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

by Neil Price

inside every Viking-Age person was not just some abstract ‘soul’ (if that is to your spiritual taste) but several separate and even independent beings. Each one was a component of the whole individual.

We know of some fifty-two individual Valkyries,

many of them embodied the condition of combat itself, often through the metaphor of a violent storm.

There is only minimal evidence to suggest they were physically attractive, but plenty that implies they were terrifying.

If you met a Viking-Age Scandinavian in the street, you would have seen their hamr—her or his ‘shell’ or ‘shape’—essentially what for us is the body.

the hugr, for which no modern translation really suffices. Combining elements of personality, temperament, character, and especially mind, the hugr was who someone really was, the absolute essence of you, free of all artifice or surface affect.

somewhere inside each of us is also a hamingja, a remarkable being that is the personification of a person’s luck.

as everyone’s path in life was determined by fate but rode on a wave of luck.

a separate being that somehow dwelled inside every human, inseparable from them but also distinct. The fylgja was a female spirit—always female, even for a man—and accompanied a person everywhere throughout life.

something unusually drastic happened to the north European world in the sixth century CE, signalled in the archaeology by a relatively sudden shift in the nature of the surviving record. In the late 400s and the first half of the 500s, and especially towards the middle of the century, there is a remarkably steep decline in the number of settlements, graves, and, indeed, most other markers of human activity.

climate event, or perhaps several within a short number of years, that together took on major proportions.

volcanologists and climate modelers are now sure: in the years 536 and 539/540, there occurred at least two volcanic eruptions of almost unprecedented magnitude. The first of them may have been somewhere in the tropics,

The situation in Scandinavia seems to have been so bad that it left a mark on religion itself, in what scholars call geomythology, whereby natural events and disasters are given meaning through their articulation in sacred tales.

a paradox in which parts of the Viking Age may have originated, precisely, with the imagining of its end.

a real sense, much of the ‘Viking world’ was built, underpinned, and maintained by the enslaved.

By the eighth century, there was already a considerable population of unfree people living in the North,

their condition being largely a hereditary one built up over generations.

In the Viking Age, this picture changed dramatically because for the first time Scandinavians began to make the active acquisition of hum...

This was one of the primary objectives of the Viking raids and...

which leads to an inescapable conclusion: girls and boys were given different amounts and qualities of food, strongly to the advantage of the boys and to a potentially life-threatening degree for the girls. It is impossible not to read a chilling value system into this discrepancy.

Selective female infanticide is particularly difficult to trace, although there are small suggestions in the archaeology. In the runestone inscriptions of central Sweden, up to six sons might be mentioned from one family, but never more than two daughters.

Many of the sagas also emphasise mutual attraction as the proper basis for sexual relationships, with a constant element of choice

the so-called thing (Old Norse þing), a regular gathering of elected representatives in whom was vested the practical exercise of power at a local level.

Delegates would represent their districts, often with spokesmen who were especially gifted at public speaking or legal argument.

one of the main duties of the assembly was to place a check on interpersonal or familial feuds before they got out of hand.

The things were not strictly democratic but were nonetheless focussed on formal ideas of fair representation and an attempt to create neutral spaces where disputes could be heard.

In Norway, especially (where there is greater resolution of the data), but also in the rest of Scandinavia, the major question is what happened to this system of communal government at its points of contact with the rising power of kings. It is not coincidental that this political friction begins to be felt precisely in the eighth century, at the start of what we call the Viking Age.

In contrast to the view of many people today, water was not perceived as a barrier to communication and transport but rather as a means of facilitating it. Island and coastal communities would not have been considered remote and inaccessible, but instead as being closely connected to each other through an extensive network of maritime routes.

What we would now isolate as religion was then simply another dimension of daily life, inextricably bound up with every other aspect of existence.

This included the gods themselves, who were simply there as an unchanging part of the worlds. Granted, one might need to propitiate them to keep on their good side (and on their terms), but you did not have to like them in the process.

There is a curious sense in which the very notion of a Norse religion may actually be in part a Christian product.

Something codified, organised, and

In everyday life, however, people were more concerned with getting along with the invisible population of spirits and nature- beings.

All these creatures also required placation, even a form of spiritual bribery.

The most dramatic and far-reaching bias in the understanding of Viking-Age death rituals is quite simply the fact that not everyone received a grave of a kind that can be detected archaeologically.

up to 50 percent of the population are ‘missing’ from the funerary record in this way.

We should be wary of equating ‘Valhalla’ with some kind of Christian heaven, or Hel with its dark twin.

Just as the einherjar would fight for the gods at the Ragnarök, the drowned also had their station, although a terrible one that they do not seem to have earned. As all the powers gather at the end, something will stir on the ocean floor, the greatest Viking ship ever made. Its name is Naglfar, ‘Nail-Ship’, so called because it is built from the fingernails of everyone who has ever died; the vessel thereby naturally grows larger by increments over the millennia until by the time of the Ragnarök it will be vast beyond imagining. As the roosters begin to crow, announcing the coming battle, Naglfar breaks loose from the sea bed and rises to the surface, its waterlogged timbers green and rotten. Its cargo will be all the dead of Hel; its captain is the giant Hrym; Loki stands at the helm. The drowned are its crew.

It is hard to find a moral scheme in the Viking mind or in the actions of their gods.

Many scholars have tried to divide the Viking Age into phases, usually determined by changes in the patterns of maritime violence. The conventional view sees an initial period of sporadic raiding from c. 789 to 805, and then a focussed shift to targets in Ireland and Scotland until 834, before the rise of true Viking armies with overwintering campaigns after that date.

the Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence, not the contact.

Coupled with this were social pressures—the effects of polygyny creating an underclass of young men disenfranchised by the laws of inheritance and with minimal marriage prospects.

However, the earliest actual evidence for a Viking raid is not textual at all, but archaeological.

Baltic. Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750,

there were many sea-kings who commanded large troops and had no lands”.

In Rogaland, the courtyard thing sites seem to disappear at exactly the time when the sea-kings were entrenching their rule. If the rights of the popular assemblies were transferred to the person of the king, this was a dramatic appropriation of authority,

Vikings started raiding because there was a rapid expansion in places worth plundering—what today’s militaries call a target-rich environment.

The result was a perfect storm of opportunity and desire, supply and demand.

The central concept in the organisation of Viking warrior groups—as one scholar calls them, ‘bands of brothers’—seems to have been the lið, a term that cannot be precisely defined but is usually taken to refer to a shipborne host or team of warriors sworn to a leader whose responsibility it was to feed, equip, and reward them for their service.