Who were the real Vikings?

One of the most interesting questions that Price grapples with is why the “Viking Age,” which historians date roughly to AD 800 to 1000, happened when it did and why it happened at all. The inhabitants of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway had been living in a style similar to their ancestors for thousands of years, farming, fishing, and raising sheep, before their sea raiding expanded to include all of Europe and a little of Asia and Africa as well. What changed? Most obviously, there was the power vacuum in Western Europe created by the collapse of the Roman Empire. For a point of comparison, imagine the effect the disappearance of the U.S. Navy would have on piracy. In the wake of the Pax Romana, much of Europe looked soft and ripe for the taking.

But there may have been other causes as well. Price explains that “in the years 536 and 539/540, there occurred at least two volcanic eruptions of almost unprecedented magnitude,” one in an unknown location and the other in present-day El Salvador. The effects of the blasts, in which “ejecta and sulphur dioxide aerosols reached the lower stratosphere and began to circle the globe,” was to block out the sun through what scientists call a “dust veil,” stunting tree growth and devastating agriculture. Chinese and Indian records from the time mention famine and crop failure. European sources describe food riots and societal breakdown. But the Scandinavian regions, where even minor fluctuations in temperature and sunlight devastated farming, were particularly affected. Plants refused to grow. Acid rains diminished fishing. Farms were left vacant. According to Price, nearly half of the Viking population died. To the survivors, surrounded by death and eking out a precarious existence on the fringes of what had recently been a flourishing and connected empire, raiding must have seemed like a pretty appealing option.

As the Vikings pushed out into the world from Scotland to Constantinople, the stories of their exploits were told mostly by their victims and enemies. Those depictions aren’t necessarily wrong, just incomplete. Price writes that Vikings were “warlike people in conflicted times, and their ideologies were also to a marked degree underpinned by the supernatural empowerment of violence. This could take extreme forms, as manifested in such horrors as ritual rape, wholesale slaughter and enslavement, and human sacrifice.” But what’s missing from the accounts of Irish monks and Arabian ambassadors are explanations for the beliefs that animated the Viking’s experience and gave his violent acts coherence and shape in his mind.

Luckily for the reader of Children of Ash and Elm, Price happens to specialize in Viking religion and polar shamanism, and the book begins with a deep dive into Viking mythology and cosmological belief. We might remember bits and pieces from school, such as Ragnarok, the Viking apocalypse story, but Price gives us a concise account of the Vikings’ invisible world, which is stranger and more complex than you might remember. Take the composition of a human, which, according to Viking beliefs, was an amalgamation of forces and entities. You had a “hamr,” or a shape or a body, though some people could shape-shift into various animals. You had a “huge,” or a mind. But people also had something known as “hamingia,” which was sort of like a personal luck energy that could occasionally abandon you. And finally, everyone had a “fylgja,” a female “fetch” or “follower” inherited from ancestors. The exact function of the fylgja is unclear, but belief in it continues among modern Icelanders. If you ask them about the “hidden people” or the huldufolk, Price writes, they’ll “roll their eyes,” but ask them about their fylgjur, and you might get “a level stare and perhaps a change of subject.”

Much remains mysterious about the Vikings in Price’s account, but that seems to be his intention, pushing back against all the ways that the symbols of Vikings and their religion have been simplified and pushed into the service of strange gods. The Vikings are gone, of course, but, Price writes, they still “inhabit a curiously haptic kind of prehistory, one which reappears whenever pressure is applied to it.” Christian monks, for instance, reinvented their Viking forebears as “agents of the devil.” They became Saracen, “enemies of Christ depicted with turbans and scimitar.” In Elizabethan times, they were the violent catalyst which helped to form England. Romantics saw the Vikings as “noble savages,” and, of course, the Nazis used Viking symbology in their own apocalyptic race fantasies.

In all of these instances, the actual human beings who existed in history are buried under nostalgia and narcissistic projection. What Price attempts to do with Children of Ash and Elm is to strip away the cultural sediment that has built up around the idea of the Vikings and return us to the archaeological record itself. We learn, for instance, about their complex “socio-sexual economy,” in which male royalty were allowed to dabble in polygamy while a kind of disaffected, incel class of bored and lonely young men existed near the bottom of society; about their strict code of honor, in which warriors would switch sides in the midst of combat should someone behave “odrengiligt” (unwarriorlike) by, for instance, killing a defenseless bystander; and about their rituals, including hanging pigs and even bears as sacrifices from sacred trees.

In the process, he shows what historical interrogation can and can’t do. The better we understand the Vikings, the more comfortable we are with how little we actually know about them. Whatever received ideas we might have about the Vikings, Price uses data points to destabilize them. What we’re left with are fewer illusions and a much more interesting mystery.

Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.