After reading Neil Price's The Children of Ash and Elm, I immediately knew this was an author to follow. In fact I've already read The Viking Way, his PhD thesis, but finding the time to blog it up has been difficult. So I'm going to go straight to his latest popular book, The Sea-King and the Sorceress, before that one gets unduly delayed as well.
0) The Review Bit
In many ways this is like a more detailed version of Eleanor Barraclough's Embers of the Hands. The main difference is that Price concentrates on burials rather than objects more generally, and most chapters are more focused on specific graves rather than presenting a larger ensemble. But like Barraclough, this is an attempt to give a complete overview of the whole Viking world, from the ordinary farmers to far-flung adventures, over the whole period. Both books go together very well.
Price has a little more rhetorical polish than Barraclough and puts a little more of a modern moral slant on things. That's not to say that he judges the past by the standards of the present, because anyone doing that would run away screaming. Rather he's more eager to judge his unintended audience : those who look to the Viking Age as an era of heroic glory of strong white men protecting vulnerable damsels and giving Johnny Foreigner a good clobbering.
He's not wrong, but I also think he sometimes forgets that most people aren't far right extremists and don't really need this reminding.
If anyone tries to claim that the general ideology of the Viking-Age Scandinavians did not elevate violence and the prowess of warriors, they are mistaken. The infamous Viking raids were real, and every bit as destructive as the annals of their victims describe... In our contemporary vocabulary, they could epitomise toxic masculinity : anyone who finds Vikings admirable ought to pause for serious reflection.
But this is not the whole picture. It should go without saying that to acknowledge something's existence is in no way to approve or advocate it. It is even harder to acknowledge the fact that Viking violence did play to their own sensibilities and social expectations, and from much of what has survived of their thought, they did not mind it at all.
While the expansionist imperial forces of Charlemagne and his successors certainly both raided and enslaved, the Franks never invaded the British Isles, plundered the cities of North Africa and the Asian Steppe, laid siege to Constantinople, or, for that matter, settled the North Atlantic, reached the American seaboard or traded eastwards far into the Silk Roads. The Norse did all of those things, and they did them over three hundred years.
I don't disagree with any of this, I just think this is giving the far right more credit than they deserve (and anyway, without the Vikings, they'd only use some other justification; loonies gonna loon).
Most people, when they think Vikings, probably think the image of a madman with an axe chopping his way through Christians is, well, kinda cool, in the way that Darth Vader or a T-Rex are cool. Worthy of emulation ? Fuck no, unless you think that your life won't peak until you weigh eight tonnes and start eating people. That's just not how most people work, thankfully. No, if they admire anything about the Vikings, it's their hardiness, their skill at seafaring, their exploration, their proto-democracy, and their outstanding artwork. We needn't chuck the baby out with the bathwater here : there's much that is admirable even by modern lefty-liberal standards, as well as much that's abhorrent. And that combination is fascinating to me.
That said, I personally never found that this got in the way of anything, and Price presents fairly convincing cases – in fact sometimes I don't think he goes far enough – as to why the far-right image of the Vikings was often incomplete and frequently downright wrong. He also explains very nicely why trying to judge the past according to the values of the present is a mistake :
The people of the Viking Age have moral codes that are emphatically not ours, and nothing in the archaeological traces tells us how we should respond to their behaviour, for better or worse. This is as it should be.
Quite right. And in Price's book emerges a world that could be strikingly modern, even at times that most horrendous label of woke, and yet sometimes as barbarous and cruel as anything that mankind has ever produced. Their ethical boundaries were not at all ours. In some ways, they saw the world in entirely different terms, a place where causes and consequences did not always result from observable reality.
Hel-gate is lowered, the graves have opened,
the island's surface is seen all aflame,
it is terrible to be outside, to see this thing;
hurry, girl, if you can, back to your ships !
When you literally believe your neighbour might be a werewolf, asks Price, how does that affect you ? The answer that emerges is essentially : in a multitude of ways. Our understanding of cosmology does not exist in isolation from our ethical beliefs, and when that cosmology is filled with capricious deities operating on ill-defined rules beyond the merely physical, the result is an outlook that can be both strikingly similar to, yet also spectacularly different from, our own.
