A History of the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price

A History of the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price

A "thrilling" (Wall Street Journal) history of the Vikings by a pre-eminent scholar

The Viking Age saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the 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 writers, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more.

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, and beliefs to the lands and peoples they encountered. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is a remarkable history of the Vikings and their time.

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.

Review Quotes:

"Not the least of Price's achievement is to rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for the Vikings--theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrifice and slavery, as Price makes abundantly clear--but by restoring their rich and strange particularity....I'll long remember Price's evocation of the wafer-thin squares of gold, stamped with images of otherworldly beings, that adorned the great halls where visitors drank and fought and recited poetry. Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something similar here."-- Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, The Best Books We Read in 2020

"Price, a Sweden-based archaeologist and academic, is adept at bringing this cosmopolitan and brutal world to life, interweaving many complicated strands of history with his own experience in the field along with poetic meditations on a people and time long since passed."-- Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review (Staff Pick)

"Scholarly, colourful and often remarkably funny, this is history at its very best, a richly decorated window on to a very strange world."-- The Times (UK), Best History Book of the Year

"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.... The writing hums with life as Price summons up the voices of the past."-- Guardian

"A wonderful read, with prose that flows like poetry in places and modern analogs that inspire creative thinking....This volume would make an excellent textbook and a splendid introduction to the world of the Vikings for any reader."-- Science

"Outstanding....This is as much a history of mindsets as of significant names and dates....Price constructs a very human history of the period....Yield[s] new insights into the complex nature of Viking culture."-- Literary Review (UK)