The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

Michael Pye's The Edge of the World is a popular history for a broad general readership tracing the North Sea's role shaping the cultures, trade networks and religious history of the peoples surrounding it, including Viking religion's spread and Christianization across the region. As a work aimed at general readers rather than a specialist monograph, it synthesizes existing academic scholarship into an accessible narrative rather than presenting new primary-source research of its own, and Pye is a journalist and popular historian rather than an academic specialist in any one of the many fields the book touches. It is a reasonable entry point for the broad narrative sweep of North Sea religious and cultural history, with claims needing fine precision better checked against the specialist academic literature it draws on.