God’s Hammer

From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a stunning new perspective on the medieval world.

When we think of the Crusades, the image is usually squarely medieval: an era of pageantry, knights, castles and cathedrals. An age of violence, certainly, but one glossed with faith, chivalry and Christian derring-do.

When we think of the Vikings, we most often see barbarism and pagan menace: Norse warriors drenched in blood-sacrifice and presided over by grim, brooding gods.

Both images are false, of course, created by centuries of cultural baggage. This book sets that history right, showing how the Vikings and their descendants embraced Christianity and the mores of mainstream Western Christendom – and how that Western medieval world imbibed the values and attitudes of the Vikings’ northern home.

Telling the story of how the Vikings took up arms and the cross, this is a book that leads to extraordinary places: from Jerusalem and Istanbul to Novgorod and Tallinn, via cold northern seas and ice-shrouded northern forests. It tells stories full of adventure, horror and madness, of pilgrimages and war-paths, bodyguards and princes, holy missions and rapacious greed.

That which transformed the bounds of Christendom forever was a hammer forged in the pagan fires of the Viking Age.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR LOST REALMS

‘Skeptical, scrupulous, written with wit and flair’ Financial Times

‘This brilliant history of Dark Age Britain mixes serious scholarship with nods to pop culture, from Tolkien to The Wicker Man… Lost Realms is a joy to read’ The Telegraph, FIVE STAR REVIEW

‘Williams makes a compelling guide as he steers us through the darkness’ Spectator

‘Williams has a fine command of the literary, administrative, religious and archaeological sources of early medieval Britain. He is a diligent scholar and a likeable writer’ Sunday Times

‘Thomas Williams is an exceptionally vivid and exciting writer, and his wonderfully evocative recreations are just what the generally impoverished and bewildering evidence for early medieval Britain requires. He is also however a meticulous, honest and fair-minded scholar, and his careful analysis of that evidence, material and textual, always establishes its limitations as well as its potential. His consideration of the losers of Anglo-Saxon state building provides a genuinely original and illuminating perspective on how England came to be’

Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch

'Thomas Williams has blended a potent brew of mythic and material fragments to raise forgotten kings & queens (and their stories) from the grave. An historian not afraid of the dark and with eyes adapted to it – what he sees is assessed sagely and described beautifully'

Christopher Hadley, author of Hollow Places

About the author

Thomas Williams is author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Viking Britain. He was a curator of the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend in 2014 and is now Curator of Early Medieval Coins at the British Museum. He undertook doctoral research at University College London and has taught and lectured in history and archaeology at the University of Cambridge.