Your subtitle is, the subtitle of your book, The Viking Heart, is How Scandinavians Conquered the World.
Did they conquer the world to the extent that they did in just a 200-year period?
It's incredible what they managed to accomplish in that period of time in terms of not just the raids that they conduct.
And it's a mistake to think of them primarily as pillagers and as...
I mean, of course they had that quality to them.
It was part of the life of Dark Age Europe, was to steal what others couldn't defend.
But they're also major traders.
As I explain in the book, they established the trading sea routes.
They really come to be the sea routes of modern globalization from that point forward.
As well as settling, you know, you've got to get away from Scandinavia, Dennis.
The land is poor, the resources are meager, the population is growing far beyond the ability of the land to support the numbers of young sons and daughters who set out in their longships to go find, not just plunder, but also to find land in which to settle their families.
And so, British Isles become major Viking settlements, and as our DNA research now shows...
They are still, that Viking genetic legacy still lives on in those areas as well as England and other points as well.
It's an amazing story for people who come from one of the most inhospitable and underpopulated parts of Europe to be able to accomplish all that they did in a 200-year span.
What was their religion?
At the time of the classic Viking raids, they're pagans.
They adhere to a Norse pantheon of gods, Odin and Thor, and all of the other names that we associate with movies now, you know, superhero movies, but also of the Viking sagas.
And the Wagner's opera, which really romanticized those myths.
The big change, as I explain in the book, though, the big watershed change is when, beginning in the 11th century, the Vikings, the Scandinavian population shifts over to Christianity.
It brings an enormous change in the way in which they live and in the set of values that they adhere to and stick to.
And what we see is a shift as they join the mainstream European civilization.
As the more, shall we say, bloodthirsty aspects of Viking life and of Scandinavian culture drop away, and they become much more a people who stand in solidarity with European civilization and Christendom as opposed to its opponents.
But that is part of the amazing thing about Scandinavian culture, which I really explain in the book, and which really carries over, Dennis, when the first wave of immigrants come in the 19th century to America.
And that is that living in an inhospitable climate where the only survival is group survival builds a strong sense of solidarity and trust within the community that, of course, the Vikings needed.
If you're going to cross the Atlantic with three or 40 other people, you've got to make sure there are people you can trust, you can depend upon.
And also then becomes the foundation for Scandinavian culture that lasts all the way down to today.
With it, a premium also on hard work, the importance of hard work.
You can't survive if everybody isn't pulling their rope.
If everyone isn't pulling their weight.
Arthur Herman, forgive me, I've got to tell everybody the name.
The Viking Heart, How Scandinavians Conquered the World.