Viking

Viking Stand mixers are fabricated by the Viking Corporation. Viking begun as a major appliance manufacturer supplying mercantile ranges designed for residential use. It was only natural that they would look at kitchen stand mixers as a natural fit to the product line they offer consumers. Viking has two basic models the VSM 500 and the VSM 700. The main divergences are the power of the motor and the mixer bowl sizes. The VSM500 comes with a 5 quart mixer bowl and 800 watts of power. The VSM700 has a 7 quart mixer bowl and 1000 watts of power. Both Viking stand mixers have the same popular features, colors and affixations or accessories. This may be rather handy if you are moving up from the VSM500 and have all the affixations already. The model reviewed for this article was the Viking VSM 700 Professional Series. I considered a number of components for this review; power, mixer bowl size, features, warranty, and product reviews:

Power: The VSM700 features a powerful metal gear driven motor that has 1000 watts of power and three speeds. Metal gears last longer than plastic promising years of authenti service.

Mixer Bowl Size: 7 quarts

Accessories: comes with 7 quart stainless steel bowl, paddle, whisk and dough hooks. Additional affixations available include a blender, feed processor/slicer, pasta maker, and sausage maker. The splash guard is also an optional attachment available for further and added cost.

Features: Viking has a little feature that most stand mixers do not. Easy glide wheels on the base of the mixer grant for easy motion on your counter top. This is a nice feature giving careful consideration to that a good industrial size stand mixer like the VSM700 weighs approximately 27 pounds.

Tilt back construction allows the mixer affixations to be raised and lowered into the bowl easily. The affixations stay above the bowl so that drips don’t get on the counter. You may lock it in the up or down position.

Viking stand mixers come in four basic colors; black, white, stainless gray and bright red

Warranty: Viking warranties the motor and parts for 12 full months from the date of buy under normal household use. The paint or finish, and ornamental items are only covered for the introductory 90 days from the date of purchase.

Cost: Viking VMS700 Stand Mixers purchased directly from Viking are listed at $604.95. They may be found at other web sites at around $550.

Product Reviews: 3 stars out of 5 on e-pinions.com total of 5 reviews. 4 stars out of 5 on amazon.com total of 3 reviews. 5 stars out of 5 on cooking.com with a total of 34 ratings.

Overall the Viking stand mixers compare favorably to household favorites such as KitchenAid, Bosch and Cuisinart. All four brands have intensely truehearted users and compare favorably for versatility, durability and price. If price is an issue for you and you actually want a Viking stand mixer then consider the VSM500. It has a 5 quart bowl and an 800 watt motor. And it sells for with regards to $100 less than the Viking VSM700. It may do everything the 700 series may do but just a little bit littler batches. If you don’t need the huge capacity of the more prominent mixer then you in all likelihood won’t miss the 1000 watt motor and the 7 quart mixer bowl.

Viking

From BooklistSeverin offers the initial installment in a projected trilogy. Thorgils, son of Norse chieftain Leif the Lucky and fey Celtic noblewoman Thorgunna, is shipped to Greenland and brought up by a series of tutors who school him in the traditionalisti customs and religion of the Vikings. Gifted with the second sight he inherited from his mother, Thorgils struggles to fulfill his fate in a world torn asunder by feuding factions and the introduction of Christianity into a pagan culture. Stretching back and forth throughout the Old World and new frontiers, this fantastical historical adventure serves up a satisfying blend of action, intrigue, and suspense. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review“this fantastical historical adventure serves up a satisfying blend of action, intrigue, and suspense.” — Booklist

About the AuthorTim Severin, explorer, traveller, author, film-maker and lecturer has made a good deal of expeditions, most lately in search of Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe, and has written books with regards to all of them. Odinn’s Child , volume one of the VIKING trilogy, is his original novel.

Viking Pic

Viking Picture

Viking Image

Viking Photo

Most helpful client reviews

21 of 21 persons found the following review helpful.
Great Moments from the Icelandic Sagas
By Stuart W. Mirsky
Tim Severin has cobbled together great scenes from Norse saga history to construct a novel which takes his fictionalized protagonist, Thorgils Leifsson (illegitimate and somewhat mysterious son of Leif Eiriksson, according to Erik the Red’s Saga), from his earliest days as a babe in Orkney and Iceland to childhood in Greenland and Vinland and then back to the European world in the last days of the Viking era.

