Review : Viking Britain

Hot on the heels of Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm comes Thomas William's Viking Britain. Given how much I enjoyed his Lost Realms, I was expecting good things from this.

The Review Bit

I was by no means disappointed. But I was, sometimes, a tad frustrated.

While Viking Britain is vaguely chronological, it forms little if anything in the way of a linear narrative. That's not so bad in itself, but the whole thing is unstructured all the way down. Each chapter tends to be an eloquent, beautifully written but all-encompassing rant about the Vikings. Even chapter titles give no real clue as to what they're about, the themes are sometimes hard to discern (occasionally replete with irrelevant information), and some of them are clearly out of sequence. Williams is apt to wander off on innumerable tangents and nobody has tried to rein him in. The word that keeps coming to mind is unfocused. 

Just as in Lost Realms, Williams fails to give any sort of satisfying ending or conclusion*, with the book essentially just coming to a halt because he ran out of things to say. This is a shame, because there's tonnes of good stuff here, and the rhetoric really is quite formidable. It's also obvious that Neil Price read this one very carefully (the two authors cite each other), with many passages feeling strikingly similar in the two books. There are also plenty of differences too, as we'll see.

* One smaller example : he goes on at some length about how the "Danelaw" was a later conception (the original treaty being between Alfred and Guthrum personally and specifically, rather than between English and Norse more widely), but never explains why exactly this matters.

Ironically, this is much more of a conventional history than COAAE, concerned mainly with what happened more than why. And this is perhaps the biggest defect : that there's previous little about what life was actually like in, well, Viking Britain. He gives some extremely readable passages which are almost micro-stories about very particular incidents, but it's dominated by high politics from the Anglo-Saxon perspective. It's not that there's nothing about everyday life in the Danelaw, just that there's not nearly as much as there should be. 

All the marvellous prose leaves me with the impression that Williams has a not-so-secret, irrepressible urge to write a novel, that he loves writing true history* but it isn't his real calling. And he bloody well should write fiction ! His descriptions are beautifully evocative and put flesh on the bones of a lost age. But sometimes it felt here like being at the literary equivalent of a swimwear pageant, showing off the author's ample talents for no particular reason. I'm not complaining – the author's literary assets are certainly eye-catching – I just think they could be put to better use.

* WHY, for the love of all things holy, do people call it "true crime" and not just "crime" ? IT MAKES NO SENSE ! Nobody does this about anything else ! STOP IT !

Despite all this I give it a very solid 7/10. It may be unfocused, but it's not a true mess, and there's plenty of interesting content wrapped in almost verse-like description. It's just a bit... muddled.

This is a much shorter book than COAAE, so I'll attempt to keep this to a single post. I'm gonna go for three major themes : why the Vikings did what they did, what exactly it was that they did, and the experience of what life was actually like in Viking Britain.

1) A life on the ocean wave : why bother ?

Price did a good job of examining what made tens of thousands of Scandinavians up shop and invade Britain, but there's a whopping difference of omission from COAAE : Williams never mentions polygyny. It's hard to know what to make of this since Williams literally never refers to it at all, nor does Price ever comment on the lack of attention previously paid to this possibility. Williams favours the much more straightforward explanation of a desire for wealth as the main motivational drive, and doesn't comment on why the Northmen should have been especially avaricious compared to the other realms of the time (polygyny would at least be something peculiar to the region). Both authors do agree, though, that a combination of factors were at work, and no single factor can ever explain the Viking phenomenon. 

They also similarly agree on the ethnic diversity of Vikings, with Williams pointing out that even in Britain there were some Englishmen among their numbers (just as Price noted that raiding began internally in the Scandinavian regions before its tumultuous outgrowth). Racism, then, was a marginal factor at best : the Vikings didn't see their opponents as sub-human or inferior, just unlucky enough to find themselves on the receiving end of a very sharp axe.

Williams makes a useful contribution here, noting that the Anglo-Saxons may not have shared this ethnically-tolerant viewpoint. He says that they viewed themselves living on the edge of world, with the North a paradox : on the one hand, they viewed it as their cherished ancestral homeland*, but on the other, it was also a realm of Satanic terror. He points to Grendel as a potent symbol of this, a demon of the dark invading the warmth of the hall in a way that retains a deep emotional resonance today. But for the original audience the symbolism would have been far stronger, with Vikings being described as "slaughter wolves" because they were thought to be almost literally monstrous, demons from beyond the pale, foes risen from out of the mouth of Hell.

* Like Price, Williams says that the two peoples knew about each other for centuries before the raiding began, pointing to Sutton Hoo as a prime example.

For all their racial liberalism, the Vikings themselves would have shared some of the religious-driven xenophobia, seeing the new religious symbolism as a threat to their way of life. Williams argues that this may result more from a political response to the aggression of Charlemagne, who posed a very direct and blunt threat to pagan lifestyles. The Vikings, then, may have attacked religious symbols more out of a perceived association with Frankish imperialism, rather than because they especially hated Jesus and his stupid goody-two-shoes beard or whatnot.

2) From beginning to end

Williams does a perfectly decent job of charting the course of the Viking invasions, beginning roughly with Lindisfarne and ending roughly with Cnut. He does this latter part especially well, making a good, easy-to-follow summary of what could easily have become a tremendously complex sequence of back-and-forth political turmoil. But whether one even considers the Christian Cnut*, as a centralised ruler of conventional military forces, a genuine Viking, is open to debate. The interesting stuff is all in the earlier period.

