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Ivory Vikings
- The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them
- Narrated by: Tony Ward
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
In the early 1800s, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most famous chess pieces in the world. Harry played Wizard's Chess with them in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Housed at the British Museum, they are among its most visited and beloved objects.
Questions abounded: Who carved them? Where? Ivory Vikings explores these mysteries by connecting medieval Icelandic sagas with modern archaeology, art history, forensics, and the history of board games. In the process, Ivory Vikings presents a vivid history of the 400 years when the Vikings ruled the North Atlantic, and the sea road connected countries and islands we think of as far apart and culturally distinct: Norway and Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, and Greenland and North America. The story of the Lewis chessmen explains the economic lure behind the Viking voyages to the west in the 800s and 900s. And finally, it brings from the shadows an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the 12th century: Margret the Adroit of Iceland.
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A compilation of essays from the English Historical Fiction Authors blog, this book provides a wealth of historical information from Roman Britain to early 20th-century England. Over 50 different authors share hundreds of real life stories and tantalizing tidbits discovered while doing research for their own historical novels.
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Historical Tidbits
- By Troy on 08-03-15
By: Debra Brown, and others
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The Middle Ages
- By: Morris Bishop
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this indispensable volume, one of America's ranking scholars combines a life's work of research and teaching with the art of lively narration. Both authoritative and beautifully told, The Middle Ages is the full story of the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance - a time that saw the rise of kings and emperors, the flowering of knighthood, the development of Europe, the increasing power of the Catholic Church, and the advent of the middle class.
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"It's All left to the imagination."
- By Dave Miller on 09-22-17
By: Morris Bishop
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Making Haste from Babylon
- The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History
- By: Nick Bunker
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 18 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.
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Excellent, detailed and eye-opening
- By David on 09-20-15
By: Nick Bunker
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Angels & Demons
- Myths, Legends & History: 2 Books in 1
- By: KIV Books
- Narrated by: Tom Chandler
- Length: 2 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Angels have been a critical part of humanity for as long as we can imagine. Often depicted as benevolent beings, they have been at the center of many religious texts, especially in Abrahamic religions, Christianity especially.
By: KIV Books
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Red Land, Black Land
- Daily Life in Ancient Egypt
- By: Barbara Mertz
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 14 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Esteemed Egyptologist Barbara Mertz updates her widely praised social history of the people of ancient Egypt, which was originally published in 1968. Combining impeccable scholarship with a delightfully personal style, the author reconstructs the life of the Egyptians from birth to death, and beyond death, too.
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Brilliant
- By Elizabeth on 04-03-10
By: Barbara Mertz
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A Voyage Long and Strange
- Rediscovering the New World
- By: Tony Horwitz
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 17 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university - a history major, no less! - he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus' landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between?
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Just Not For Me
- By Sara on 10-25-15
By: Tony Horwitz
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Foundation
- The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors: The History of England, Book 1
- By: Peter Ackroyd
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 18 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Foundation the chronicler of London and of its river, the Thames, takes us from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, in 1509. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows us glimpses of the country's most distant past - a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house.
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The Most Annoying Narrator EVER
- By JudieBee on 12-25-15
By: Peter Ackroyd
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The Vikings
- A New History
- By: Neil Oliver
- Narrated by: James A. Gillies
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.
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Intriguing for a broad audience.
- By Grant on 08-07-18
By: Neil Oliver
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River Kings
- A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
- By: Cat Jarman
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Three years ago, a Carnelian bead came into Catrine Jarman's temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace the path of this ancient piece of jewelry back to eighth-century Baghdad and India, discovering along the way that the Vikings' route was far more varied than we might think—that with them came people from the Middle East, and that the reason for this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, all the way to Britain.
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Like school
- By Amazon Customer on 09-08-24
By: Cat Jarman
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Black Tudors
- The Untold Story
- By: Miranda Kaufmann
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A Black porter publicly whips a White English gentleman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A heavily pregnant African woman is abandoned on an Indonesian island by Sir Francis Drake. A Mauritanian diver is dispatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose.... Miranda Kaufmann reveals the absorbing stories of some of the Africans who lived free in Tudor England.
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I thought I knew it all...
- By Sylvia Schmidt on 08-01-19
By: Miranda Kaufmann
What listeners say about Ivory Vikings
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tracie
- 04-13-16
Informative
Listening to this the last two nights. Not bad and lots of new trivia. Though at times it does sound like large groups of consonants slew all the vowels and then turned on each other.
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- S Flores
- 09-07-16
Dry and tedious listening.
Good information, however, I sadly found this book to be quite tedious to listen to.
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- Ben
- 03-04-17
Amazing history but slightly dramatic reader
This remarkable in-depth exploration of the history of 78 small chess pieces is a lot more than an archaeological history. It manages to weave the history of the late Viking age into art history, the history of chess, the history of the medieval church, the history of commerce in Europe, the history of literature, and the history of archaeological debate. Nancy Marie Brown expertly weaves these diverse topics together by following the pieces on the chess board, using the art and military history of the age to determine the date of the relevant pieces, and in turn connecting that to their creation. The insight into Icelandic history and literature, which is often overlooked in past academic works on the Chessmen, provides a unique insight into the way, for example, a rook would be fashioned after a berserker or a bishop would have powerful range of movement and be at the king's side. These are all tied into Icelandic experience and history so that, Brown argues, it proves the pieces were made in Iceland by Margaret the Adroit. Brown's book is a history, but it is written using some journalistic techniques as well, she having interviewed some of the main characters who have brought this Icelandic theory to the fore in the previous decade. The argument for Icelandic origin is compelling, logical, and well laid out. The history is interesting, engaging, and presented in an accessible way. Overall, a really well-written look into a unique piece of historical detective work and well worth the read.
I got the Audible version of this book, and the narration was clear and easy to follow, though the narrator takes slightly dramatic pauses before a quotation. I could listen to it easily, but he wasn't my favourite reader, seeming to be a bit over the top. The book's complex Icelandic history and jumps between Nordic lineages would probably be better suited to a physical book, just so you can go back and make sure you know who is actually being talked about, but if you can listen without distractions and have an interest in the subject matter, you'll be able to follow along just fine.
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- ILA
- 07-25-24
Well done!
I loved the mystery of the chess pieces. I understand it may be reasonable today to for Margaret the Adroit’s workshop. But the sequel to this book will tell that story. Well done analysis.
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