The Festschrift is often an ungainly beast. When the principal aim of a collected volume is to pay tribute to the honorand, one cannot expect too much in the way of thematic coherency and balance between the papers; often, too, the ability of the contributors to supply finished studies of equal weight varies considerably, and the articles can therefore be of uneven quality. In light of such all-too-familiar experiences, the editors of the Festschrift for Professor James Graham-Campbell, FSA, merit praise and congratulations for having allowed their authors the leeway – no doubt in terms of time as well as space – to produce a volume in which the substance and value of the papers is both remarkably high and unusually consistently so.

The result is a colossal tome. The forty-four academic papers together with preliminary material that includes a bibliography of James Graham-Campbell's publications total a thousand pages. It is not appropriate or practical here to discuss individual contributions or arguments, and indeed it would be invidious to shape an evaluative characterisation of the collection by personal areas of interest. The honorand is renowned as an expert in the archaeology of the Viking period; with that at its core, the chronological range of the studies included nonetheless spans at least a millennium from the late Roman period to the High Middle Ages. Geographically, the ‘northern world’ proves to be centred very firmly on Britain and Ireland, although extending from Iceland to Iberia and Italy, the western Continent and, of course, Scandinavia. The westerly focus of the volume is reflected most sharply by the absence of any discussions centred on the Viking expansion to eastern Europe and the Asian trade routes.

The papers are grouped into four sections. The largest of these by far is that on ‘Objects’ (twenty papers), ranging from individual items of jewellery to groups of weaponry, implements, ceramics and vessels. Collectively, these papers provide a valuable demonstration of the potential and importance of artefact studies, although, taken as a whole, the inevitably substantial and unco-ordinated descriptive component of the section dims its effect a little. Conversely, the six papers in the section on ‘Hoards’ produce a more coherent and effective cumulative impression, even though they vary markedly in character, from direct empirical discussion and analysis of individual hoards to contextual and historical discussions. The two remaining sections, ‘Place’ and ‘Style, Symbol and Meaning’, with eight papers each, are more miscellaneous and appear more artificially formed – but still contain some thoroughly interesting and significant contributions, and indeed a number of appropriately juxtaposed and comparable papers.

It is in fact the especially high quality of this volume that prompts a final comment, returning to its genre as a Festschrift. The editors presumably did not plan it as such a large book. One consequence of the number who accepted invitations to contribute must have been the greater time needed to complete the work, poignantly reflected in Else Roesdahl's paper on Jelling, submitted a year before startling new excavation results from the perimeter structures began to appear in 2007. The price of the volume is staggering. Even in an avowedly ‘research-led’ Russell Group university, it is hard to justify spending more than £200 of the library budget on a single book of this eclectic kind. If the desiderata of access, impact and knowledge-transfer mean at heart what the words would imply, it is scarcely consistent with them for useful papers to be enclosed in books that are too expensive for more than a handful of institutions to afford, so that students who wish to access them are likely to face additional costs for travel and library admission or making copies. It would be good for the academic world collectively to think about alternative, at least equally appropriate, ways of honouring a respected colleague. The voicing of this opinion is not, however, intended in any way to distract or detract from the tributes justly paid here to James Graham-Campbell as scholar, colleague, teacher, mentor and friend.