Jarman takes us step by step along this route, starting in England and then to Scandinavia, then the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland, then to the (now) Russian rivers flowing north past (now) St Petersburg, and the portages to the River Dnieper running south across Ukraine into the Black Sea. The question posed by and then answered in this book is what was a bead made in India doing in a mass Viking grave in the UK? River Trip The reason this tiny bead is significant is because it is made out of a material that can be traced back to its origin thousands of miles away in Gujarat in India. Things clearly didn’t go well for the Viking who owned the bead (given that he died) but the Great Army itself was hugely successful - subjecting the Northumbrian kingdom to humiliating defeat and marauding about the place at will. The Great Army of the 860s and 870s CE marked the first serious attempt to conquer the English Anglo-Saxon kingdoms rather than just grabbing stuff from monasteries, killing a few monks, and sailing home.
The bead in question was found in a mass Viking grave in Repton in North England and belonged to a member of the Viking Great Army. While we don’t get eternity we do get a few hundred years of rampaging Vikings in a perfectly formed 300 page package.Ĭarnelian bead found in a 9th Century Viking grave in Repton (UK), but originally made in Gujarat India © Cat Jarman While Blake saw a world in a grain of sand, Cat Jarman shows us the Viking world in a little carnelian bead in her book River Kings: the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road.
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