* Can we go back to the anglicisation of Canute, please ? "Cnut" just makes embarrassing typos and misreads far too easy...

A notable point of difference from COAAE, which I can't resolve, is whether the early raiding caused positive or negative feedback. Price has it very much as being positive, with the resources from the raids being used to fund more and larger expeditions. Williams views the situation as being more negative, saying that raids diminished because they became unsustainable. But since the raids did grow in the early period, which lasted many decades, this seems a bit strange; Price's argument that raids => money => more raids => cultural exchange => end of raids makes a good deal more sense to me.

On a more specific point, there's one thing that nobody has ever made clear : what was it about the battle of Eddington that marked it out to have such singular significance ? This was the pivotal battle of Alfred's career. Pushed into the fens and marshes, he famously rallied his forces, defeated the Vikings, and drove them out of Wessex. Okay, but as Williams makes clear, he'd suffered a series of defeats to get to this point. The Vikings had by no means had things all their own way, but they'd won more battles than they'd lost. Presumably, the scale of the defeat must have been unprecedented, but it would have been nice if he'd commented more on it*. I know, I know, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself gives precious little to go on. But a little speculation to fill in this important gap would have been helpful. 

* I mean, how did it compare with the previous battles ? Were those likely of smaller forces or were their causality rates much lower, or both ? How could the Vikings have won so often but then been rendered so impotent by this single encounter ? Williams comments that the one-sided hostage taking after the battle was unprecedented, but clearly Alfred didn't have things all his own way. He pushed the Vikings out of Wessex, rather than driving them back across the sea.

More interesting is William's observation that the Vikings relied heavily on fortifications whereas the Anglo-Saxons preferred open battle. It was the English that favoured an honour-based society, used to more formalised and ritualistic combat, whereas for the Vikings what mattered more was success. Time and again the Vikings won because they had safe fortifications to retreat to, which hardly fits with the bloodthirsty lunatics of popular culture. Yes, most of the stereotypes were true, or at least had a very solid basis to them. But the Vikings also deserve credit for intelligent military operations. The Anglo-Saxons, as depicted by Williams, won out by eventually beating the Vikings at their own game and adopting a similar strategy : Eddington gave them the breathing room, but it was the fortified burghs that won the war (of course, many authors agree with this latter part, but few mention that the Vikings themselves made extensive use of fortifications before the Anglo-Saxons did).

Williams is more openly skeptical about the significance of Alfred than other writers. Most seem to agree that Alfred was far from perfect but nevertheless a jolly good chap, extremely intelligent and a far-sighted visionary. Williams has him more skilled at propaganda than anything else – certainly not a stupid man by any means, but not especially heroic and concerned with his own image mainly as an act of vanity. For example, on Bishop Asser's chastisement of the locals for not properly following orders to build and maintain defences :

Alfred was indeed making practical and long-term changes to the way in which the defence of his kingdom was organised and was also trying hard to overcome resistance to his innovations; it is equally clear, however, that on both counts the king's efforts sometimes failed. (The temptation to blame everyone else for the bungling of executive orders can often be an appealing strategy for a regime and its apologists)

Ye-es... but sometimes also the common people can simply be thick as shit. This is a problem that affects many a well-meaning commentator, a sort of noble-savage fallacy in a refusal to believe that the great unwashed are, in fact, fully capable of being as corrupt and stupid as their idiotic rulers.

Alfred, though, has suffered because some Victorian imperialist twat decided to use the ludicrous hyperbole that he was "the most perfect character in history". You can't really help but have revisionism tend to roll things back from that because there's literally no other direction you can go. Williams does a better job of describing his immediate successors Edward and Athelstan, who have claims to be the first kings of England and Britain respectively. But the magnitude of their achievements isn't really stressed. To me Athelstan in particular still seems massively under-rated, a Dark Age king who exceeded Alfred's wildest expectations surely deserves to be more widely known.

The most interesting point William's makes is largely implicit. I mentioned in the COAAE post that the failure of the Viking network to defeat monarchical hierarchies is at odds with claims about which organisational setup is the stronger. But in Viking Britain there are hints as to what may have happened. Williams speaks of "narrower loyalties" in the settled communities within the Danelaw. In the "absence of clear royal authority", people looked to their immediate surroundings for economic and cultural guidance. In essence, then, the network fragmented to the point it was no longer really a network at all : the people were there, but the links were cut. Without a wider purpose, driven by common motivating factors, each town and village became a separate entity that could be dealt with piecemeal. This is somewhat at odds with William's own claim about how the Vikings in Britain remained economically connected to a vast economic network stretching to Constantinople and beyond, so clearly there's still work to do on this.

3) How the Viking half lived

Williams offers some interesting comments about why the Vikings inspired such peculiar terror among the Saxons : they were a ghastly embarrassment. Despite being largely or entirely Christian when the raids began, the Anglo-Saxon culture still had recognisable ties to its northern, pagan roots (witness Beowulf, and many other poems of similar style that Williams quotes*). And as he rightly points out, lulls in raiding of 30 years or so are historically short, but to those living through it, it would have given every appearance of being a permanent cultural shift. So they really would have felt, quite literally, as ghosts of the past, a disturbance in the natural order, a thing of the pagan dead risen to challenge the living Christ**. Much like the resurgence of fascism today, I suppose.

