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.