From cautiously chosen and fleshed out scenes from Eyrbyggja Saga, when the mysterious, uncanny and more or less overbearing Thorgunna comes to live briefly amid the Icelanders, to the respective North American expeditions described in the two extant Vinland sagas (Eirik the Red’s Saga and the Tale of the Greenlanders), Severin manages to insert young Thorgils into a series of huge moments in viking history. We follow him back to Iceland, where he insinuates himself into the final legal battle in the escalating feuds of Njal’s Saga, and then takes up with the shrewd Icelandic chieftain, Snorri the Priest, and gets to participate in one of Snorri’s famous escapades when he cleans out a nest of local vikings by strength of arms (recounted in Eyrbyggja Saga). Then our hero, Thorgils, hooks up once more with Kari Solmundarsson from Njal’s Saga. Kari is the sole survivor of the attack which burned Njal and his wife, along with their sons, daughter, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren to death in Njal’s farmhouse. Kari, who alone escaped the carnage in the black smoke of the flames, swears retribution on the burners and Thorgils gets to go along and witness numerous of the famous viking’s feats of arms as Kari pursues his single minded objective. Then it’s on to the Battle of Clontarf, from the Orkneyinga Saga, as King Sigtrygg Silkybeard, Norse king of Dublin, casts his lot in war versus Brian Boru, High King of the Irish in yet another famous viking moment. Along the way, Thorgils manages to cross paths, even though briefly, with the notorious Grettir the Strong from Grettir’s Saga who is, of course, Iceland’s most famous and admired fugitive, the hero cum anti-hero par excellence.

If you recognise the sagas, there are few surprises here altho Severin does a nice occupation of fleshing out details and patching the disparate sequences together in a convincing narrative skein. Unlike Severin, of course, the saga writers were famously sparing with words and Severin makes up for that with lovingly layered on detail all his own. To make it all hang together Severin ought to naturally make a good deal of selections and so he changes the details here and there to suit his story. Fredyis’ famous killings in Vinland, for instance, are modified more or less even though Severin provides a very plausible description of how these come about.

He also chooses to receive the reference in Erik the Red’s Saga to Thorgils’ presence in Iceland “a year before” the Frodriver Marvels, thereby equating the Thorgunna identified as Thorgils’ mother, Leif’s summer paramour in the Hebrides, with the Thorgunna who came to Iceland a few years later and was supposedly responsible for the hauntings remembered in the Frodriver Marvels described in Eyrbyggja Saga. That the Thorgunna of Frodriver fame is apparently a much older woman than a young man like Leif might have been attracted to, and is not brought up as having a son, Thorgils, in Eyrbyggja Saga, is disregarded as Severin sticks with this somewhat questionable reference in Erik the Red’s Saga. Still, he makes his decision convincing by proposing this Thorgunna might have been something of a nymphomaniac with the hots for a still green-behind-the-ears Leif Eriksson.

Overall, Severin does a more than creditable occupation and his writing is solid, though I thought the story started falling apart after Clontarf when our hero finds himself on the loose in Ireland for a number of years. The Irish sequences felt too didactic to me, even equated to the sequences lifted from the sagas. Indeed, in the end the story is little more than a series of these famous saga events strung together through the artifice of an old Norse monk who has written it all down as a personal memoir, while hiding out in a Christian monastery, and afterwards secreting his private manuscript amid the official ones in the scriptorium. Well, it’s an interesting notion and it provides a creditable basis for the story’s other than as supposed or expected noteworthy coincidences and very un-saga like voice.

Overall I liked this one even though I found it slow going in places, specially in the final third of the tale, and could ofttimes predict what was coming as one great saga scene was telegraphed into the next. If you are not that intimate with the sagas and you like Norse tales, this one is in all probability a good choice.

Here are a few other comparatively recent novels that partake of the saga tradition and it is motifs:

Saga: A Novel Of Medieval Iceland
The Greenlanders
Two Ravens

SWM
author of The King of Vinland’s Saga

18 of 19 humans found the following review helpful.
A must read for Heathens
By Frodhi Harson
A strong firstborn fiction venture from an established history writer.

Tim Severin’s historical accuracy is splendid in this novel which follows the exploits of the historical Thorgils, an illegitimate son of Erik the Red. His travels take him from Greenland and Vinland to Iceland and at long last Ireland, tracing his childhood and later teen years through the world depicted in the Icelandic Sagas.

Thorgils, consecrated to Odinn, holds to his Heathen faith even though a amount of time which finds the world around him speedily getting Christianized. As a innovative Heathen there is much in this tale which resonates deeply with me and leaves me marveling if the author himself might not be Heathen.

Strongly plotted and vividly described, I found Severin’s style in this volume to be more suitable to jouranlism than fiction, which is why I gave it four starts rather than five. Happily the second volume of this planned trilogy does not warrant the same criticism. Though a good deal of of the secondary characters are more or less flat, Thorgils himself is complex and well developed.

13 of 14 humans found the following review helpful.
Amazing and also accurate
By Frimann Stefansson
This surely was a outstanding read and was even better since I am an Icelander. He manages to make a very good historical novel by weaving a lot of events and characters from the Sagas together.

I take place to recognise rather a bit in regards to the history of the time and Severin has plainly done his exploration very well. I think around 90% of characters and events are supposed to have actually happened according to the Icelandic Sagas. Of course it is not clear how much of the Sagas is true but in all probability most of them.

I highly reccommend this book and can’t wait for the rest!

See all 15 client reviews…