| Vikings |
| Northmen |
| Civilization, Viking. |
| Viking antiquities. |
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Library | Collection | Material Type | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Cobourg Branch | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction Book | 948 Pri | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
The definitive history of the Vikings -- from arts and culture to politics and cosmology -- by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise
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.
Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.
Author Notes
Neil Price is distinguished professor and chair of archaeology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has been researching, teaching, and writing on the Vikings for nearly thirty-five years and is the author of several books on the history of the Viking Age. He lives in Sweden.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Archaeologist Price (The Viking Way) leaves no stone unturned in this exhaustive chronicle of the ancient Scandinavian peoples collectively known as the Vikings. Drawing on discoveries made at archaeological digs and burial sites across Europe, as well as medieval sources including the Icelandic sagas of Snorri Sturluson and the observations of Arab traders, Price pushes back against romanticized notions of Viking culture that originated during the Enlightenment. He focuses instead on more material concerns, delivering extended discussions on jewelry found in graves, shipbuilding, alcohol consumption, and gender roles, including an unexpected queer reading of Viking relationships. The infamous Viking funeral (not nearly as prevalent as popular culture imagines, according to Price) is described in horrifying detail, as are raids on the English and Irish coasts that left monasteries and villages devastated. Price also documents Viking exploration of Iceland, Greenland, and Canada, and notes that some warriors made it as far east as Constantinople, where they served as guards to the Byzantine emperor. Though the writing occasionally falters under the weight of accumulated archaeological minutiae, the breadth and thoroughness of Price's research impresses. Readers interested in Viking culture should consider this monumental history a must-read. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
Scholars, like Vikings, can be a belligerent crowd. As Neil Price notes in the opening pages of Children of Ash and Elm, the field of Viking studies is "occasionally convulsed by ¿ squabbles", particularly between those specialising in textual sources and their colleagues who focus on material evidence. While Price the archaeologist falls into the latter camp, the beauty of his book is his ability to move across the disciplines. An expert synthesiser, he brings together much of the latest historical and archaeological research in order to illuminate the Viking world in all its chronological and geographical expanse. If the merits of the book ended here, it would still be well worth the read as the latest word in Viking age history. However, Price's aim is more ambitious: to present the Vikings on their own terms, through their sense of self and their psychological relationship to the world. This is no easy task, but he is a past master of getting inside the Norse mind: a previous book, The Viking Way, was a groundbreaking study of Scandinavian paganism in the late iron age. As well as the what and when of the Viking phenomenon, Price seeks to understand the how and why. As might be expected, this is an approach that demands subtle thinking. He observes the Vikings "as if through a prism, each turn of the glass producing new people, new reflections. Everyone had their own identity - their self-image - and its outward projection; some of them were familiar to us, others frighteningly alien". Such an approach has strong modern-day resonances: a multi-gendered, multi-ethnic account of the era that embraces diversity in the mental landscapes of human nature, telling a story of cultural transformations and influences criss-crossing in many directions. Yet equally Price is no apologist, and never shies away from the "horrendous" conditions that many experienced, including horrifying levels of violence, entrenched patriarchal oppression and human enslavement as the driving force that powered much of society. Price begins by examining the Vikings' sense of their place in the world ("Viking", in this context, refers to the general populace rather than the seaborne raiders with whom the term originates). He explores how they might have understood the qualities of personhood, the intricacies of gender and the cosmos as a whole, including religious beliefs and practices. From here, he begins to trace the sociopolitical developments that came together to spark the Viking phenomenon. The causes and origins of the Viking age are still relatively obscure and poorly understood; perhaps more than any scholar before him, Price skilfully navigates the "intersecting streams in Scandinavian society" that began to converge in the later decades of the 8th century, tracing them all the way back to their source. In seeking the deeper origins of the Viking age, he deftly connects different times and places all the way back to the fall of the western Roman empire. What follows in subsequent chapters is the progression from raiding to invasions, conquests and settlements, in the context of the piratical sea-kings and large-scale trading networks that were opening up across the world. By the end of the book, we have reached Iceland, Greenland and the North American