Right, and there's the added bonus of the author not being Scandinavian himself. History classes in schools in every country probably follow the same general p

Right, and there's the added bonus of the author not being Scandinavian himself. History classes in schools in every country probably follow the same general pattern, and if you live in a western country I would expect everyone starts with the ancients, Egypt, Greece, Rome... But if you grew up in Scandinavia, after the fall of Rome you would generally jump straight into the Viking age, because it's at this point that history stops being about them, the others, and starts being about us. The Viking age is when we became a people, it's when our history starts, it's the moment when we burst onto the world stage and got noticed by others. It's at this point in time that we ceased being generic north-Germanic settlers and became our own culture. This watershed moment legitimises our modern nation states, because this is when it all began. "Maybe you shouldn't romanticise this time period as much as you do!" ᚠᚢᚲᚲ ᛟᚠᚠ, ᛞᛁᛈᛊᚺᛁᛏ.