Letter: Don't rewrite history

Sir: Anything which makes history more attractive to young people ought to be welcomed, but the latest EC-funded CD-Rom appears to confuse making the past accessible with sanitising it ("Swashbuckling Vikings are written out of history", 9 May).

In addition to pointing out the hardly surprising fact that Viking raiders had families and did not always eat well, the curator of Denmark's national museum, Anna Pedersen, apparently thinks the Vikings "have been victims of a bad press... They might have pointed out that a lot of the places they took over were easy to attack"!

This type of rewriting of history makes the subject absurd. It could even become sinister. Imagine a 20th-century history CD-Rom explaining to schoolchildren that the Wehrmacht has had a bad press - after all, a lot of places Hitler took over did not put up any resistance, including Denmark.

MARK ALMOND

Oxford