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

by Neil Price

As perceived and communicated today, the Viking Age is an intensely visual experience: the intricate interlace art, the sleek and predatory lines of the ships, the landscapes of burial and commemoration— and, of course, the people themselves as seen through several centuries of mediation in Romantic paintings, woodcuts, and reconstructions on the page and screen. Ultimately deriving from the accounts of the literate cultures whom the Scandinavians encountered on their raids and travels, especially the English, Franks, and Arabs, this is the ‘othered’ picture that has overwhelmingly formed the popular perception of the Vikings in our own times. However, very different worlds were being built inside the Norse mind. Here is another distinction between appearance and reality, between the surface and what it conceals. From the problematic medieval written sources, and occasional mentions in Eddic and skaldic poetry, emerges one of the most remarkable aspects of the Vikings: the fourfold division of being and an extremely complex notion of what might loosely be called the soul.