Vikings did not divide themselves into body and soul, as we do, but into four parts: shape, mind (including personality, temperament, and character), luck, and “a separate being that somehow dwelled inside every human” and that was always female. Parts of the book repeat his exploration in The Viking Way (slightly revised and republished in 2019) of the Viking mind. In Children of Ash and Elm, Price proceeds to paint a picture of a fascinating people who in some ways seem like aliens, and in other ways sound just like us. “Anyone who regards them in a ‘heroic’ light needs to think again.” They were also warlike, violent people who participated in “ritual rape, wholesale slaughter and enslavement, and human sacrifice,” Price says. … They were as individually varied as every reader of this book.” There was never any such thing as a ‘pure Nordic’ bloodline, and the people of the time would probably have been baffled by the very notion. This extended far back into Northern prehistory. “The Viking world this book explores,” he writes,“was a strongly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. He writes, “The three hundred years from about 750 CE onwards were above all else a period of social transformation so profound as to ultimately shape northern Europe for the next millennium.”īut don’t think he’s going to justify white supremacy. In 600 pages, Price reframes everything you thought you knew about the Vikings, starting with why their history matters. If you read only one book about the Viking Age this year, this is the one. If you don’t haunt (as I do), you’ll be happy to learn that those 20 years of scholarly work are summarized in Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020).

In my opinion, he has co-authored many of the most exciting papers on the Viking Age in the last 20 years. Price takes a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the topic, working with colleagues from literature and linguistics to genomics and climate science. thesis, The Viking Way, was first published in 2002, his has been the career to watch in Viking Studies. Neil Price, director of the Viking Phenomenon project at Uppsala University in Sweden, is somewhat of a phenomenon himself.

Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price