Tag Archives: Neil Price

‘Children of Ash and Elm,’ by Neil Price


Having at last finished Neal Price’s very long – and enjoyable – survey, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Viking Age, I find my feelings definitely mixed. There is much in this book that I admire and value. I learned from it. But I found what seem to me certain debilitating flaws in it.

I might mention, first of all, that (although he does not cite Viking Legacy, the great book to which I am immortally linked as translator) author Price takes the same line on the historical validity of the sagas – that they are not straight history and cannot be treated as such, but that they do contain useful information for the historian who employs them with care:

Even the most sceptical of literary researchers, those who generally reject the Old Norse texts as viable sources (however remote) for the actual Viking Age, do not always go on to confront the question this viewpoint requires: why, in that case, would medieval Icelanders have created—over several centuries—the most remarkably detailed, comprehensive, and consistent corpus of historical fiction in the world?

Author Price is an accomplished archaeologist, who has spent decades studying the Viking Age. His research is extensive, and he writes with the authority of long familiarity. His purpose in this book is more than to tell the story of the Viking Age. It is to draw on his learning and experience to try to convey to the modern reader the essence of the Vikings – how they saw the world, how they felt. I think he succeeds to a commendable degree.

Most big books on any subject try to offer a new theory or insight, and Children of Ash and Elm does this through a couple (relatively) new ideas – that the Viking Age began earlier and lingered longer than is generally assumed, and that the two Viking enterprises, the “west Viking” and “east Viking” currents, were in fact one and the same, with no real separation.

Hidebound non-specialist that I am, I must admit I’m not convinced by these arguments. Inception and terminus dates are notoriously hard to nail down, but Price points especially to a mass ship grave containing Swedish skeletons, found in Estonia and dated around 750 AD (he always uses CE dating, of course). I don’t entirely buy this argument. It’s hard to identify a “Viking raid” on the basis of a single burial, however impressive.

As for the unity of east and west, I have long held, and continue to hold, that the location and power of Denmark is a central issue in understanding the Viking Age. The simple fact that passing into or out of the Baltic required paying tolls to the king of Denmark tended to send Norwegians west and Swedes east, just to avoid his domains. The compartments weren’t watertight, but I think they existed.

I noted what seemed to me a telling omission in the book’s account of Viking slaving activities. Price makes no secret (quite rightly) of the fact that the Vikings routinely took and trafficked in slaves, and profited greatly from the trade. He speaks movingly of the suffering of those in bondage. But he seems to minimize the role of the Muslim world in it. He does mention the Arab markets, but only more or less in passing. Reading this book, you’d think most Viking slaves ended up toiling on Scandinavian farms. In fact, the great majority were headed into the insatiable maw of the Islamic slave markets.

The book was also marred, for me, also by occasional genuflections toward political correctness. Here and there, author Price finds it necessary to apply concepts like “privilege,” “intersectionality,” and “gendering” to the Vikings. I don’t think this is useful or illuminating in historical context.

Nevertheless, I found Children of Ash and Elm fascinating and informational. It’s written (and well-written) with a clear passion for the subject and a practiced critical eye. I recommend it, with cautions.

Once, in the Russian urban centre of Novgorod, where the waterlogged soil preserves such things well, I breathed in the scent of fresh pine a thousand years old, the whole site just saturated in the fragrance from all the woodworking waste lying where the Viking-Age carpenters had left it.

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.