Encyclopaedia of the Viking Age

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly flawed but still worthwhile
Review: I've read the whole of the section for A and just started on B (about 30 pages) and there is a lot of good information in this book - both for the less knowledgeable and for those whose subject this is but who could do with a quick reference work. There are also useful bibliographical references and the black and white photographs are good.

What is surprising though is the awful typography - yes, this is important because firstly the fonts used for this book don't appear to have the very important Old Norse letter eth - ð - resulting in using eths from another font (which looks absolutely awful) and secondly, all the very important Scandinavian letters like ö and ä are used seemingly at random - sometimes words have them and sometimes they don't. This is not a minor detail: it amounts essentially to misspelling important place names and the like. Whether this is the author's or the publisher's fault I don't know.

Furthermore, anglicization of Scandinavian names and words is bad enough, but even worse when it is done inconsistently, as in this book - some names are given in Old Norse, others in their modern English "equivalents". Very sloppy and strange.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly flawed but still worthwhile
Review: I've read the whole of the section for A and just started on B (about 30 pages) and there is a lot of good information in this book - both for the less knowledgeable and for those whose subject this is but who could do with a quick reference work. There are also useful bibliographical references and the black and white photographs are good.

What is surprising though is the awful typography - yes, this is important because firstly the fonts used for this book don't appear to have the very important Old Norse letter eth - ð - resulting in using eths from another font (which looks absolutely awful) and secondly, all the very important Scandinavian letters like ö and ä are used seemingly at random - sometimes words have them and sometimes they don't. This is not a minor detail: it amounts essentially to misspelling important place names and the like. Whether this is the author's or the publisher's fault I don't know.

Furthermore, anglicization of Scandinavian names and words is bad enough, but even worse when it is done inconsistently, as in this book - some names are given in Old Norse, others in their modern English "equivalents". Very sloppy and strange.