The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

The point should not be overstated, but it is striking that the key tenets of the new societies that rose from the Migration Period crisis seem to have included a marked rise in militaristic ideology, infused with uncompromising codes of honour, oath-bound loyalty, and the obligations of violent redress. These values were expressed in the growth of an expansionist hall-based elite culture whose elevated view of itself was fuelled by a constant appetite for war. Underpinning it all was an ever-greater reliance on family and kin—a dependence on the ultimate redoubts of social cohesion and their unbreakable bonds. It is not hard to see all this as a bulwark against the distant memory of the sixth-century collapse.