The peoples who eventually sorted themselves out as Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were latecomers to civilization. For many centuries, their ancestors, the Vikings, plundered and occupied much of Western Europe, sailed down the Russian rivers across the Black Sea to Byzantium and colonized Iceland and Greenland before touching the North American shore.
The Hudson Foundation’s Arthur Herman (descended from Scandinavian immigrants in the U.S.) writes enthusiastically about those Northern Europeans, their accomplishments and their evolution from pagan marauding through stern Lutheranism to social democracy. Herman carefully distinguishes fact from the fantasies of white supremacists, takes environment and climate change into account and catalogs interesting accomplishments in an unfailingly engaging narrative. The world’s oldest continuous democracy? Iceland.