* And it must be said that he gives translations which are millions of times better than others I've read. I will even provisionally withdraw my claim that the sagas are largely agonisingly tedious if there are more translations in this style.
** This makes it all the stranger that Williams doesn't appreciate how, conversely, sustained increases in raiding of several decades point to their self-financing nature from positive feedback effects.

In Marc Morris' The Anglo Saxons there was a clear sense of cultural change among the English throughout the Dark Ages. From proud, mead-drinking warriors in timber halls, they transformed to feudally-organised societies in the span of a couple of centuries. But Williams makes it apparent that even in the later part of the period, they shared plenty of cultural similarities with the northern peoples. The Vikings believed in the sacred nature of blood, in a supreme god who hung himself from a tree in self-sacrifice... well, so did the Christians, more or less. They each went about things in very different ways, but it may be the similarities more than the differences that the English found so fearful. Even today, it's hard to read the mythologies and not see something more than a little sinister in Odin; to the Anglo-Saxons, this older belief must have felt like a gross perversion – and one that happened to carry a very big axe.

Williams also points out that the early Christians had radically different attitudes to disasters than today : the response was blame, not charity. The Vikings could be seen literally as a punishment from God for the sins of the people, in which case fighting back would have felt all the more hopeless. The longer-term cultural attitude to charity, to respond to disasters first and foremost by helping the afflicted rather than admonishing them, is surely worthy of a study in its own right (though Keith Thomas alludes to this).

What of the titular subject ? Williams fully agrees with Price that Vikings were indeed both those who changed and were themselves changed by their exploits. Guthrum, after Eddington, actively sought to assimilate himself with his subjects. He didn't do so because he was a vanquished and humbled ruler so much as because he found the mystique of kingship both appealing and useful. Here was a means to power far greater than was possible in comparatively egalitarian Nordic society : he'd be acknowledged as an equal (if grudgingly) with, or at least a peer amongst, the great leaders throughout Europe, anointed by the Pope himself, and his visage shown everywhere on the coins throughout his realm. "Heady stuff", says Williams. Indeed. And I suppose the spiritual price of adopting Christianity would have seemed a little thing, a minor change of gods really, compared to the all too tangible prize of political power that it bestowed.

Culturally life in the Danelaw was indeed distinct, with a fair claim to being its own entity just as the preceding Romano-British had been. Williams notes that the word "Danish" was adopted to refer to far more than people from the region of modern Denmark, sometimes with horrific consequences of ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons. They had a shared mythology, expressed their identity in unique ways (Eric Bloodaxe, for example, was a Christian remembered in pagan poetry), and it's abundantly clear that Tolkien was wrong : there was plenty of religious "muddled thinking" as Christianity and paganism mingled. 

The trap for Guthrum and the others came as monotheism appears to to act as a (generally) effective one-way valve. Pagans are happy enough to incorporate Christ as just another deity (especially when so similar in some ways to their own), but Christians are apt to use this as a wedge or lever to gain entry. Once it gets a foothold, monotheism corrupts and destroys the earlier beliefs, reducing once-proud gods to spirits and saints, if it allows them to survive at all.

Summary

Williams begins with a lament about how Viking museum exhibitions are sometimes assumed to be for children : bloodthirsty monsters whose murderous exploits are culturally acceptable to depict in a light-hearted way as would never be possible for anything else*. He's got a good point. Even if many of the stereotypes were broadly accurate, the Vikings were culturally sophisticated. They were not mindless brutes and shouldn't be seen as such, even if they were more then capable of committing acts of incredible violence**.

* Well, except pirates, I guess. And Romans. And Mongols. And the Huns, and the Visigoths... hmmm...
** Not the famous "blood eagle" though, at least according to Williams, who says it's probably a mistranslation and exaggeration. Booo !

Take dragons, for instance, a point of shared mythology across Viking Britain. Tolkien notes that their other-worldly, supernatural nature is a key part of how they inspire such terror, and thus render the hero's deeds as of paramount importance. Brian Bates went further, postulating that they're more than just a foil for heroes, but represent a defence of the underworld : the buried gold given to the ancestors, with the dragon protecting the cosmic order. Here Williams notes that they're anti-kings, monstrous because of their insatiable greed – a lesson in how a king should be generous by showing the terrible opposite. 

These ideas are not mutually exclusive, and reinforce how complex any serious analysis must be. Similarly, yes, Vikings could be barbarous, but they were, as a culture, neither simple nor stupid.

Quite how much we can really know about Viking beliefs is open to debate. COAAE, and the various other books I've read, take it that the Eddas and sagas at least record moments of real belief : not the full story by any means, but nevertheless representing things that some people, for some period, sincerely believed were true. Williams is more skeptical, although why he takes this position isn't clear. Nevertheless, even he acknowledges that the belief in Ragnarok (though never entertaining any notion that it had a real-life counterpart as Price does) was something truly fundamental to the Vikings, and he deserves to be quoted here at some length :

Of all the deaths and endings it is the death of Odin that is the most poignant, the one that speaks most clearly to the contradiction at the heart of the human condition. Odin may be the darkest of the gods, but he is also the most like us. He has watched the ebb of time across the ages, the rise and fall of kings and nations, the petty hurts and feeble triumphs of humanity. And despite knowing it to be futile, that ultimately he must fight the wolf and fail, he has prepared carefully for that day, selecting and curating the champions who will fight beside him when the last sun rises over the battle-plain... It is this bloody-mindedness – the obsessive quest for wisdom though it brings no peace, the desire to gain knowledge of a future that cannot be circumvented, the relentless preparation for a doom that cannot be avoided – that reminds us of our own self-defeating consciousness, the knowledge of mortality that defines our humanity.

