatening and settling in centuries in England are always fun, and the Norman invasion of 1066 is counted as a Viking one, but the most interesting insight here was how what seems to us a stretched-out series of outposts and settlements across vast distances and formidable seas was to Vikings, used to maritime travel as an easier alternative to overland, perfectly manageable.