The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

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I wish he had spent more time discussing the four elements that supposedly determined how Vikings viewed themselves. This is a book for those who want to understand more than the sailing and raiding aspect of this culture. Be it a single Buddha statue found in the Helgo treasure or a runic monument left by a woman, who went to travel to Jerusalem, material culture can tell so many stories if we are there to listen. I highly recommend this book but appreciate that not everyone will like it, those who somehow think that the Vikings were some sort of pure ethnic group for example (they never were), or those who are only focussed on their macho image; they were much, much more than either of those portrayals. It explores their unique understandings of personhood, gender, and the place of the individual in the many dimensions of the cosmos.

It was narrated by someone who is clearly comfortable with a variety of languages that appear in this reading.There is no neutrality in him in relation to Christianity, a position that is intellectually barren at best and underhandedly evil at worst. Many of the slaves and their descendants, wherever they came from, were eventually absorbed into their respective section of Viking society. To add insult to injury, he soft pedals the blatantly wretched aspects of Viking culture, minimizing them.

Others feel more like staged clues to a murder mystery: a boatload of dead Swedish warriors, their bodies strewn with gaming pieces, and the “king” gaming piece inserted into the mouth of one of the men.It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, and traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were. Neil is a Fellow of learned academies in Britain and Scandinavia, including Sweden's oldest, the Royal Society of Sciences; in 2017 it awarded him the Thuréus Prize for his lifetime achievements in Viking studies. If I was trying to read the Swedish, Norse, Arabic, and Germanic phrases that are throughout the text, I would have been completely lost, and missed out on the beauty of the languages as they're meant to be spoken. the acknowledgment of these people’s brutality and the horrible nature of their world (slaves, rough conditions, social mores that limited so many). Children of Ash and Elm will reward the casual reader as well as serve the serious student looking for a better understanding of who the Vikings were, what drove them, and the effects they had on the world around them.

Het stereotiepe beeld van een woest bebaarde, met een bijl zwaaiende krijger met een helm met hoorns blijft niet overeind. His book is thought-provoking, thorough and extremely wide-ranging – Viking remains extend from Newfoundland to the Silk Road – with interesting colour photographs (in the paperback edition).And ending the book is a kind of summation of the influence this phenomenally active and successful force in the world. If you do not have this book as part of your Viking history book collection you are sadly lacking, I think. Writing about Vikings from a Viking perspective is a bold claim, but I think the author has succeeded in doing just that. In the 800s, Vikings extorted 30,000 pounds of silver from France: one-seventh of the entire coinage of the century.

In seeking the deeper origins of the Viking age, he deftly connects different times and places all the way back to the fall of the western Roman empire.De schrijver doet duidelijk veel moeite om zijn werk zo toegankelijk mogelijk te maken, zonder in te boeten op kwaliteit: er zijn verschillende foto’s toegevoegd, alsook een aantal pagina’s in kleurendruk, en daarnaast zijn er verschillende Vikingroddels en allerhande verhalen in opgenomen (legendes, vertalingen van Runen uit het dagelijkse leven, …), wat de geschiedenis concreter en dichterbij brengt. The emphasis here is very firmly on who the Vikings really were, what made them tick, how they thought and felt. This book was clear, concise and analytical, while also allowing lots of space for fun examinations, easy to digest prose, and moments of fancy from the author. He never says away from it, but he qualifies it, he deepens them beyond the surface level pillaging that we know the Vikings for.