NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of William Rosen's The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century (Viking, 2014). The preview consists of chapter 1, "The Fury of the Northmen," which traces the career of the Vikings from their beginning to the Battle of Hastings. Rosen argues, "The great achievements of the Viking Age were almost entirely enabled by the impersonal workings of climate."
The reviewer for Nature writes, "A kink in Europe's climate during the fourteenth century indirectly triggered a seven-year cataclysm that left six million dead, William Rosen reveals in this rich interweaving of agronomy, meteorology, economics and history. ... Rosen deftly delineates the backstory and the perfect storm of heavy rains, hard winters, livestock epidemics, and war leading to the catastrophe."