Children of Ash and Elm

If you don't lurk on Academia.edu, as I do, looking for scholarly articles on Vikings, you'll be shocked by the depiction of the Viking world in Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020). And even if you do think you're caught up on the latest thinking and research on who the Vikings were and how their society was organized, you still need to read this book.

If you love Norse mythology and the Icelandic sagas and the stories they tell about the Vikings, you will be as eager as I am to separate the runes and the names of our heroes from the white supremacist neo-Nazis who are trying to co-opt them. Price's Children of Ash and Elm gives you the facts you need.

It's time to put an end to the idea that the Viking world was ruled by white men.

"The Viking world this book explores," Price writes, "was a strongly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. This extended far back into Northern prehistory. There was never any such thing as a 'pure Nordic' bloodline, and the people of the time would probably have been baffled by the very notion.... They were as individually varied as every reader of this book."

It's also time to put an end to the idea that the Viking culture is one we want to live in today. These were people who participated in "ritual rape, wholesale slaughter and enslavement, and human sacrifice," Price says. "Anyone who regards them in a 'heroic' light needs to think again."

None of which means we shouldn't study them, tell their stories, or thieve from their ideas.

The way the Vikings saw themselves, for example, is more sophisticated than ours. According to Price, they did not divide themselves into body and soul, but into four parts: You had a shape that could shift into a bird's or a bear's. You had a mind (which included your personality, temperament, and character). You had your luck, and if you lost it part (or all) of you died. And you had a fetch, which was "a separate being that somehow dwelled inside every human"—and this fetch was always female. "How marvellous, and how utterly subversive of the male-focussed stereotype," Price notes, "that every single Viking man literally had a spirit-woman inside him."

Gender is one theme Price explores throughout Children of Ash and Elm, and one that particularly resonated with me, having just finished writing The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women (which is partly based on Price's work).

Price notes that patriarchy "was subverted at every turn, often in ways that—fascinatingly—were built into its structures." While he goes along with the standard idea that men's roles and women's roles in Viking society were different, he urges us to "consider the traits that were shared across gender boundaries, in which identity was formed as much by social role as by gender or sex." We also must not ignore what he calls "the vast ocean of lives lived on different terms."

One of these lives is that of the warrior buried in grave Bj581 in Birka, Sweden—long considered to be the ultimate Viking warrior burial—whom Price and his colleagues confirmed through DNA tests was female. Their papers on the Birka Warrior Woman in 2017 and 2019 have been both praised and condemned, but Price, discussing the work in Children of Ash and Elm, does not back down.

"Taking a clear-eyed look at the archaeological data," he writes, "it seems that there really were female warriors in the Viking Age, including at least one of command rank."

I wholeheartedly agree, and in my new book, The Real Valkyrie, I recreate her life and times.

For my complete review of Children of Ash and Elm, see The Midgardian Magazine.

For more on my book The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

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