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.
