Episode 1 - Rollo and the Viking Age

They were the great success story of the Middle Ages, a footloose band of individual adventurers who appeared out of nowhere to blaze across the face of Dark Age Europe. In the course of two centuries the Normans launched a series of extraordinary conquests, transforming Anglo-Saxon England into Great Britain, setting up a powerful Crusader state in Antioch, and turning Palermo into the dazzling cultural and economic capital of the western Mediterranean. Their story, however, begins rather humbly in the fierce Viking Age, when a group of Scandinavian raiders came crashing into Charlemagne's empire. Join Lars Brownworth as he follows the ferocious warrior Rollo, the first Norman, who began life as a simple raider and ended it as a great lord of the West.

Thanks for this podcast series on for Norman History

I am a world history buff that has watched a few documentaries and read a couple books surrounding the Crusades so I am very familiar with the Normans, but I haven't until now listened to a series specifically on the Normans and their origins. All of it rings a bell and matches with my mind's rough timeline but the author adds some details and expands on what I already know. Thanks. Will keep listening to more episodes.