Author(s): Neil Price

History | Scandinavia

The definitive history of the Vikings from arts and culture to politics and cosmology by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise. 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.

Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. 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.

Review:"A wonderful read, with prose that flows like poetry in places and modern analogs that inspire creative thinking....This volume would make an excellent textbook and a splendid introduction to the world of the Vikings for any reader." --Science

"Children of Ash and Elm is the culmination of decades of academic writing and field research by Price. It is a broadly accessible, archaeologically informed account of one of the most deeply mythologized groups in human history."--Russell Kirk Center

"A comprehensive and highly readable history of the Vikings." --Swedish Press

"Capturing the full and rich nuances of the Viking Age, Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm offers a sweeping account of the famous Scandinavian culture that stretched from North America to the Asian Steppes....Price relies on archeological and textual evidence to move past stereotypes and reveal the Vikings as never before."--Explore the Archive

"One of the most comprehensive treatises on the Norse to date....This book brings together a wide body of scholarship that makes the world of the Vikings all the more comprehensible." --The Explorers Journal

"Outstanding....This is as much a history of mindsets as of significant names and dates....Price constructs a very human history of the period....Yield[s] new insights into the complex nature of Viking culture." --Literary Review (UK)

Majestic.... Children of Ash and Elm illuminates the brutal realities of Viking raids, of course, but its revelatory power comes from its focus on the culture that built and launched those ships, an industrial feat more impressive than the pillaging.... Price's stripping away of Viking cliche still leaves warriors worthy of the songs -- they're just people now, too.--Shelf Awareness

Neil Price offers a spirited account of the Vikings from unexpected angles, and brilliantly succeeds in seeing the world from their perspective rather than from that of the people whose lands suffered from Viking raids. He shows that this was a world in which gods, spirits and humans co-existed and one in which the savagery of warfare was counter-balanced by peaceful settlement as far away as Greenland and briefly North America.--David Abulafia, professor emeritus of Mediterranean history, University of Cambridge, and author of The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

"Not only a leading authority on the period, Price is also a wonderful writer, by turns philosophical, witty, lyrical and poignant. He possesses both an archaeologist's ability to interpret large quantities of scholarship and data, and the skill to translate it creatively. His vivid prose illuminates both the physical and the psychological dimensions of the early medieval north, while at the same time leaving space for uncertainty: the possibility of future discoveries and theories that will alter the picture yet again.... The writing hums with life as Price summons up the voices of the past."--Guardian

Author Biography: Neil Price is distinguished professor and chair of archaeology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has been researching, teaching, and writing on the Vikings for nearly thirty-five years and is the author of several books on the history of the Viking Age. He lives in Sweden.