Best-selling historian tells the story of 'The Viking Heart' in involving new book. Author talk is Thursday.

Aug. 17—The promise of freedom unlocked an inner drive in these immigrants, who were ready to meet vast horizons of the American heartland. Its great empty spaces could not be more dangerous than the great empty spaces their Viking ancestors had crossed in their ships or settled in the wilds of Iceland and elsewhere. Here the Viking heart had room to set down roots and start anew. In addition, it was a place that could accommodate the Scandinavian impulse to find the sacred in the secular, the exalted in the mundane, a transcendent connection in places that might be seen as inhospitable and empty, an awareness of the depths present in nature ... nearly all Scandinavians have sensed that wild and untamed places offer an inner freedom and peace. — From "The Viking Heart"

Were your greats or great-greats from Sweden, Norway, Finland or Denmark? That means you share the Viking Heart, that elusive set of characteristics Arthur Herman discusses in his involving new book "The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30).

The author will talk about his book at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 19, via Zoom, presented by Minneapolis-based Norway House.

Herman is a bestselling historian and author of nine books including "Churchill," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In "Viking Heart," he uses new DNA research and archeological finds to tell the story of these sometimes-misunderstood people.

"The real Vikings were neither superheroes nor rampaging, bloodthirsty savages," he writes. "They were farmers, herders, and fishermen who turned to war and plunder to enrich themselves in a world where wealth was scarce and where ethical standards about how to get it were even scarcer."

While the Norsemen raiders were certainly given to looting and plundering, they were no worse in that respect than others of their age, he points out.

Herman writes of the Vikings' ability to be "in the right place at the right time," a knack first displayed at the end of the eighth century, "when they seized on Europe's vulnerability after the death of the Emperor Charlemagne to launch a series of daring overseas expeditions. Their raids reached east to Russia and as far west as Ireland with the goal of not only enriching themselves at others' expense but also finding new homes for their families — a constant theme in Scandinavian history."

An informal name for the Vikings history from the Middle Ages onward, Herman writes, might be "Scandinavians to the rescue." He points out that the descendants of the Vikings came to the aid of the Papacy in the 1000s, and in the 1100s they transformed their earlier paganism "into a powerful cultural force that would inspire Western music, art, and literature for centuries, right down to today."

They went on to save the Protestant Revolution, and "turned Protestantism itself into a powerful force for reshaping the future of humanity — what I have described as the Lutheran work ethic, which still characterizes the men and women of Contemporary Scandinavia," he writes.

What propelled these changes, Herman believes, was their Viking Heart characteristics of ingenuity, daring, resiliency and loyalty to family and community.

The story begins on a bright June day in 793, when monks of the monastery of Lindisfarne were attacked by "fierce men" who leaped over the sides of their ships armed with swords and battle-axes. Then Herman looks at the early world the Vikings made, Vikings and Christianity, Vikings into Scandinavians, the Viking Heart Empire, and eight chapters about "the great migration": when some 450,000 Scandinavians chased the "American dream" to this country in two decades.

Minnesotans will be especially interested in Herman's assertion that by the late 19th century, this state had become the center of Scandinavian America life, with Norwegians drawn to Minneapolis.

"By 1903," he writes, "it was the second-largest Scandinavian city in the world, after Stockholm. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes occupied large swaths of it, including the stretch from Washington Avenue to Cedar Avenue, known as 'Snoose Boulevard,' after its Scandinavian residents' favorite vice, snuff, or snoose"

While thousands of Scandinavians were making new lives in America, there was trouble back home when, in 1864, Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck went to war to get Denmark's two southernmost duchies, Slesvig and Holstein. As the Prussians crushed the Danes, neither Norwegians nor Swedes would come to the Danes' aid.

The lack of help from Norway and Sweden devastated playwright Henrik Ibsen, who had written pamphlets calling for war in support of Denmark.

"...the Scandinavian modernist movement, led by figures like Ibsen, August Strindberg, Georg Branes, and Edvard Munch, took root in the disillusionment and sense of betrayal that the war left in its wake; this mood would characterize Scandinavian arts and letters right down to the twentieth century," Herman writes.

"The Viking Heart" is a big, 470-page, easily-read insight into the history, culture and experiences of Scandinavians.