Price fleshes out Viking culture,often by focusing on the material realitiesoftheir day-to-day lives....What Price attempts to do with ChildrenofAshandElmis to strip away the cultural sediment that has built up around the ideaofthe Vikingsandreturn us to the archaeological record itself....What we’re left with are fewer illusionsanda much more interesting mystery.”— Washington Examiner

From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time. All the surviving texts were written by Christians long after the Viking Age. p. 21. [Except: the eyewitness account of Ahmad ibn Fadlan of a Viking boat burial, in 922. It included the human sacrifice of a teenage slave girl, after she was used for sex by all the men. One-third of the dead chief's wealth went to supplying alcohol to keep the men drunk for the 10 days of funeral preparation; one-third for burial clothing; one-third to his heirs. Many Viking-era graves have been found containing a large male skeleton with an apparently teenage female skeleton. pp. 246–253, 260, 436. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... ] The Christians misunderstood the Viking story-world, and codified their misconceptions into the retrospective pagan orthodoxy they created. p. 208. [There's a Latin history of Norway older than Snorri's. p. 279. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of the Wessex kings give contemporary accounts of Viking raids by surviving victims, late 700s– , pp. 275, 279–285, 515. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... If you truely believed-in fact 'knew'-that the man living up the valley could turn into a wolf under certain circumstances, what was it like to be his neighbour? What was it like to be married to him? Not the leastofPrice’s achievement is to rescue Viking history from the graspofwhite supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sortofmoral superiority for the Vikings—theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrificeandslavery, as Price makes abundantly clear—but by restoring their richandstrange particularity….I’ll long remember Price’s evocationofthe wafer-thin squaresof gold, stamped with imagesofotherworldly beings, that adorned the great halls where visitors drankandfoughtandrecited poetry. Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something similar here.”— Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, The Best Books We Read in 2020 What we get here, then, in this day and time, is the rare beast of a true “cultural history” written by a scholar who not only masters the reading of the texts, understands the new archaeological scientific methods, and is well-versed in the broader history of the period; but who is also not afraid to tell us in plain English what a Viking fart in York smelled like after having been hidden in the underground a 1000 years.

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The answer is not that it provides us with an up-to-date introduction to the latest archaeological research on for instance the Salme ship-burials from c. 750 and the boat-grave culture; or the “micel here” (the Great Army) and its campaigns in England c. 865-878; nor the gender bender of the people as it has been uncovered in graves such as that of the “Birka Female Warrior”; or the raiding, slaving and trading economy and how its preconditions – wool, slaves, sails, boats and tar – were brought about. Or the transition from the early piratical culture to its later phases, the diaspora, the settling and the conquering. All this and much more are presented to us and with meticulous care. A comprehensive, lyrically told and personal account of the Viking Age….No other history of the Vikings is as vibrant or expands the scope of the Viking world to encompass not just landscapes, but mindscapes.”— Times Literary Supplement Part three moves the story to the mid-eleventh century, as the Viking phenomenon diversified across the northern world. Its consequences included an urban revolution in the Scandinavian economies and the reorganization of the countryside, paralleled by the consolidation of royal power and the rising influence of a new faith." Viking cities and power bases were established across the world at this time. The idea of separate identities of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden began and they started becoming a part of Christian Europe. a very human history of the period, one that is by turns illuminating, surprising and even moving ... much of the beauty of Price work is in its qualitative, sometimes subjective nature, even while it remains a meticulously researched, rigorous piece of scholarship. Eleanor Barraclough, Literary Review

The Viking Age—from 750 to 1050—saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture. Elegantly conceived, constantly surprising...With clarity and verve, Price examines various aspects of Viking society...An exemplary history that gives a nuanced view of a society long reduced to a few clichés."— Kirkus (starred review) What is one thing the author is very good at, is asking questions, or creating new interpretations, of archaeological situations and material culture, for example I was really captivated by his idea of funerals as drama, the sacrificed animals, humans, the notable dead and all his/her belongings - all characters or set pieces. Neil Price is a scholar that I've admired for many years and I've frequently returned to works of his over and over for my own research so I was thrilled to receive an ARC of The Children of Ash and Elm. To be frank, this is one of the best books on the Vikings I've ever read and that is for many reasons. One of those reasons is how Neil Price writes. This is not a dense nonfiction where you feel like you're in over your head. He writes in a way that feels conversational and also relates the Vikings to the modern-day in extremely interesting ways. This helps cut through the "assumed" knowledge of yesteryear, showing that Viking warriors were more than the lazy stereotype of skillful sailor barbarians hell-bent on satisfying carnal desires and a lust for treasure.Eastern Roman Empire, 565 CE at death of Justinian: limited to Greece, Italy, Balkans south of the Danube, western Turkey; none of France, Germany, or England; only the southernmost part of Spain. p. ix How is this wrought? Neil price offers us a story, which takes its departure in the myths and the minds of the Vikings, and how they thought about the world, their worldview. In this, he unabashedly explores the poetry, the myths, and the sagas as these stories were handed down to us by the Icelanders. Always on the lookout for archaeological evidence, which may function as an illustration thereof, we effortlessly get a sense of a world intricately bound up in itself. Some literary scholars of the post-modern school of Toronto may be livid when they consider the use of such texts written down in the 12th and 13th century to shed light on a past, which was forged in the aftermath of the ecological crisis in the 6th century. Never mind, we must say. Today, we recognise again that any society has such founding myths, many of which may be older than a millennium (think about the Quran and modern Islamic societies). Of course, the Vikings had such myths.