conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled A History of the Vikings about with the genre: History, Europe
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conversations.value: Since this book was first published in 1968, it has become an authorative classic, very readable, like an adventure story, but all true. It contains 30 plates,58 figures and 15 maps.
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conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about History, Vikings, Illustrated with the genre: History, Europe?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A History of the Vikings'
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conversations.value: the first paragraph for this book
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conversations.value: A History of the Vikings
  For the viking, whatever he may have done abroad, whatever his social behaviour was, despite his heathendom and the polygamy of his chieftains, must be seen against a cultural background that deserves respect. He came of a people who were for the most part sober and industrious agriculturists, a people who were endowed with considerable aesthetic sensibility and who were in some trades, such as shipbuilding and ironwork, craftsmen of more than ordinary skill. Therefore though it is profitless to look for such a thing as a typical viking, since throughout the whole of their history the vikings were exactly what their circumstances made them, robbers, colonists, and traders, yet it is a nearer approach to the truth to believe of them that they were an orderly and sensible civilized folk than that they were bloody and destructive brutes.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'The Norse king left Ireland soon after his initial conquests, but upon his return in 856 he was joined in Dublin by two viking princes, one a Dane, Ivar the Boneless, who was a son of Ragnar Lodbrok, and the other his (Olaf's) brother Audgisl, and these three chieftains having come to terms, they soon set about the plundering of the middle territory of Ireland, even ransacking the pre-historic tumuli and the souterrains (stone-lined underground passages) in their frenzied search for treasure'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Norse king left Ireland soon after his initial conquests, but upon his return in 856 he was joined in Dublin by two viking princes, one a Dane, Ivar the Boneless, who was a son of Ragnar Lodbrok, and the other his (Olaf's) brother Audgisl, and these three chieftains having come to terms, they soon set about the plundering of the middle territory of Ireland, even ransacking the pre-historic tumuli and the souterrains (stone-lined underground passages) in their frenzied search for treasure. But it so happened that a great Irishman, Aed Finnlaith, was now high-king, and he so resolutely opposed the Norse raids, so fearlessly and so successfully carried the war back to the very gates of the Norse strongholds, that the prudent Olaf and his fellow-adventurers deemed it best to remain content with the safeguarding of their own small colony rather than to risk defeat and expulsion by Aed. They made no attempt, therefore, to co-operate with the other Norse settlements in attacks upon the Irish, always supposing that the jealous and independent colonies could co-operate effectively, and instead made a peace with Aed, Olaf himself wedding the high-king's daughter, a plain proof of the secure establishment of Dublin as a Norse realm. From this time onwards (it was in the late '60s) Olaf's principal viking expeditions were directed overseas against Strathclyde Wales and Pictland, though his Dublin colonists still went plundering in Leinster and Munster when the Irish were busy with their own quarrels, and he himself on one occasion (868) went north to burn Armagh. In the meantime Ivar the Boneless had sailed for England to help in the conquest of the Danelaw by his brothers Halfdan and Ubbe.
  But in 871, at the height of his power, Olaf left Ireland for ever, sailing off to fight in his own country where he fell in battle. He left Ivar the Boneless, who had been away fighting in England, as king of the Norse colonies in Ireland and Britain ', and two years later, at Ivar's death, Olaf's son Eystein became king in his stead. Early in his reign there was an attack by the Danes on Dublin, a small party of the Northumbrian vikings under Halfdan (p. 231), and perhaps Ubbe, his brother, attempting to take Eystein's kingdom from him by guile, this because it had been under the rule of their brother Ivar and they could therefore pretend some claim to add this splendid colony to their rich English possessions. It was the beginning of a long and curious struggle between Dublin and York that was partly based on the natural rivalries of Danes and Norwegians and partly a result of the circumstance that the later rulers at Dublin were of the same family as the Danish kings of York ; in a word, the struggle was not so much a declared war between the two viking states as a series of attempts to unite by force these two states into a single family heritage.
  On this first occasion Aed Finnlaith intervened on behalf of the now peaceful Norwegians, so that Halfdan and his contingent took fright and sailed off northwards up the Irish coast where the great Northumbrian chief was killed in a battle with the Norsemen on Strangford Loch. The Danes of his army fled to Scotland, and thence to Wales and Devonshire, and for the time being the Norwegians in Ireland had nothing more to fear from their fellow-vikings.
