It seems like the world of the Vikings will never quite go out of style, but it can be hard to find a good, responsible, academic-style history of these infamous and often misrepresented raiders from the north. My fascination with early medieval history won’t let me stop looking, however, and so the striking, minimalist cover of Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm naturally reached out from its shelf at Barnes & Noble and grabbed my attention. My gamble that this wouldn’t be yet another pandering, too-popular history almost immediately paid off, and while I wasn’t quite on board with some of Price’s claims to Scandinavian singularity, I found his work on the whole to be a refreshingly unique way of writing pre-modern ethnic history.
While histories of the modern era tend to focus on political, economic, cultural, or social history, most public-facing ancient or medieval histories I’ve come across tend to cover them all, attempting to offer as comprehensive a picture as can be painted of the people or region that is its subject. Often, the political narrative understandably takes the lead, with other topics either filtering in between major eras or being left to a separate, later section. Children of Ash and Elm consciously upends this paradigm, devoting its entire first part to the religion, society, and culture of medieval Scandinavians in order to provide readers with a lens through which they can interpret the Vikings’ political history. Price readily admits that the peculiar nature of available sources makes this approach more feasible for the Vikings than for other subjects; almost all we know about all these topics comes from later, High Medieval sagas finally written down not in the pagan Scandinavian heartland but in its Iceland colony after its conversion to Christianity. This comes with its own weaknesses, of course. Norse religion, society, and culture would have evolved significantly over the half-millennium that forms Price’s narrative, and while he does attempt some conjecture in this regard, concrete knowledge is simply beyond our reach.
Instead, the biggest flaw in Children of Ash and Elm appears to stem, ironically, from Price’s own mastery and knowledge of his subject matter, to the exclusion of more accurate, relativist understanding of the general period. A key theme in his discussions of Viking culture and worldview from the earliest pages is how different they were from the contemporary Christian societies of western Europe. To Price, pagan Scandinavians experienced their religion in a much more intimate, present way than medieval monotheists, seeing fantastical creatures over every hill and feeling the power of the gods around them in everyday life. Yet I would argue that popular religion, especially at the village level, was much the same in this way regardless of faith in the early medieval period. Christians may not have believed that elves or trolls lived in their local wood, but myriads of local saints and the stories of their miracles were intimately revered, the Holy Spirit was earnestly invoked and believed to be present in battle, and the mystical power countless relics from saints’ body parts to artifacts to endless pieces of the True Cross were very real to the Vikings’ contemporaries. While we shouldn’t underestimate pre-modern peoples’ intelligence or reasoning faculties, the nature of faith was very different in their time than in our own, and Norse expressions of that are but one facet of historical relativism, not necessarily something that set them apart at the time.
This one hiccup, though, doesn’t derail what is otherwise a fantastic, engaging, responsible, and eminently readable history of this seafaring, martial culture; in short, exactly what I had been looking for. While Price’s “socio-cultural history first” approach certainly isn’t perfect, I much preferred it to other attempts at organizing history, and will be on the lookout for more such works, whether from Price or others, in the future.