The capacity to think, to remember, to dream, to prepare against whatever the future holds – all of it leads inevitably to the only certainty that the universe can provide: that all things fade and all things fail. And yet, like Odin, we struggle on heedless of the long defeat, wading against the tide that one day will overwhelm everything. It was acceptance of this harsh reality that permeated Viking warrior culture, shaping its mentality and appetite for adventure – the willingness to stare death and defeat in the eye knowing that to carry on is futile and that failure is assured, yet determined to fight on regardless, to struggle until the last breath is spent. It is in that struggle – internal, ethical – that true bravery lies and there, precisely there, eyeball to eyeball with death unflinching, was the place where legends could be born that might outlast the living.

Heady stuff indeed. All the same, I have to wonder if there isn't a different certainty that we struggle with. Not that all things fail, but the opposite : that all things have consequences, that every action, however minor, ripples through time unbroken, that a billion years hence the universe will, in some small way, be different because of our trivial triumphs and failings. Every act we take has infinite effects; nothing is truly irrelevant, but to look at full eternal magnitude of our myriad daily actions is to court insanity. We make choices in spite of ourselves. It's not that all our decisions are futile but their limitless ramifications that ought to stupefy us into inaction, yet, like the doom-laden Vikings, we make our choices just the same.

Finally, both Price and Williams do an excellent job of seeing the Vikings on their own terms. They don't try to moralise the past, don't try and hold the Vikings up either as icons of virtue or symbols of barbarism, but as real, complex people. Both authors acknowledge that there are aspects of the Vikings that, to a modern Western audience, can be at once inspiring and horrifying. The notion that they were perhaps traders rather than raiders, says Williams, is a particularly appalling one, given that they only thing they ever had to sell to the locals was what they'd stolen from them in the first place. By not brushing this under the carpet, by dealing with the Vikings as their own unique phenomenon, allows a far richer, more interesting, and far more mysterious portrait to emerge.

They were not 'just like us' : there is more to being human than using coins or wearing shoes, and mundane things do not readily reveal how people felt, thought and dreamt. But we can still stand where they stood, and feel the grass under our feet and know that they felt it, and taste the sea-breeze on our tongues and know that they tasted it. And when we wait by the shoreline, with the sun dipping like blood into the west and the breakers crashing on the strand, we can still hear their voices singing with the tide, the grinding of keels on the shingle.

Review : The Children of Ash and Elm (II)

Welcome back to yet another two-part review, this time Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm. Hey, it's not my fault I keep picking interesting books to read, so don't blame me for going overboard. Actually I'd really prefer not to go overboard, given Viking beliefs about what happened to those who drowned...

In part one I covered how Price defines the Vikings and why insisting it should only mean "sea pirate" is a bit silly, as well the factors that led to a distinct Viking Age. In this concluding post I'll look more into lifestyles of the rich and Viking : the scale of the raids and invasions, how women were (mis)treated, and the often bizarre spiritual beliefs that drove the Northmen across the world... and, very briefly, at what happened next.

4) Quantity and Quality

Many years ago I remember reading a book (though I forget which one) in which it was clear that the scale of the raids was controversial. The author favoured the view that the historical records were in the right ballpark, with some of the larger Viking armies numbering in the thousands or even tens of thousands. This was opposed by earlier claims that this was all exaggeration, with the "actual" numbers  being more like hundreds. The answer here appears to now be decisively settled in favour of thousands. Estimates of the number of arrivals following the initial raids in English are now, conservatively, 30-50,000 in 30 years. 

Which is not to say that it started like this. The Viking Age wasn't a long period, perhaps 300 years, but long enough for plenty of developments within it. The earliest raids were no more than a few boats here and there; the final ones numbered in the low hundreds. Incidentally, Price answers a question I had from reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : why is Lindisfarne typically cited as the beginning of the era ? Two answers. Firstly, that's only true in the west, whereas raids to the east were happening a good fifty years earlier. Secondly, it's the one for which the date is secure from multiple sources, with the date of the earlier incident mentioned in the Chronicle being disputed by other records.

While the first raids were just that, within a generation they'd escalated to a true invasion. Early longships contained nothing but warriors, but thirty years later they were transplanting entire communities with the intention to settle. By the end of the era there were still huge Scandinavian fleets roaming the North Sea, but by now they were under much more centralised control, much more like conventional military forces with specific objectives determined by a distinct leader. Price describes this as being in some ways a second Viking Age, although by the time they'd all converted to Christianity and adopted kingship, it's difficult to distinguish them from any other European powers of the time. Their piratical tendencies may have persisted, but by licensing them as legal military duties set forth by a king, they were hardly the same as the spontaneous let's-go-kill-some-monks jollies across the North Sea as in earlier times.

The reason the Viking Age can be said to persist, says Price, is Iceland, which remained free of monarchy. And of course even changing religion does not change a culture completely. Some of their supernatural beliefs persisted well beyond the medieval era and indeed still persist to this day. 

5) Angry Young Women

But before I tackle that final topic, I have to say something about Viking attitudes to women. Here Price is at his most ambiguous. I get the very distinct sense that he wants to present them as misunderstood, the hyper-masculinity at least exaggerated due to later attitudes (this certainly seemed to be the case in Larrington's mythology book). And to an extent this is clearly true. But there are other aspects of Viking attitudes to gender which were much, much worse than any stereotypes. Ultimately, pinning them down directly to to modern ideals is a bit like trying to nail fog to a wall : they were a culture all of their own, and trying to understand their beliefs on our terms is a mistake.

