Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Masterful book about the Vikings, approaching them from every angle. Very informative and well-written.

Still reading, but love it so far. Through first third of book. Great HISTORICAL background.

In Children of Ash and Elm, Price gives us a comprehensive history of the Vikings. Viking studies, we learn, is based on a vast corpus that the Vikings left to us: millions of graves, countless runestones, a few but remarkable sources written by Viking’s descendants, and contemporary accounts written by the Vikings’ associates. Viking studies is a rich field. The author’s expertise is evident throughout Children of Ash and Elm. Price is a master of this rich and complex area of study. Inevitably I spend many words on quibbles. I have only one serious complaint, but we will begin with the quibbles. The maps are good but require a magnifying glass. The print could have been made a little larger without causing crowding or overlaps. The maps are numbered but, since they are never referenced in the text, there is no reason to number them. There are a few sentences with big words that could have been rendered in simpler and more concrete language. We see “These Scandinavian immigrants seem to have merged rapidly with the Slavic population. This transition in material expressions of identity may represent the formation of a class-based community, in which expressions of ethnicity were not prioritised [British spelling] as a means of identifying between different groups.” What? I would have said that the Scandinavians quickly took up local customs and left it at that. Another quibble is that Price seems surprised by the lack of racism among Vikings, but racism is a recent phenomenon. In the Enlightenment, “environmentalism” prevailed: people from different parts of the world were thought to look different because of differences in climate. Both Europeans and Africans in America would eventually come to look like American Indians. Price can be forgiven; his expertise is in Vikings. My one serious complaint is that we learn that the Viking Age transitioned into the Medieval period, but I don’t know what that means. How did the Medieval period differ from the age of the Vikings? I don’t know. But Children of Ash and Elm came with a surprise bonus. One of the great historic rabbit holes is the Bronze Age Collapse: the end of Western Civilization that took place around 1180 BC in the eastern Mediterranean. We know enough about the Collapse to want to learn more, but it’s not out there. At least it’s not translated. But the hints we see about how the Collapse occurred are not hints at all in Viking history. There is a rise in piracy. The raids become more ambitious and complex. Potential victims switch sides. Groups of pirates band together and make collective decisions. The raids go farther afield. The raids entail the creation of semipermanent camps. Families go along with the raiders. Some settle permanently. The best way to dive into this rabbit hole is Cline’s excellent 1177 B.C: The Year Civilization Collapsed. But back to Children of Ash and Elm. Overall, it’s an enjoyable book. Perhaps not “a thrilling read” as the Wall Street Journal promises, but overall enjoyable and generally well-written. I learned a lot.

If you, like me, have read many older books on the Viking Age and come away dissatisfied with the proffered hypotheses on why the Vikings exploded out of Scandinavia, then this book is for you. Professor Price's background of the complex political, economic, and social processes that lead the Vikings to expand both East and West, and his description of the impacts of the resulting conflicts, conquests, and diaspora makes for a compelling explanation of what happened. Dr. Price's story is strengthened by his adept blending of differing sources of evidence (archaeological, written, etc.).With that said, other reviewers' criticisms of Price's musings on the Vikings and LGBTQ lifestyles are valid. Price's seeming attempt to make the Vikings (and perhaps his own career focus?) acceptable to 'woke' academia is an embarrassing and lame waste of page... after page... after page... as he drones on in gushing terms about the possibility that some Vikings were sexual 'explorers'. It seems like he tries to make up for the lack of any supporting evidence by sacrificing more words to the theme.Oh well. You can easily skip or skim read the queer-themed parts, and enjoy the rest of the book, which is evidence-backed, comprehensive, coherent and informative.

Fascinating book. Niel Price is the best source on Vikings in English. Probably in Scandinavian languages too, but I don't read any of them so I don't know for sure.

Came in great condition

Great abridged history of the Vikings. I highly recommend this book!

If you want to genuinely understand the Vikings during the roughly 550 years up to William the Conqueror —not a novelized saga (which can be wonderful) — this is the book. Price is less a storyteller than a master curator: Children of Ash and Elm reads as a comprehensive compendium of what is actually known, assembled from archaeology, texts, and decades of fieldwork. Ships, silver, slavery, trade routes to Baghdad, burial rites, how they dressed, how they thought, what they believed happened after death — it's all here. And crucially, it never tips into the overly detailed or academic. Price wears his scholarship lightly; he tells you what the evidence shows, and — rarer and more valuable — where the evidence stops.One gnat to swat away: Price devotes a stretch of the book to woke-gender topics. Readers can decide for themselves whether this tells us more about the author and his era than about the Norse and theirs. But it's a small detour in a very large book, and it would be a mistake to let it cost you the outstanding material surrounding it.Verdict: the single best one-volume path to a comprehensive understanding of the Viking Age.

If you are keen to learn about the so called Viking age or even if you are well read on the subject, this book is a gem. Highly recommended.

The book can be considered as a fairy tale for the adults before sleep.Enjoyed it from page 1 tot he last.

This is the most comprehensive history of the Vikings that I have ever read. It covers all the areas of known Viking activity and gives us many new insights into the lives of the people from Scandinavia and elsewhere during the time of the Vikings.Neil Price does not confine himself to the traditional starting and finishing dates of the Viking Age and demonstrates that there were no such dates in reality. He shows too, that the influence of the Vikings covered a huge geographical area from North America in the west to Byzantium, and points even further, in the east. By carefully considering each direction in which they moved and looking at the probable motivations behind their expeditions and their frequent build up overtime into settlement and conquest, Professor Price provides a detailed portrait of their histories. These are based not just on past scholarship but also on the many recent finds, new ways of interpreting them, and on the very many discussions within and outside of academia.Neil Price does not neglect the fact that much of the Viking economy depended oh the human trade; capturing, using and selling slaves from many different regions. This is often barely mentioned in many histories but is given its proper place in this book together with the violence, misery and distress that this would have caused. Without slave taking and forced labour there would have been no Viking Age. Many of the slaves and their descendants, wherever they came from, were eventually absorbed into their respective section of Viking society. Of course, there were many other contemporary societies, besides the Vikings, that also dealt in slaves.Throughout the book’s pages the worldview of the Vikings and their beliefs is always there in the background. Again, the author is able to tell us much about the way that they thought and how they saw many aspects of their lives by critically considering the poems and literature and by analysing imagery, artefacts and the thoughts of many scholars and others. The Vikings were active for around three to four hundred years and beliefs will have varied from region to region and over time and eventually were replaced in most areas by Christianity, sometimes forcibly by Scandinavian kings. Viking society was never static and always developing and innovating.With the skill of a storyteller, Professor Price brings his subjects to life and guides us through their vast and complex story. I highly recommend this book but appreciate that not everyone will like it, those who somehow think that the Vikings were some sort of pure ethnic group for example (they never were), or those who are only focussed on their macho image; they were much, much more than either of those portrayals. Neil Price’s work is important and needs to be read. Too many people want to misrepresent history for their own ends and sadly the Vikings can be used by those with their own agendas.

Molto bello. Per gli appassionati di scavi e di vichinghi un libro immancabile

Long , hard read.Even for this avid reader.But very worth the effort. Very well researched , very captivating,