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.