The Vikings famously took no prisoners relished cruel retribution & prided themselves on their bloody-thirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the west & as far as Baghdad in the east. As the Vikings did not write their history we have to discover it for ourselves & that discovery as Neil Oliver reveals tells an extraordinary story of a people who from the brink of destruction reached a quarter of the way around the globe & built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years. Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? & just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1000 years ago? VIKINGS will explore many of these questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.