THE CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM
A HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS
NEIL PRICE
Allen Lane, 624pp, £30, ebook £30
‘Although most people know that the image of Vikings in horned helmets is a piece of Victorian fantasy, they remain as hideously fascinating to Hollywood screenwriters as they once did to medieval scribes,’ wrote Dan Jones in the Sunday Times. ‘Yet as Neil Price shows in his colourful, revelatory new book... to understand the Viking world view, we must consider the environmental catastrophe that reshaped Scandinavian society 250 years before the Viking raids began. This was a series of huge volcanic eruptions of the years 536-541, which pumped so much debris into Earth’s atmosphere that global temperatures plummeted for several years.’ When Viking society re-emerged it was dominated by what Price calls ‘encultured violence and expansive competition’. Price ‘redraws the Viking world in all its strange and gory glory. Thousands of books have been published about the Vikings — this is one of the very best.’
For Rebecca Onion, in her review for slate.com, Price ‘offers a sense of chronology and hits the major high points, while also introducing nonspecialists to the major questions that those who know a lot about Vikings still consider unresolved. Vikings, Price writes at one point, are interesting to him because of their “curiosity, creativity, the complexity and sophistication of their mental landscapes, and yes, their openness to new experiences and ideas”. This is a set of qualities also to be found in this book, which manages to be lyrical, unnerving, specific, and passionately uncertain, all at once.’