Which is not to say we can't compare them to our standards on a case-by-case basis. In that sense the situation can be helpfully simplified to positive and negative aspects, if only by revealing just how strange the Vikings were. The mistake would only be in thinking that there's some predetermined objective standard to which human cultures should naturally adhere to.

On the positive side, women were, unlike slaves, legally people and not property. They could initiate divorce just because they felt like it. They could own property and were masters of their own domain (the household) as a perfectly respectable social sphere. They weren't exclusively confined there either, with the notorious shield maidens being almost certainly a real thing (one of the most famous ship burials turns out to be that of a woman) even if their numbers are not yet known. Open marriages seem to have been common, and mixed or gender neutral (even gender fluid !) grave goods suggest that being female or male was never central to one's entire identity. There were also strong legal protections for women against the direct effects of violent feuds, though not its indirect consequences.

Like the Greeks, they had many powerful female gods, but unlike them they seem to have had real female warriors. They also believed that everyone had their own personal guardian spirit who was invariably female, which puts a rather different spin on people who gave themselves nicknames like Bloodaxe*. Even seemingly passive goddesses like Idunn, who gave the gods the apples they needed to remain immortal, wielded incredible power in their own way. In real life, magic was largely the domain of women, though often with an explicitly sexual component to it.

* Though on a related point : the Valkyries, Price is keen to point out, started off as being dangerous, primal, and extremely violent forces, only becoming the busty maidens of Wagnerian opera much later.

Wait, wait, back up a second... unlike slaves ? Let's not just brush that one under the carpet. Make no mistake, this was not a nice society. People were discriminated against on the grounds of wealth and class, though apparently not, interestingly, race. This didn't stop Viking society from being one heavily reliant on slaves, with their very myths describing how the gods gave rise to the thralls, clearly implying that some people were simply good for nothing else. Social mobility... not so much of a thing*. 

* Things were a thing, but though people got together to discuss their problems, Price is clear that the great and the good carried much more influence than others. There wasn't much democratic about Viking society even in the pre-monarchy era.

And the downsides of being a woman may not have been as great as being a slave, but they were nonetheless manifold. Compared to men, the archaeological evidence indicates drastically different rates of malnourishment : 7% for men but 37% for women. Sex trafficking was common and men openly raping other women in front of their wives was normal (notoriously, gang rape was sometimes part of the funeral rites). While women could divorce on grounds of violence, the socially acceptable standards of violence were absurdly high. Though they could do male roles, what they could not do was actually pretend to be men (and vice-versa : they may have had myths involving cross-dressing and even gender-swapping, but this wasn't shown in a positive light – at best it was intended to poke fun). There were prescribed dress codes and haircut styles. For a woman to seem too manly, by, say, wearing trousers, would certainly be grounds for her husband to divorce her.

Price makes an excellent point that it's very hard to say how all this actually played out in real life. The majority of romantic liaisons, he said, would have been between freely consenting adults. Though some gender role deviations could carry a capital sentence (especially men practising female magic), in fact plenty of men managed to do this without any actual penalty. Much as how the Christian Church would later pronounce harsh invective against astrology and other magic, in everyday like people tended to ignore even the most serious-sounding legal diktats. Even Odin was clearly a powerful user of what was supposed to be female-specific magic. As always, people didn't always enforce their professed ideologies all that rigorously; rhetoric and hyperbole are sometimes just that. The hyper-macho stereotype is by no means at all without foundation, but it isn't the whole story either.

6) A World of Doom and Darkness

What sort of spiritual beliefs could give rise to a society like this ? As with other pagan religions, says Price, their mythologies were fundamentally amoral. They were concerned more with providing a world view rather than ethical instruction. There are hints of moral guidance here and there, most notably with the fallen heroes going to Valhalla, but they're only hints. Whether Hel (both the person and the place) is supposed to be a place of suffering and woe is very unclear; in some interpretations it's more neutral. There's nothing about anyone being tortured in Hel but it also just doesn't seem very nice. Nor is it at all obvious where most of the ordinary people actually go after they die.

One exception proves the rule : those who drowned were damned to crew the great nail-ship Nglafr, made of the nails of all those who had died. They were punished in the afterlife not for any choices they made but simply because of how they happened to die through no fault of their own. Price is careful to stress that beliefs varied, and as with other pagan cultures, it's unlikely there was any set doctrine, but there seems very little evidence of the afterlife being much of a reward or punishment for any moral reasons. In the main, in paganism the supernatural is much more of an idea about how the world works rather than why.

This comes through very clearly in the funerary rites, which varied hugely. Yes, the classic boat burial was very much a thing (though Price doesn't mention if they were ever set adrift and burned at sea), but these could even be small dugout canoes as well as the full-sized longships. Chambered burials were also common*, with burial mounds sometimes in the middle of settlements. Like prehistoric graves, both could be actively used for years afterwards, with some boat burials being half-completed with accessible chambers open on the incomplete half of the mound, then filled in later – apparently in a great hurry, as if in fear. The sense of fear is also apparent at recorded descriptions of the funerals, and not just for the unfortunate sacrifices**. There are reports of naked men walking around the ship just before it was burned, keeping all their orifices either covered or pointed away from the boat, as though protecting themselves from some spiritual force that might somehow enter them. And there are descriptions of the interred sitting upright because of the heat of the fire, an image that must have caused absolute terror. Which makes it all the more mysterious that they didn't just bury the deceased immediately. Nor is it obvious why some of the dead were thought to become dragur and others didn't, or why some people were to be feared in death while others weren't.

