The British Museum’s Vikings: part provincial exhibit, part gripping drama

Exhibitions are made for two main reasons: education and entertainment. Although I recognise the importance of education I am, by nature, a devotee of pleasure and want people to enjoy what they see in museums — not just feel that they must learn from it. Great exhibitions marry the two impulses effortlessly, and on balance the Vikings show, supported by BP, in the marvellous new Sainsbury Exhibition Gallery at the BM, is a great exhibition, though it does rather fall into two sections, the first somewhat more earnest than the last. But this also has the effect of significant build-up: the first half is like Sir Les Patterson and Sandy Stone warming the audience before Dame Edna appears after the interval. For it is only in the second half of the show that the sea really arrives: the crucial ambience for a seafaring nation and a sea-based culture.

The exhibition opens to the droning of Norse sagas with a copper alloy ship brooch from Denmark of the period 800–1050, a rather beautiful affair of opposed dragons’ heads. This, the toy boats nearby and a couple of pieces of intriguing ship graffiti are the only indications in this first section that water and maritime ascendancy were the very essence of the Viking empire. German by descent, and based in Scandinavia, they were great marine explorers. These expansionist raiders and traders, these sea wolves, were wide-ranging and omnivorous in their rapine plundering across Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands, from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean. The show concentrates on the heart of the Viking Age, from the late 8th century to the early 11th, and emphasises the diversity of its cultural connections mostly through stolen artefacts. One Viking hoard, for example, the recently discovered Vale of York hoard (found near Harrogate in 2007 by metal detector, and shown here in its entirety for the first time), contains Russian jewellery, Islamic coins and a gilded silver Frankish cup.