  But at this period, about 877, their power was already on the wane. No longer came great fleets from Norway to reinforce the colonies, for now the Vestfold royal line was aiming at the mastery of all the country and the full strength of the great viking provinces of Vestland was needed at home in order to resist their would-be lords. The Irish settlements, therefore, grew weaker in numbers, and less and less a menace to the native kings and their peoples. It even came to pass that Dublin, the mainspring of Norse power in Ireland, fell, after the short reigns of the sons of Audgisl and Ivar, under the control of Cearbhall of Ossory, who had been an ally of Ivar. Although Cearbhall's granddaughter married a son of Olaf of Dublin, and his daughter married the viking Eyvind Eastman, and though he himself was later counted as the head of the family tree of several distinguished Icelandic families, this Irish control of Dublin must have been a sorry business for whatever remained of the old viking pride, and it is natural enough that about this time the settlement should have been further depleted by the wholesale migration of many of the Norse colonists across the Irish Sea to Cumberland and Northumberland. Small wonder that when Cearbhall, king of Leinster, attacked Dublin in 902, he captured the place without difficulty, made a terrible slaughter of the inhabitants, and forced the beaten remnant of the defending army to seek refuge across the sea, some going off to plunder Chester and others sailing for the Loire.
  Although, during these forty years after the death of Halfdan, the viking hold upon Ireland had been steadily weakening, yet most of their harbour-strongholds on the coast must still have remained as centres of a semi-Norse population. Even as early as the middle of the ninth century there existed the Gaill-Gaedhil, or foreign Irish, and though at first these were merely Irishmen who had thrown in their lot with the pirates, it is likely enough that from these recreants had sprung a race of mixed parentage, half Irish and half Norse, in the settlement areas. But the Gaill-Gaedhil, low-born adventurers whose swords were for hire, were not the only result of intercourse between Norse and Irish. On the contrary, there are many records of the free and peaceable mingling of the two peoples, the intermarriage of the high-born Norse and the Irish nobility, and also of temporary alliances between them for battle and adventure, the Norse sometimes entering with zest into the wars of the rival Irish kings, while these kings, upon occasion, were not above taking a part in the viking expeditions in search of plunder. There remained, therefore, on the Irish coasts a not inconsiderable legacy from the viking conquests of Turgeis and Olaf, even if viking rule had to some extent collapsed, and it needed only the advent of fresh armies of Norsemen to re-establish the colonies where the Norse tongue and Norse manners were still cherished by the enfeebled descendants of the early raiders.
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conversations.value: the last two paragraphs
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conversations.value: Karlsefni is said to have sailed northward to Keelness and then westwards, having land on his port side. This probably means that he sailed across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then back again in a westerly direction to the Gaspé peninsula and thence westward along the south bank of the St. Lawrence.
  It is sometimes said that Harald Hardradi journeyed to Wineland during his celebrated voyage to investigate the breadth of the northern ocean (Adam of Bremen, IV, 38), but actually there is no reason for supposing that he reached America. Nor is the Honen rune-stone in Ringerike of any historic importance even though an uncertain reading seems to record an expedition to Wineland by explorers who lost themselves among the ice of uninhabited countries. Nor, moreover, can anything be made of a projected expedition to discover the ' New Land ' found in the northern seas by Icelandic explorers about 1290. On this, and Harald's voyage, see F. Nansen, In Northern Mists.
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conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
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conversations.value: This probably means that he sailed across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then back again in a westerly direction to the Gaspé peninsula and thence westward along the south bank of the St. Lawrence.
  It is sometimes said that Harald Hardradi journeyed to Wineland during his celebrated voyage to investigate the breadth of the northern ocean (Adam of Bremen, IV, 38), but actually there is no reason for supposing that he reached America. Nor is the Honen rune-stone in Ringerike of any historic importance even though an uncertain reading seems to record an expedition to Wineland by explorers who lost themselves among the ice of uninhabited countries. Nor, moreover, can anything be made of a projected expedition to discover the ' New Land ' found in the northern seas by Icelandic explorers about 1290. On this, and Harald's voyage, see F. Nansen, In Northern Mists.