* Burial practises varied enormously and I'm simplifying to an absurd degree here. Some examples include pits of murdered children and animals ripped apart; more tame practises involved lining up the corpses and putting a pebble in each hand.

** Of which animals were included in vast numbers. Nor was each boat burial necessarily just for one person – in extreme cases they contain several dozen people. The boat itself might not symbolise a journey but simply be the ultimate in grave goods, as evidenced by some cases where they are actually moored up : hardly could they have been expected to go anywhere.

While the stories of the gods form the backbone of the mythology, Price says that these weren't that important in everyday life. They mattered, but more frequently the supernatural was encountered as draugr, ghosts, monsters, elves, dwarfs, and most frequently of all as the fourfold nature of the human spirit : the physical body (which some could alter as shapeshifters), something roughly equivalent to the soul (which Odin can destroy), the person's luck (which could walk around on its own and even be visible to people with certain abilities), and the always-female guardian spirit. This was an extremely rich and sophisticated set of beliefs, no matter how brutish and barbaric it could sometimes be.

As to the gods themselves, I need not repeat myself (you're far better off reading a book for those anyway – it shouldn't be reduced to a blog post). But the refined nature of Norse religion comes through here too, and these tales also reinforce just how little we understand about their ideas. Almost uniquely, says Price, the Vikings believed in temples in the afterlife. There were graves in Hel, and Odin even visits one to resurrect a seeress, thus giving death after life after death (she retreats of her own accord after her temporary restoration). Perhaps this fits with a cyclic view of time...

And so on to my final point, Ragnarok. My current read reminds me that the Apocalypse is also part of Christian mythology, but in large parts of Christendom it isn't seen as all that important. In Britain we're never taught about it in school assemblies and the like – it's something you pick up on in popular culture. But every author I've read agrees that this was front and centre of Viking religion, this permanent sense of overhanging doom. 

Price thinks this may have been inspired by a real event, a real-life "fimbulwinter" caused by volcanic eruptions in the sixth century. The archaeology, he says, supports a truly cataclysmic population decline by perhaps 50% of the population, with probable eruptions having been robustly identified. With flame-red sunsets, bitterly harsh winters and people routinely starving and freezing to death, it becomes easy to see how this could have been mythologised. And with so many direct parallels in Viking and Greco-Roman beliefs, maybe this is what happens when you mix pagan religion with catastrophe : nothing like this happened to the Romans themselves until they had converted to Christianity. Maybe also the fact that the Scandinavian people did survive and rejuvenate is why Ragnarok is followed by a new and better world, though Price wonders if this might only be the influence of Christianity recasting the earlier stories to make them more palatable.

The End Of All Things

Of course, the Vikings also ultimately converted to Christianity. Price notes that missionaries explicitly targeted kings to make mass conversion of the populace easier. But this is seemingly at odds with the earlier claim that Viking society was reasonably egalitarian, a network more than a hierarchy in which no individual had the power to much alter anyone else's ideas. So how would that work ?

Several reasons. By this point kings were much more powerful, with the tendency of networks to evolve into hierarchies surely being an important lesson in its own right – those who want to do away with the corrupt politicians/billionaires/tyrants etc. would do well to remember this. More importantly, as Price says, it was more like a magical effect exactly as Keith Thomas describes : the important thing was that people were baptised. Actually altering their beliefs was both very much harder and not really the point at all, with the act of baptism itself believed to be the cause of salvation, not altering anyone's moral outlook. And of course it wasn't always successful, with plenty of conversions in both directions to begin with, with some aspects of pagan belief never really going away entirely.

And so the Viking era came to an end, or many ends in different places, but end it did. No more raids, no more human sacrifices, no more egalitarian networks. For better or worse, the Scandinavian countries became more and more like the rest of Christian Europe. From conquering kingdoms across a continent, the invaders were themselves assimilated and absorbed. There was no final battle, no pivotal moment. They simply changed, as all things must do. Some of their beliefs have become incomprehensible, all the symbolism lost, and all we have left are the weird vestiges of a "very old, and very odd" way of looking at the world. Other aspects survived and endured and still resonate today. So on the legacy of the Vikings, in this modern age of right-wing resurgence, I give the last words to Price :

We should never ignore or suppress the brutal realities behind the clichés – the carnage of the raids, the slaving, the misogyny – but there was much, much more to the Vikings. They changed their world, but they also allowed themselves to be altered, in turn; indeed, they embraced those connections with other peoples, places and cultures. Their most respected values were not only those forged in war but also – stated outright in poetry – a depth of wisdom, generosity, and reflection. Above all, a subtlety, a certain play of mind, combined with a resilient refusal to give up. There are worse ways to be remembered.

Review : The Children of Ash and Elm (I)

Continuing with the recent history/mythology theme, Professor Neil Price's history of the Vikings is an essentially perfect combination of both. In this first of two parts, I'll look at why it's such a bloody good book and what made the Vikings who they were. Next time I'll look a bit more at Viking life.

The Review Bit

Skip ahead to the next section if you just want to know what the book says and don't care much what I think about it.

