Expanding the Viking World: A Review of "River Kings" by Cat Jarman
In River Kings, Cat Jarman takes the reader on a forensic journey that begins with a single carnelian bead and expands into a sweeping reappraisal of the Viking world. Drawing from the layered strata of archaeology, bioarchaeology, and material culture, Jarman challenges the geographic and intellectual boundaries that have long defined Viking studies. Rather than adhering to the well-worn dichotomy of western raiders and eastern traders, she proposes a cohesive, transcontinental Viking Age that runs not just from Scandinavia to Western Europe, but all the way to the trading hubs of the Middle East and South Asia.
A methodological commitment to material evidence is at the heart of Jarman's narrative. Her background as a bioarchaeologist enables her to read the past not from the top down but from the soil up. The book's central motif, a small bead unearthed in a mass grave at Repton, serves as a narrative device that ties together disparate histories, ranging from Viking winter camps in England to the bead markets of India, from the icy rivers of the Dnieper to the diplomatic embassies of Constantinople.
Her application of cutting-edge scientific techniques strengthens this commitment. Jarman employs isotope analysis to determine geographical origins, ancient DNA studies to identify ancestry and familial relationships, and refined carbon dating methods for issues like the marine reservoir effect. These bioarchaeological approaches allow her to reinterpret sites like the Repton mass grave, revealing connections and origins that would otherwise remain invisible. By combining scientific research and traditional archaeological evidence, Jarman builds a more grounded and nuanced picture of Viking movement and identity that challenges long-established assumptions about their geographical reach and cultural composition.
Through this object-driven framework, Jarman skillfully builds broader meaning from the smallest fragments of material evidence without sacrificing scholarly weight. She is part of a growing group of historians and archaeologists, including Eleanor Barraclough, whose Embers of the Hands offers a complementary lens and uses innovative approaches to revisit and reframe the Viking Age. While Barraclough explores how artefacts can illuminate the period's lived experience, Jarman focuses on using bioarchaeological science to expand the geographical and conceptual map of Viking influence. Both contribute to a broader shift from insular, text-bound histories toward a more expansive, materially grounded understanding of the past, emphasizing movement, contact, and the unexpected reach of early medieval networks.
This is a revisionist history in the best sense. Jarman does not reject written sources outright; she draws judiciously on Arabic geographers, Byzantine emperors, and Icelandic saga writers. However, she uses them cautiously and often as counterpoints to the archaeological record. For example, her treatment of the Birka warrior grave deftly navigates the ongoing debates about gender, burial customs, and identity. Where some scholars see ambiguity, Jarman insists on complexity. This nuance is a recurring strength.
Even more politically charged is Jarman's navigation of the "Normanist" debate surrounding the origins of the Rus'. She acknowledges how the interpretation of Viking influence in Eastern Europe has been weaponized by competing nationalist agendas and shaped by political regimes from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. Rather than avoiding this "political minefield," Jarman confronts it directly, demonstrating how scientific evidence can offer new perspectives in debates where written sources have been interpreted exhaustively, often tendentiously. This willingness to engage with historiographical controversy strengthens her broader argument about East-West connections.
Jarman resists the urge to collapse new evidence into old frameworks, preferring to leave the reader with the sense that the past is not a puzzle to be solved, but a pattern still forming.
Particularly striking is her recontextualization of the Viking relationship with the East. The eastern trade routes, which have long been treated as peripheral to the central drama of conquest and colonization, are recast here as essential arteries of cultural exchange. This culminates in her treatment of the Vikings' entanglement with Constantinople, where Norse warriors served in the Varangian Guard, leaving behind graffiti in Hagia Sophia and impressions in Byzantine military memory. By triangulating archaeological data with DNA analysis and early medieval treaties, Jarman strips away the mystique surrounding these contacts, revealing a practical and persistent infrastructure of mobility and influence. It is not the romance of distant lands that draws the Vikings East, but silver, opportunity, and negotiated power.
Jarman's exploration of the unintended consequences of Viking mobility is particularly compelling. She draws striking parallels between medieval and modern forms of globalization, noting how expansive trade networks facilitated cultural exchange and biological transmission. Her discussion of archaeological evidence for diseases like smallpox that spread along Viking routes resonates powerfully in our pandemic-conscious era. This bioarchaeological lens reveals how the Viking Age marked not just a cultural and economic watershed, but also an epidemiological one; further evidence of the interconnectedness that Jarman places at the center of her reframed Viking narrative.
If the book has a limitation, it lies not in what it covers but in what it deliberately omits. Readers looking for a comprehensive survey of Viking activities in the British Isles or the North Atlantic will find those chapters largely absent. But this omission is a conscious choice, not a gap. Jarman is not fully retelling the Viking story; she is redrawing its map. What emerges is not a replacement of the old narrative, but a rebalancing, an insistence that the eastward gaze was not a detour but a defining trajectory of the Viking Age.
River Kings is a deft, thoughtful, and often revelatory work. It balances scholarly insight with narrative clarity, presenting a compelling case for reevaluating our understanding of the Viking world. Jarman does not romanticize her subjects—traders, migrants, mercenaries, enslaved, and free. She humanizes them, and in doing so, restores the scale and complexity of a world that was always more connected than we had imagined.
You make it sound so interesting. It's a period of time I know so little about. It's hard, isn't it, when you are a voraciously curious person, to strike a balance between the period you want to focus on, and so many competing topics
This book is one of the sources I most frequently refer to for my own writing here on Substack. It's an absolutely unparalleled look at the cutting edge of archaeology, and a great statement regarding just how much we still have to learn about the history of the Viking Age!