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

by Neil Price

This book takes the opposite approach, working from the inside looking out. The emphasis here is very firmly on who the Vikings really were, what made them tick, how they thought and felt.

The Scandinavians of the eighth to eleventh centuries knew the word—víkingr in Old Norse when applied to a person—but they would not have recognised themselves or their times by that name.

there is no doubt that the flow, scale, and range of seaborne piracy gradually but dramatically increased from the 750s onwards, culminating in the full-blown military campaigns of the ninth and tenth centuries that would shatter the political structures of western Europe. At the same time, there were parallel and intertwined movements of colonisation, trade, and exploration, especially to the east.

An essential prerequisite for a good researcher is the willingness to be wrong, the invitation of constructive critique.

things made of textile, leather, wood, and the like—which have almost always disappeared except when the soil is waterlogged or else in other ways excludes oxygen.

protohistoric, in that its ‘history’ comes from what some of their foreign contemporaries wrote about them.

all the surviving Old Norse texts date to the centuries after the time of the Vikings, and were written down by Christians. They are, therefore, separated from the pagan Viking Age they claim to describe by significant barriers of time, culture, and ideological perspective.

This idea of being inside the wall, as distinct from what is beyond and therefore outside one’s control, is at the core of Viking-Age concepts of settlement and order. It is an insight into their way of thinking.

For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, fate did not represent the absence of choice but rather the manifestation of a pre-existing truth. Free will existed, but exercising it inevitably led to becoming the person you always, really, had been.

In the Viking mind, somewhere inside each of us is also a hamingja, a remarkable being that is the personification of a person’s luck. This was a very important attribute for the people of the North in the late Iron Age, as everyone’s path in life was determined by fate but rode on a wave of luck.

When Continental Christians opened their doors in the morning, they did not see the work of elves, dwarves, and nature-spirits; their day was not ordained by the Norns; the dew on the grass was not sweat fallen from supernatural horses; a rainbow did not lead to Asgard and the sky-halls of the gods. Even battles, though bad enough, were not the playground of terrible war-women, screaming their rage and malice in the din. The Vikings, in short, were different.

The firelight also had an unsettling effect that lent an otherworldly air to the lords of the hall. The poetry describes how they wore their helmets indoors, and the flickering orange flames of the hearth would have animated the covering of relief pictures on their tiny press-metal plaques. The warlords’ faces were veiled with a mass of moving figures, dancing in the shadows. Again by firelight, some of the helmet images could also be seen to lack an eye, an effect achieved by selectively omitting the reflecting gold foil backing of the cloisonné garnets on their features—a one-eyed lord for the one-eyed god, Odin, the ultimate patron of the new royalty. This may even have been taken as a possession, almost a transformation.

Arctic waters off Norwegian Lofoten could provide the bone for a gaming piece with which you could win at the popular

not. These sacrificed men may thus have been war captives, or

In one of the Hedeby cemeteries, several warrior males were buried in the same chamber, although one of them was separated from the others by a low partition across the floor—one thinks of Angantyr and his berserker companions in the same grave. After all the animals, weapons, and other objects had been placed inside and the chamber sealed, an entire warship was laid across the top before being covered by a mound. Its mast stuck up through the surface, while the bow and stern would have protruded either side of the barrow, like upturned horns.

Salme find.

Each of the sea-kings’ territories was a genuine maritorium, encompassing an entire community culturally oriented towards the ocean. Crucially, they were not based upon the control of land, beyond what was needed to supply the core manors with their needs. Places like Avaldsnes were thus warrior manors—bases for the warlords of the sea, with hinterlands that kept them in food and drink, as well as the raw materials to equip and maintain the ships. The farms of the surrounding districts could provide men for emergency defence and a ready supply of crews for the ships themselves.

we must dispense with the notion of spontaneity, of an element in the Viking ‘character’ that sent them out raiding. Any such action requires considerable planning in terms of resources, logistics, and personnel.

After 834, the Scandinavians regularly came in fleets numbering hundreds of ships, carrying thousands of men. Their depredations would bring the major western European powers to the very brink of destruction, and they would also acquire names in the chronicles and annals of those regions: the Great Heathen Army

Orkneyinga saga has some fascinating descriptions of várvíking and haustvíking—literally ‘spring-viking’ and ‘autumn-viking’—showing the seasonal cycle of raiding that operated in places like this.

The mobile Scandinavians; the settled Byzantines, Slavs, and Bulghars; the nomadic Khazars, Pechenegs, and Magyars: all these peoples were moving parts in the vast machine of eastern trade, diplomacy, and the frequent warfare that erupted.

while baptism was evidently an important rite, it cannot be taken as an indication of religious conversion in the sense that we understand it today. Priests seem to have been more concerned with harvesting souls than effecting long-term change on individuals. It was not until the eleventh century that Christianity really began to transform daily life in Scandinavia.

hamingjur luck

Two hundred and seventy years from Lindisfarne, more than three hundred from Salme, western European history would swing on a pendulum between a Norwegian former commander of the Varangian Guard and a fifth-generation Viking descended from Rollo’s army of the Seine.

Iceland, in particular, cut across the social and political currents that were swirling around Scandinavia. It was never an easy combination—an island of pioneer settlers, established without rulers in an age of monarchs, a republic of independent-minded farmers in a time of burgeoning nation states.