seaboard, not to mention Constantinople, Russia and the Middle East. The dangers of such a big-picture synthesis cannot always be completely avoided; no wonder that Price himself calls the task a "daunting prospect" and speaks of "snapshots and brief visits in different times and places". On occasion, specific source difficulties - particularly in the textual record - can get glossed over, and regional differences elided. In the final few chapters, there is perhaps less of the vigour and sparkle that characterises the book as a whole, although what remains is still a strong account of the latest historical research. Not only a leading authority on the period, Price is also a wonderful writer, by turns philosophical, witty, lyrical and poignant. He possesses both an archaeologist's ability to interpret large quantities of scholarship and data, and the skill to translate it creatively. His vivid prose illuminates both the physical and the psychological dimensions of the early medieval north, while at the same time leaving space for uncertainty: the possibility of future discoveries and theories that will alter the picture yet again. Nor is he afraid to face up to the absences and random gaps in the source material (such as what their music sounded like), and the confusions and inconsistencies that come from dealing with human nature. 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.) The book contains many wonderful little details, some so tiny and precise that, as if witnessing a magic trick, the reader is left wondering just how the archaeologists managed to conjure them from the earth: a grave from 10th-century Denmark where the body was laid out in a coffin with an enormous wax candle placed on top, which carried on burning in the dark until the oxygen was gone. Others feel more like staged clues to a murder mystery: a boatload of dead Swedish warriors, their bodies strewn with gaming pieces, and the "king" gaming piece inserted into the mouth of one of the men. Yet others are testament to the remarkable coincidences and connections that make up history: two fragments of silk from two women's hair caps, one discovered in York, the other in Lincoln, which thanks to a fault in the weave can be traced to the same bale of Persian (or perhaps Chinese) silk. Given the spotlight Price throws on all that was seen and unseen in the Viking world, it is appropriate that he dedicates the book to the "fylgjur, all of them". These were the ancestral guardians of a family, inherited down the generations, guiding their descendants' every move. On whatever level this dedication is interpreted, one suspects that Price has made the fylgjur very proud.
Kirkus Review
A fresh history of the Vikings and their world. The Vikings, writes Uppsala University archaeologist Price, whose books include The Viking Way, were "as individually varied as every reader of this book." Yet, he adds, it's possible to advance some generalizations about them. They regarded the world as a hostile place to be met with violence that was supernaturally empowered by their gods. The Vikings thought of themselves as children of the great ash tree Yggdrasill, "the steed of the terrible one," an epithet for Odin. Over the course of three centuries, they ranged over an impressively large territory in a number of guises, from traders and soldiers to raiders and legendarily ferocious fighters. One Norse woman lived in Greenland, meeting First Peoples, and later visited Rome and met the pope; moving to Iceland after becoming a nun, she was "probably the most traveled woman on the planet." In this elegantly conceived, constantly surprising narrative, Price charts this evolution. When Viking merchants landed near wealthy British monasteries to attend trade fairs, one of their number, thinking hard about the possibilities, likely turned to his fellows and said something like, "Why don't we just take it?" So effectively did they put the fear in their targets that the English were soon calling them "slaughter-wolves." With clarity and verve, Price examines various aspects of Viking society, including the place of women and transgender people on the battlefield and other venues of warrior society; the structure of warrior cults such as the berserkers; what Viking mass burials tell us about the people thus interred; and, especially, the structure of the Viking economy, which was enriched by the widespread application of slavery. The author also considers the last generations of Vikings as pirates whose society, though founded on violence, was also definitively democratic. An exemplary history that gives a nuanced view of a society long reduced to a few clichés. (16-page color insert; maps) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Price (archaeology, Uppsala Univ., Sweden; The Viking Way) sets out to uncover Vikings myths and legends in order to create a nuanced view of the Viking Age (750--1050 CE). Using research taken from across various disciplines, such as archaeology, sociology, and economics, Price attempts to get at how the Vikings viewed themselves and how they reshaped the world. 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. Separated into three sections focusing on how the Vikings viewed themselves from gender identities to burial rites; to the Viking phenomenon itself of raids and expansion; and finally, to the transformations of both themselves and the world at the end of the era, this is an engaging and engrossing read. VERDICT Exhaustively researched using cross-disciplinary resources, this breathtaking, epic history will appeal to all types of readers.--Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO