The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

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The writing hums with life as Price summons up the voices of the past. (On the Gotland picture stones: “That’s my father, and there’s his father, and the weathered stone by the brook is my great-grandfather. We’ve always been here, and when my time comes, I know what my story will show.”) He includes evocative, often humorous explorations of the pagan myths. (On the god Odin: “He will probably sleep with your wife or, just possibly, your husband.”) There are also comical asides to the scholarly debates. (Price imagines monks leaning over a monastery wall watching the raiders approach, pondering: “What do you think, are they warriors, or more like militia?”) Enjoyably loose definitions also appear alongside the scholarly rigour. (He bases his own personal definition of what constitutes a “town” on his appalling sense of direction: if he could get lost in it, it’s probably a town.) Also, no politising. Which is a brilliant as too many now seek to place a modern day political stamp on heathen subjects, which is kind of missing the point. Norse has been adopted by those who seek to use it ,by misinterpretation, for means of hate on both sides. If those people were to listen to this, they would be appalled, as some doesn't fit with their narrative , the same for gatekeepers who have read little and refuse to accept anything further than what they read or heard once, or watched on a show. An immense undertaking from an expert who has studied the Vikings for almost 35 years, this is a masterful piece of work that seeks to present the historical Vikings as distinct from the caricatures of pop culture.... An engaging and engrossing read. Exhaustively researched using cross-disciplinary resources, this breathtaking, epic history will appeal to all types of readers."— Library Journal Eastern Roman Empire, 565 CE at death of Justinian: limited to Greece, Italy, Balkans south of the Danube, western Turkey; none of France, Germany, or England; only the southernmost part of Spain. p. ix This book has kept me company as I travel to work and while working at home on my little craft business. I have been a norse pagan for nearly 30 years and all perspectives are always sort after. This is a rather comprehensive work, looking into the amazing wide world of the differing viking societies, the religion, the transition to Christianity, how far their global reach truly was. It is great for the curious-about-viking away from the romantic notions and myths about a people who were well organised, inventive and intelligent, building up trading networks, social and political structures, some that would be found abhorrent by todays standards, but, no culture was perfect all those centuries ago. They have truly left their mark on the world with beautiful art and crafts, language, morality, politics etc but, retain that element of mystery as archeology is still to uncover more and interpretation found.

Price, a Sweden-based archaeologistandacademic, is adept at bringing this cosmopolitanandbrutal world to life, interweaving many complicated strandsofhistory with his own experience in the field along with poetic meditations on a peopleandtime long since passed.” Only very rarely does a book earn a one star review from me. This one did, and when I say it earned it I mean it. It isn't that Neil Price doesn't know his stuff. He does. He's clearly an expert in the field. But he doesn't write a history here, by any accurate measurement. He writes a sociological dissertation egregiously slanted with 21st century academic liberal bias. The problem here is not that it is an academic work, for I can accept that and even appreciate it for the most part. Nor is the problem that he is a liberal academic. I've read hundreds of works of history and biography authored by liberal academics. It is that he so blatantly and horrifically brings those biases into what is represented as a highly accurate placing of the Vikings into their own culture and time. Het stereotiepe beeld van een woest bebaarde, met een bijl zwaaiende krijger met een helm met hoorns blijft niet overeind. Integendeel, Neil Price weet op bedaarde manier veel nieuwe inzichten te geven in de wereld van de Vikingen die ik op veel punten moest bijstellen. In die zin is deze Nieuwe Geschiedenis waarlijk nieuw en gaf het me goede inzichten in het Vikingtijdperk. Door deze ervaring en kennis kan hij een levendig beeld schetsen van de Vikingwereld, ondanks dat dit toch als een wetenschappelijk boek kan gezien worden. De schrijver doet duidelijk veel moeite om zijn werk zo toegankelijk mogelijk te maken, zonder in te boeten op kwaliteit: er zijn verschillende foto’s toegevoegd, alsook een aantal pagina’s in kleurendruk, en daarnaast zijn er verschillende Vikingroddels en allerhande verhalen in opgenomen (legendes, vertalingen van Runen uit het dagelijkse leven, …), wat de geschiedenis concreter en dichterbij brengt. Ook zijn vertelstijl is vlot, en met hier en daar een vleugje humor. As Neil Price shows in his colorful, revelatory new book, we are almost always looking at the Vikings the wrong way around.... He may know more about medieval Scandinavia than anyone else alive, and he aims to show us these fascinating people as they saw themselves, not as they were perceived by those on the sharp end of their robbery.... Thousands of books have been published about the Vikings — this is one of the very best."— Sunday Times (UK)Price's factual narration and decades' worth of research make it easy to see why it won both The Times of London and The Sunday Times'"History Book of the Year" for 2022.

The new elites who rose to power in the 5th and 6th centuries claimed descent from Odin, Freyr, and the other gods. pp. 208–210. Remains of a temple at Uppåkra, Sweden, date from the 3rd through 11th centuries CE. pp. 211–213. In de eeuwen sinds de grote plundertochten is het beeld van de Vikingen vele malen bijgesteld - en aangepast. In de 18e en 19e eeuw werd het beeld, onder invloed van nationalistische en romantische denkbeelden, neergezet van een edele wilde. De nazi's eigenden zich een vals arisch archetype toe. Maar al deze perspectieven gaan voorbij aan hoe zij de wereld zelf zagen. Wie waren zij werkelijk, wat dreef hen en hoe dachten zij? Op die laatste vragen wil Neil Price een antwoord geven. This book is the closest thing I have found to a time machine. It brilliantly clears the fogofthe past from the Viking era. Extremely well written…if you are seeking an accessible, yet definitiveandup-to-date book on the Vikings, this is the one you want.”And there's that tall one again, good-looking despite the scar, with the gold-hilted blade (which he didn't have last year). This is the third ship he's sailed with, and he's got another stripe on his teeth. Ignore that frightened girl he brought home with him--that's just to be expected, and anyway she can't even speak the language; and he does keep looking at you. But you'll be the judge of where that might lead." Neil Price is a Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at the University of Uppsala and his other books include “The Archaeology of Shamanism” (which has been on my to-read list for a couple of years now) and “The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia”, which I found about shortly before I started reading “Childrens of Ash and Elm”, and sounds like a must-have title too. The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

Round trip, Denmark to England, 14 days by Viking longship, weather permitting. A 24-meter (79-foot)-long, 5-meter (16-foot)-wide 32-oar funeral longship, circa 890, in Harald Finehair's reign, was found in 1880. A 30-meter (98-foot)-long warship for an 80-man crew, with a draft of just 1 meter, from the 11th century, was found in Denmark. The largest Viking warship yet found is from the early 11th century, 32 meters (105 feet) long, for a single-watch crew of 80, that could've been doubled for war. Warships with sails from as early as 750 CE have been found. pp. 197–201. In winter, people and their animals used iron crampons on shoes or hooves.

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Early life: These children of Ash and Elm knew how to rotate crop and animal husbandry. They had idiosyncrasies in clothes, decorations, and life in general but they were not barbaric. They had elaborate ship-burial ritual recorded by a visiting Arab. This gets archeological confirmations later. Life was not easy in the far north. They had suffered one of the 10 largest eruptions in the past 7000 years and had 3 years of volcano winter (536-539). Together with plague, population dropped by 1/2. It’s not hard to understand why they took to piracy. Over time, there was a rise for the Sea King who united different tribes into a hydrarchy.

Another thing of major value here is that Neil Price does not do what so many scholars before him have done; he doesn't separate things into different arenas. This book makes it clear that the same people conquering Iceland and sailing to North America were also present in Russia at the same. This is of great importance to a beginner in this time period, in my opinion. What is one thing the author is very good at, is asking questions, or creating new interpretations, of archaeological situations and material culture, for example I was really captivated by his idea of funerals as drama, the sacrificed animals, humans, the notable dead and all his/her belongings - all characters or set pieces.

In the unlikely event you only read one history book in 2020, the new book by Neil Price on The History of the Vikings should be it.

Mid-term in the grant, the first general book derived from the project has now been published, a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Viking Age, Children of Ash and Elm. But it must be emphasized that these were gradual processes, not just in quality but kind: Price emphasizes the synthesizing tendencies of, uh, Viking-Age Culture throughout the book. This is alongside the other achievement of the book, in line with the other task of the historian: the delight in particular detail. Take, for instance, one evangelical text: Verdict: Price, as an author, is about as skillful and masterful as Thor is with Mjölnir. This book is a must-read for all lovers of Vikings.