This isn't a conventional history and it isn't meant to be. Price sets out with the underlying aim of examining why the Vikings did what they did, how their world view shaped their actions, how they lived their everyday lives. In this he succeeds brilliantly. What he doesn't do, couldn't possibly do in the 500 pages available, is also give much in the way of a history in the classical sense : who did what to who and when they did it. This is a social and religious account of the Viking era, and by design only contains the bare minimum of anything so base as to describe actual events that happened. The result is a seriously good read but not necessarily the best introduction to the topic.

Price presents his arguments with extreme clarity, following a broadly chronological track yet with distinct themes to each chapter. He is at turns vividly descriptive, emotive, detailed, humorous, empathetic, serious, rhetorical, all as the occasion demands. He manages to blend of all this into a rich mixture rather than a chaotic mess, and the result is something hugely readable, informative, well-argued and critical. It's a first rate work which I give a rock solid 8/10.

Okay, so it's mainly excellent. Hooray ! But it's far from flawless. I hasten to add that none of the issues should be enough to put anyone off from reading it, but I can't ignore them either.

First off, it must be said it does sometimes get a bit plodding and humdrum, with some chapters concerned with minutia and trying a bit too hard to making Viking fashion sense somehow interesting. Price's enthusiasm is always set to high, which helps keep the drier chapters readable, but even this can't always succeed, and it can be a bit distracting. He perhaps needed an editor to ask awkward questions like, "well, yes Neil, I understand that it's important to note that the Vikings didn't spend all their time hacking off heads and drinking themselves to death, but do readers really need to know about how they liked to do their hair ?". Some much more interesting questions he raises, like what it's like to live in a world where you sincerely believe your neighbour could be a werewolf, go unanswered in favour of the utterly mundane and unsurprising.

Another niggle is that while he rightly attempts to dispel the stereotypes, he largely ends up doing the opposite. Okay sure, they weren't the outright foaming-at-the-mouth rabid madmen the chronicles of the monks would have us believe, but they absolutely could be and were – not infrequently – savagely violent in the extreme; dark, brutal instruments of terror, and yes, they could also literally drink themselves to death. There is every indication that they practised human sacrifice with deliberately pronounced bloodletting. 

On this score I'd have to say that pretty much all the stereotypes were true, except that they were very well-dressed savage maniacs (and their attitudes to women being more a good deal more subtle than the hyper-macho alpha males of legend). I came away almost thinking of them as the Aztecs of the north : civilised, sophisticated and intelligent, no doubt about that, but also deeply alien with a value system that is at times incomprehensibly strange. In short, the History Channel's Vikings is about as good an adaptation of Viking history as you're ever likely to find. 

Actually, if you're looking for more expert commentary, I stumbled on this blog review by another history professor, who picks Neil to pieces over what appear to me as a gormless layman to be rather petty details (I mean, complaining the author is too fond of Beowulf...well, how very dare you !). She's probably right that Price could and should have corrected his various errors, few of which sound like they'd change anything, but I very much like Price's attitude :

One can speculate with varying degrees of confidence, but it is not always possible to be sure. An essential prerequisite for a good researcher is a willingness to be wrong, the invitation of constructive critique. Nevertheless, while conclusions must be framed carefully, it is pointless to caveat everything to oblivion, to believe that it is impossible to really know anything about the past.

This could have been written as a direct response to Ronald Hutton's strap-caveats-onto-everything approach. To advance an idea knowing it might be incorrect, but inviting others to discuss it, is infinitely more productive than giving up and saying we haven't got a clue, which is not only pointless but also extremely boring. 

Similarly, while every reputable book about the Vikings feels the need to condemn the far right in no uncertain terms, Price manages this in a sensible way. He moralises, but never to an excessive degree or in accusative terms except where this is undeniably necessary. Most of the time the balance is firmly on understanding his subject, not judging it. He allows himself to be more explicit here and there, but it's generally a light touch. Nothing ever gets rammed down anyone's throat or other orifice.

A final minor issue where I have to vehemently disagree is Price's love of the sagas. "Go and read them !" he says, repeatedly. Their poetry can "taste like cold iron on the tongue", he claims. Mmm, nope. In my experience reading the sagas is more like having that cold iron bash your teeth in, and Price's own phrase is better rhetoric by far than anything I ever read in any of them*.

* That said, in Thomas William's Viking Britain (stay tuned !), there are some much better examples, so maybe it's just a matter of translation. Also to be fair, in some sagas people jump spontaneously into verse as though they were in a musical or something. Okay, it's often dismal, boring verse, but it's still at odds with the popular view of axe-wielding savages.

Right, let's get on with things. What interesting stuff does Price have to say ?

1) To Be A Viking

"Viking" is often said by People On The Internet to be a job description rather than a people. Price is both more tolerant and nuanced :

In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders, while in English and other tongues it has come to serve for anyone who had, as one Cambridge scholar resignedly put it, "a nodding acquaintance with Scandinavia in those days"... Some scholars now use 'vikings' to mean the general populace, while reserving title case for their piratical acquaintances.

That is, restricting the word to only the sharp end of the people who decided to go out in longboats and whatnot is to deny a perfectly serviceable term for which no other quite fits the bill. Trying to bring it back in English to the original meaning of its mother tongue (which is anyway uncertain), and even debating what we mean by "Viking" in terms of the people, is to miss the point. Instead, Price believes that a clear Viking Age took place with a distinct beginning and end, even if it's not quite as straightforward as saying it started with Lindisfarne and ended with Stamford Bridge. 

