Vikings ho! I guess my real question is how "serious" you want to get? I can dump some pretty high level sources on you, but I will start with more accessible (though still academically valuable) sources. I will also note that I am biased towards Vikings and the Continent, so someone else might have some better sources for England and the Danelaw.

Note all of the sources I am giving are chock-full of leads to other sources. Follow foot notes and bibliographies and track down these authors author works for even more stuff.

So probably the best place to start is the massive tome The Viking World. It is a collection of a whole ton of very short, very accessible introductory essays on a wide variety of topics. Everything from ship building, to gender, to coinage, to the Danelaw, to Islam and the Vikings etc. and so forth.

If you are looking for good monographs, Anders Winroth's newest book The Age of the Vikings is very nice, though pretty heavily weighted towards the Scandinavian side of the equation (never forget it takes two to make a Viking raid!).

In terms of primary sources there are any number of good translations of things like the Poetic Eddas, the Eldar Eddas, and the Sagas. A quick amazon search will turn up some things. Scandinavian sagas are great, though it is worth remembering that they are largely post-factual accounts of events, set down in writing several centuries after the world they purport to describe. They are also literature with all the beauty and danger that implies from a historical standpoint, heh.

Another place you might look to for easy accessible primary sources is the Toronto Press reader The Viking Age: A Reader. It has a ton of excerpts, everything from Frankish historical sources, to Sagas, to runic inscriptions.

if you can get your hands on the British Museum's Vikings: Life and Legend you will get a lot of really beautiful images and accompanying essays by pretty much every major Viking scholar working today. It is quite accessible and again, really tremendously beautiful. That being said, its also a museum book so coffee table sized.

Lastly, I've heard good things about Graham Campbell's recent revision of his "pictoral" overview The Viking World though I haven't had a chance to check it out.

Anyway, hope that gives you some ideas of places to start. Sorry I don't have more in the way of "entertainment" I tend to be a little too close to the subject to be able to listen to media about Vikings. Someone else may have some suggestions though.

Happy raiding reading!

I really enjoyed Vikings! by Magnus Magnusson. It's all English, despite the name he worked in Britain, and he takes you through the archaeology of the Vikings when the book was written (it was published in the early 1980s). This one's a bit longer than the others I'm reccomending, but it's not overly long, it's exceptionally readable, and it gives you a great feel for the sort of things we know about the time period: also, it teaches you what sort of things won't be known, which is equally important.

Another short book I'd reccomend is the Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings. This one is much shorter, and it's presented in the form of a group of double pages, with a map on one side and text on the other. I found it useful for getting a sense about where the vikings had been and when: it's also a good starting point for further research.

A final book I'm very enthusiastic about is the Penguin Classics version of the Prose Edda. I say Penguin Classics for a reason: different publishers will do their editions differently, the translation varies, how it's presented changes, and so on. This is a great example of a 'source' for the vikings: it's a translation of a 13th century Icelandic nobleman's attempt to record his ancestors' mythology and put it into the context of his own life and beliefs. Contrary to how it might sound, this is really quite short, very easy to read and understand, and highly enjoyable. If you want to know about norse mythology, I can't think of a better place to start (mind you, I'm an enthusiastic amateur, not a professional).

These aren't the world's most comprehensive texts, but hopefully they should be a great place to start, and understand what about the vikings you might want to research further.

A lot of good references here: http://www.businesslawbasics.com/legal-quotes-week-viking-justice http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/

Generally, I would recommend all of the following:

Sagas/Norse literature

Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (transl. Lee Hollander, Univ. of Texas Press, 1991)

Landnamabok (transl. Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, Univ. of Manitoba Press, 2007)

Laxdaela Saga (transl. Magnus Magnusson and H. Palsson, Penguin Classics, 1969)

Egil’s Saga (transl. H. Palsson and P. Edwards, Penguin Classics, 1977)

Fagrskinna (transl. Alison Finlay, Brill, 2003)

Grettir’s Saga (transl. Denton Fox and H. Palsson, Univ. of Toronto Press, 2001)

Hrafnkel’s Saga (transl. H. Palsson, Penguin Classics, 1971)

Poetic Edda (transl. Lee Hollander, Univ. of Texas Press, 1986)

The Sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok (transl. Ben Waggoner, The Troth, 2009)

the Saga of the Volsungs (transl. Jesse Byock, Penguin Classics, 2000)

General History:

Eric Christiansen, The Norsemen in the Viking Age (Blackwell, 2006)

Robert Ferguson, The Vikings: A History (Penguin, 2010)

Angelo Forte et al., Viking Empires (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005)

Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings (2nd ed.) (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

Law and Society:

Peter Foote et al., Laws of Early Iceland: Grágás (2 volumes) (Univ. of Manitoba Press, 2007);

Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society, (Cornell Univ. Press, 1998);

William Ian Miller, especially Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Soceity in Saga Iceland (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997); An Eye for an Eye (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007); Faking It (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); and Losing It (Yale Univ. Press, 2011).

Religion

Anything by H.R. Ellis Davidson, including Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin, 1965) and The Road to Hell: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (1968)

Andy Orchard, Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend (Cassell, 1999)

John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals and Beliefs (Oxford Univ. Press, USA, 2002)

Rudolf Simek, A Dictionary of Northern Mythology (D.S. Brewer, 2000)

Technology and War:

Ian Heath, The Vikings (Osprey, 1985)

Mark Harrison, Viking Hersir (Osprey, 1993)

Keith Durham, Viking Longship (Osprey, 2002).

Can't really go wrong with anything by Thomas Downing Kendrick, John Lindow, Jesse Byock, Alex Woolf, Clare Downham, Judith Jesch, Else Mundal, Thomas Noonan, Roman Kovalev, Kevin Brook, Constantine Zuckerman, Omeljan Pritsak, Gareth Williams, Donnchadh O Corrain, Alison Finle, Kristen Wolf, Gabriel Turville-Petre, Dagfinn Skre, Wladyslaw Duczko, Anthony Faulkes, Andrew Jennings or Arne Kruse.