The Vikings hold incalculable complex legacies—in research, the popular imagination, misuses of the past, and, not least, the history books. In Children of Ash and Elm, Neil Price synthesizes decades of scholarship and reweaves a history of the Vikings with an anthropological goal: understanding these people in the past as they saw themselves. He acknowledges the complications of the term “Viking,” provided that Scandinavians themselves never wielded such a cultural label. Price adopts the term, but inspired by Bruce Trigger's The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (1976), he also offers “children of Ash and Elm” as an opportunity from Norse cosmology to see the Vikings within their own worldview. The use of “Viking” to identify a discrete cultural group is a lingering trace of the culture-history approach that Trigger himself often discussed in the history of archaeological thought, but Price aims to apply the term contextually.
The prologue and introduction justify the goal of working from the inside of Viking society looking out. Price outlines the wide-ranging disciplines, evidence, and interpretive work involved in Viking studies. The monograph consists of three thematic, loosely chronological sections: “The Making of Midgard” (Chapters 1–8), “The Viking Phenomenon” (Chapters 9–13), and “New Worlds, New Nations” (Chapters 14–18 and the epilogue). “The Making of Midgard” centers the creation story from Snorri Sturluson's Poetic Edda, the Norse gods, and supernatural beings in an effort to unsettle the “unsophisticated barbarians” stereotype and reveal the complex landscape of the Viking mind. Although the Viking Age is traditionally periodized as AD 793–1066, this section instead examines the centuries-long emergence of the Viking Age leading up to the eighth century in terms of intersecting ecological, social, and economic transformations and the institutional, social, and spiritual characteristics that came to define the people. “The Viking Phenomenon” section then addresses the traditional assumption that raids in the British Isles mark the beginning of Viking history. Having already taken readers through a longer trajectory of the Viking past, Price introduces the Salme boat burials in Estonia as early (pre-Lindisfarne) evidence of Viking activity. This discussion destabilizes the traditional periodization of the Viking Age that is entirely based on the foreign (British Isles) reception of Viking attacks: the Salme burials instead hit closer to home as evidence of what Price calls a “domestic” activity (p. 278). Price also discusses recent scholarly analytical contributions that recenter the Vikings within their own worldview, including concepts of maritoria, warriorhoods, hydrarchies, and diaspora. The final section addresses later Viking-Age developments, although these chapters, too, are primarily thematically arranged—covering technological developments, urban lifestyle, Christianization, monarchies, North Atlantic settlements, and Vikings in the East. As expected, the epilogue begins with Ragnarok, but Price poignantly places this cosmological event in futurity, rather than reductively as an ending: doing so also consciously roots the Vikings in their worldview.
Price acutely attends to language: the “complex soundscape” of Scandinavian languages (p. xvii) and his own weaving of words that reconstruct the past for scholars and general audiences alike. Constructing accessible, enjoyable texts on the Vikings is one of Price's enduring scholarly legacies, and this book is no exception. The structure may be less easy for novices seeking a strictly chronological framework. Striking a balance between thematic and chronological developments is difficult in such an ambitious book, especially because Price aims to teach readers not only about the Vikings but also about the practice of engaging this past and the assumptions, biases, and judgments we might make along the way. Too few scholars attempt this dual project, and Children of Ash and Elm succeeds in communicating the analytical processes involved in studying the past.
Current Viking studies hold a tension between looking inward at Scandinavian societies and outward at decidedly global (but not yet decolonial) connections. Price elegantly navigates that tension. Although he references both established and emerging scholars in Viking studies, the book could be strengthened by identifying scholarly developments outside core Viking scholarship that may yield important contributions to the field. Despite some treatment of wider Afro-Eurasia, Children of Ash and Elm remains mainly a West-oriented history.
Price has undeniably inspired a generation of scholars, who will recognize in Children of Ash and Elm his decades of scholarship, alongside the contributions of many other experts. The book concludes with an invitation to recognize the Vikings’ humanity within the nostalgia of childhood that surveys the horizon of the future's unknown possibilities. This work reads better than most “state of the field” texts and provides an excellent introduction to aspiring students of the Viking Age. I look forward to how those students will build on that foundation over the next decades.
