Children of Ash and Elm Quotes

“Free will existed, but exercising it inevitably led to becoming the person you always, really, had been.”
― neil price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“Strangely, Asgard also contained temples, cult buildings where the gods themselves made offerings—but to what or whom? The mythology of the Vikings is one of only a tiny handful in all world cultures in which the divinities also practised religion. It suggests something behind and beyond them, older and opaque, and not necessarily ‘Indo-European’ at all. There is no indication that the people of the Viking Age knew what it was any more than we do.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“There is a sense in which this viewpoint is looking through the wrong end of the historical telescope, defining (and often judging) a people solely by the consequences of their actions rather than the motivations behind them.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“There most respected values were not only those forged in war but also---stated outright in poetry--- a depth of wisdom, generosity, and reflection. Above all, a subtlety, a certain play of mind, combined with a resilient refusal to give up.
There are worse ways to be remembered.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“The Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland were all found by accident when ships were driven off course in bad weather; nobody just set out for a far horizon. It is also important to remember that many of these Viking voyagers were simply never seen again.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“History is nothing if not a suppositional discipline, sometimes akin to a sort of speculative fiction of the past.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“Crucially, some people with different, equally disquieting gifts could see these aspects of others. In the poetic fragment known as the Ljóðatal, the ‘List of Spells’, Odin boasts of his magical ability with a series of individual charms, and in one of them we see the true viciousness of his power: I know a tenth [spell]: if I see sorceresses playing up in the air, I can so contrive it that they go astray from the home of their shapes [heimhama] from the home of their minds [heimhuga]. The spell is directed against the independent spirits of witches, sent out from their bodies on their mistresses’ errands. Odin’s charm is terrible in its severance of their very souls, cut away to dissipate forever.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“All these travellers carried with them, and left behind, a great many things: not only objects---the 'material culture' beloved of archaeologists---but also ideas, attitudes and information. At the most intimate levels of interaction, they also left their genes, and their families acquired new ones.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“By the time the Franks could respond by sending troops, the Danes had already left (to add to the disappointment, the emperor's pet elephant suddenly died at the same time----one of those useless bits of historical information that tell us that the past was real.)”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“The act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“Equally, the legal codes do seem to genuinely recognise a woman's claim to the integrity of her body and person---for herself rather than merely as an extension of her kin. There were laws against unwanted touching without violence , with penalties that varied according to the part of the body on which a man laid hand or lips.”
― neil price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“The Viking mind is far away from us today, but occasionally just about tangible.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“Now the night was perpetual, long, dark as pitch, a deep place unreached by the sun. It was night for five years, no sun for six years, no moon for eight years.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“The latest suggestion, and a convincing one, is that in the sixth to eighth centuries the North actually formed the western terminus of the Silk Roads that ultimately stretched to Tang China, to Silla and the North-South States in Korea, and in the eighth century to Nara Japan.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“Textile archaeologists have calculated the amount of cloth that would have been required to equip the Ladby ship, a good example of a medium-sized warship found in a burial mound on the island of Fyn in Denmark. Based on a sail size of eighty square metres (probably a conservative estimate), it would have taken two person-years of ten-hour days to make just one mainsail weighing about fifty kilos, and nobody would put to sea without reserve sailcloth that might save their lives. This workload is also something of an ideal figure, so the reality would have been closer to three or even four person-years for one sail. This was not solo work, of course, but the permutations of time for increasingly large teams of textile workers are easy to calculate. Then there were the sea-clothes. As far as we can tell, these were multi-layered assemblies of coarse, thickly lined, insulated fabric able to withstand the weather of the open ocean. The Ladby ship had a crew of thirty-two, judging by the oar positions. Using the same ten-hour-day production pace as for the sails, it would have taken perhaps twenty-four person-years to fit out the crew. And added even to this are rugs, tents, a variety of other clothing (including a change of clothes for wet conditions), plus ropes, cordage, and the like.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“A mentality geared for war, and the deeply ingrained militarism that accompanied the rise of the new elites, combined with clear notions of preordained fatalism to produce a frame of mind that drove the Viking attacks with militant fervour—almost a form of holy war. This may have been almost literally the case, in the context of countering expansive Christian missionary ambitions in the late eighth century, generating a need to appropriate and weaponise the traditional beliefs of the North in the service of the elites. As individuals bought in to this ethos, they became an effective medium of its aggressive expression.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“Something codified, organised, and effectively systemic (everything Norse belief was not) is much easier to oppose, because it is a coherent target and might be suppressed as a single entity. And if this was not already there, then it could be formed in that image. This was the beginning of the process that eventually turned the living, organic story-world of the North into ‘the Norse myths’—a kind of pagan scripture that never actually existed. It does not help that the Christians also seem to have misunderstood much of what they encountered and, in turn, incorporated their misconceptions into the retrospective pagan orthodoxy they created.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“disappointment at the discovery that it was itself and not something that the scholar would have liked better”.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“It was not enough Svein threw his whole army against London (the famous nursery rhyme, 'London Bridge is falling down,' is supposedly a memory of the Viking attack on the strategic link across the Thames). The city surrendered.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

“The distinction between belief and knowledge is significant... However, both these attitudes to the 'other' are also somewhat abstract---they are located in the mind, not in the tangible realm of action and practice.”
― Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings