Tag Archives: Children of Ash and Elm

Reading report 2: ‘Children of Ash and Elm,” by Neil Price

Ever see one of those old comedy movies, set in the Middle Ages or sometime, in which the orchestra suddenly breaks into swing music and everybody starts jitterbugging? (I recently watched “A Knight’s Tale” for the first time, and they did the same sort of thing , with different pop music. I fear this will not age well.)

I had much the same feeling today as I was reading Neil Price’s generally excellent book, Children of Ash and Elm. In a chapter called “Border Crossings,” he takes a break from a mostly well-informed and insightful study of Viking Age history to impose 21st Century concepts on an alien culture.

There are clear suggestions of queer identities in the Viking Age (with a caveat for the retrospective application of contemporary vocabularies).

Give him points for self-awareness, anyway. Retrospective application is precisely what’s going on here. I speak from a position of prejudice, of course, but it saddened me to see a good study like this marred by what I consider (I could be wrong, of course) a transient intellectual fad.

In fact (except for the admittedly problematic Grave Bj. 581 in Birka, which I can’t explain, but neither can anyone else), he is able to demonstrate nothing about the Vikings themselves other than that they had an extremely “gendered” (his word), male-dominated culture, in which there is evidence of a certain amount of deviance. You could say the same about the Victorians. He admits it plainly at one point, saying, “There are no positive depictions of same-sex relationships in the textual sources.”

To put it in terms comprehensible to current academics, Price is “appropriating” Viking culture, forcing his own paradigm on them in a way that they would have found offensive.

Reading report: ‘Children of Ash and Elm,’ by Neil Price

After a couple weeks with Rodney Riesel’s light – and short – Dan Coast books, I have plunged (with some relief, actually) into a little more challenging material. I’m reading Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by Neil Price. It’s a long book, and it will take me a while to get to the point where I can review it. I’m finding it a good object to wrestle with – I like parts very much, and I disagree now and then. Here’s a nice passage from near the beginning:

When properly recited in appropriate surroundings, Viking-Age poetry can taste like cold iron on the tongue, its complex rhyme schemes building upon one another like layers of frost—treacherous but beautiful. We gain something old and true in this language, even if only understood in translation, and for that reason I have included a selection here.

Tolkien would have liked bit that very much. Even if you disagree with a historian, prose like this can make reading his book worth your time.

New Viking book by Neil Price

Via our friend Dave Lull, a London Review of Books review of Neil Price’s new book on the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm.

In one of several vignettes, Price imagines a younger son on the impoverished west coast of Norway, whose childhood sweetheart has a new brooch: a present from a boy who spent a successful summer raiding. What is young Orm or Gunnar going to do? Not only does he need money for the bride-price paid to her family, he needs a reputation: ‘The act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself.’ And if he went raiding he might in any case acquire a woman for free. DNA has shown that ‘a very large proportion – even the majority – of female settlers in Iceland were of Scottish or Irish heritage.’

Looks like the kind of book a man of my pretensions needs to read. It’s coming August 25th.