The impression I get is that there are three main criteria for defining a Viking either as an individual or part of a wider society :

• Belief in the Norse gods, deities, and associated religious practises.
• A capacity for raiding and waging war, without any moral beliefs against violence.
• Being part of distinctive culture and society, often including a decentralised organisation with no single ruler.

Have all three and you've clearly got yourself a Viking. Have only one and you definitely don't : later Norwegian armies organised under powerful Christian kings to wage war on other nation-states don't feel Viking at all. Any random two ? That's a very grey area.

One obvious question here is why the Vikings went raiding. The Anglo-Saxons and other European peoples never did this (at least not to anything like the same degree), so what set the Vikings apart ? Price explicitly denies there was any one cause, but definitely favours some over others. Which leads on to the next section.

2) The Anti-Social Network

Implicit in this is the (initially at least) decentralised structure, there seldom being any single leader with whom their adversaries could negotiate with. The Vikings were an emergent network phenomenon : they went into piracy because they all independently decided it would be a good idea, not because anyone commanded them to do anything. This made them all but impossible to stop through diplomacy, because diplomacy can't remove the underlying conditions. You might as well try negotiating for the rain to stop. Price likens them to much later pirates :

The mythical hydra was a challenge to defeat because every time one of its heads was severed, two more grew to take its place. Likewise, sinking individual pirate ships or killing notorious captains did little to dent the nature of the enemy – and yet through it all, "the pirates" as a collective source of grave political peril remained entirely valid and operative, just like the supposedly unkillable hydra.

The term he uses is hydrarchy. The Viking "armies" were, he says, polities in themselves, groups of armed migrants the like of which aren't supposed to exist outside of the pages of the right-wing tabloids. They weren't "armies" in the modern sense, not on their way to anywhere in particular, but were instead "an end unto themselves". They had no single overall goal, though they were intelligent and their raiding was carefully planned (but often badly coordinated), and, as time went on, their piratical operations built up to an industrial scale.

While Niall Ferguson has it that "it takes a network to beat a network", this doesn't ring true here. Early Viking attacks on the Frankish Empire were successful only because the Franks were in a period of political turmoil; when the Empire got its act together and was able to marshal its resources properly, the Vikings were swiftly repulsed. Hence they began to attack England in much larger numbers, but once again, when Wessex united itself under a strong, capable leader it was famously able to fight back very effectively. 

The network of Viking society could be resilient but it could also be vulnerable to fragmentation. Without any deliberate large-scale coordination, without a clear underlying reason to maintain momentum, they could be eliminated piecemeal. The Vikings on the warpath, when they were all individually motivated towards aggression, were indeed formidable opponents, but once they began to settle down, they were vulnerable to the trappings of centralised societies. The parallel is not exact, but there are definitely similar overtones to the nomadic steppe tribes invading China here.

3) Angry Young Men In Their Filter Bubbles

It takes more than a decentralised social structure to cause idle young men to undertake enormously dangerous ocean voyages to hack the heads off a bunch of defenceless monks. What gives ?

Part of the cause, says Price, was religion, even a "holy war" of sorts in which the pagans were the deliberate aggressors against the Christians just because they didn't like them very much (i.e. they hated and feared the new religion). This, though, was a relatively minor factor. A more significant but indirect contribution is that Norse religion was amoral and didn't condemn violence, but more on that in part two.

Considerably more important than this is the sheer and simple desire for wealth. Price is keen to stress that the Vikings actions abroad were the outgrowth of what were original internal Scandinavian practises. Raiding began internally before expanding outward to more distant, more profitable shores, which had the helpful side-effect of unifying the populace somewhat. There was also positive feedback, with raids bringing back resources to finance more raids.

But the biggest factor in all this, or at least the one Price devotes most effort to, is polygyny, in which men routinely married multiple women. In the TV show Vikings this is supposed to be reserved for a select few elite men*, whereas according to Price it was the norm rather than the exception. This rapidly led to a severe depletion in the number of available ladies for otherwise eligible bachelors, meaning that to have any chance of social success, would-be husbands had to outdo each other. Foreign wealth, often poorly defended, made an awfully tempting target. They could also, of course, simply take a wife abroad, with "take" here often meant in its most literal and brutal sense. 

* Whether they were lucky or unlucky depends, I suppose, both on one's perspective and who they happened to marry... in Vikings they're all supermodels (woohoo !) but also manipulative, angry, and murderous (less woo).

Price is very keen on this explanation but doesn't develop it very much. If we had evidence for exactly when it started, if we could say that there was a coincidence in uptake of the practise and an upscaling in raiding, that would make it much more convincing as an explanation. Especially since he makes it clear that it was the conflict with the other countries that was novel, not the contact : Vikings has Ragnar essentially discovering England, which Price dismisses as nonsense. It was abundantly clear that they're traded with the British for centuries beforehand (cough, cough, SUTTON HOO ! forts of the Saxon shore !). There's scope for more investigations here, I think. He does also acknowledge technological developments in ship building and navigation as also being essential factors, though clearly not the main motivation. 

In sum : Nobody wants to turn pirate just because they're horny and have a new boat. But if you're horny, have a new boat, don't particularly want to attack your neighbours, haven't got much money, have heard of some rich defenceless monks across the ways and there's no spiritual penalty for bashing their heads in... well, what's a man to do ?

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The answer is... well, quite a lot really. Next time I'll look into the scale and nature of the invasions, how Viking women were really treated, and the complex and sophisticated religious beliefs that underpinned everyday Viking life.