Safe to say I really like this book, but I don't think it's quite up to The Children of Ash and Elm. It's a bit too short, and could have done with some proper conclusions. A refusal to anglicise Norse names, instead giving a guide to pronouncing a dozen different letters and symbols, doesn't win him any brownie points. And it doesn't help that the final chapter is by far the worst and completely uninteresting : it's about a woman who got married. That's literally all that happens. Even so, I'm still giving it a solid 8/10.
1) Viking Around The Christmas Tree
If there's a running theme to the book as a whole, it's blurred boundaries. As we'll see, the distinction between the living and the dead, the human and the animal, man and woman, were not hard and fast. Reality was (at least) nine worlds, and the human spirit not one but four sorts of souls. I mean, I guess if you accept the premise of dualism, why not double down (literally) and go for quadralism ? It seems oddly specific from a modern view. Plenty of people still view mind and matter as fundamentally distinct, but it's a lot harder to see why you'd need to split mind into four different sorts of supernatural attribute.
But before we get to the serious stuff, there's one weird little anecdote that I have to mention even though it doesn't fit in with anything else I want to cover. Price covers the Viking explorations of the North Atlantic well enough, and it's pretty interesting in itself – I'm omitting it because I think that deserves its own book. He also covers their expeditions in the east, especially the famous Varangian Guard. Of which their were actually two sorts, one a bodyguard for the Byzantine Emperor, and one an elite but more regular corps of shock troops. Both were formidable warriors who'd lop your head off as soon as look at you. How did such men relax during their off-hours ?
They rush in quickly while striking their shields with their staffs, and thereby make a great noise, in that they continually cry "jul, jul", and so take themselves forward almost to the Emperor's table. When they have almost reached it, the two companies run in from both sides together, so as to build a double rank. Then when they have in this way run three times around the holy table, each section withdraws back to their places.
That's "jul" as in "Yule." So in essence, some of the toughest men in the world liked to kick back by doing a silly little dance for the Emperor and singing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas".
All At Sea
When they weren't running around putting on a Christmas dance routine, such men were having a very different time of it.
I mentioned the discovery of a ship burial in Estonia in the previous post but it's worth describing in more detail. In fact there were two adjacent boat burials on the same island : one with eight bodies and the second with 34, originally probably more. There were joints of meat, birds of prey, fish, ducks, a panoply of weapons, and the bodies covered in rough dome of shields. Over their were buried six dogs, "some with slashing cuts to the legs, as if inflicted as they tried to run. Their body parts were then reassembled in anatomical order". More birds of prey followed, and finally, "two swords had been plunged vertically into the top of the body pile, left sticking up, as they still were when the archaeologists found them."
Amid the pile of corpses was that of the commander (the eponymous "Sea King"), with a sword inlaid with gold and a gaming piece in his mouth. The whole was likely covered by burial mounds, though these did not survive.
This extraordinary burial vividly demonstrates a people whose thought processes were not the same as our own. To bury their leader with a gaming piece might feel familiar, but to put it in his mouth rather less so; to make six franken-dogs and bury 34 people in a boat and then cover them in shields is not even remotely similar to modern burial practices. Surely, you don't do something like this without a radically different belief system.
An even more dramatic example comes from the earlier discovery of the Oseberg Ship, which had fewer human corpses but more, and more dramatic, animal burials. Buried in c. 830 AD, this 22m boat would have required a crew of 30. It could have been a warship, but the complete lack of interred weapons makes this a difficult inference. At more than a kilometre from the nearest waterway, even getting it to the burial site would have been a major undertaking. The 44 m-long, 6 m-high burial mound possessed a sinister local reputation, and given the likely sequence of funerary events, this may have been well-deserved.
The sequence is complicated. In brief, and simplifying considerably, the ornately-decorated ship was buried in a deep trench. A wooden burial chamber was built on board, housing two finely-clothed women, one in here 80s and the other in her 50s, laid together on a single great bed with headposts carved like animals. Behind the chamber was placed an entire ox. Other grave goods included the 100-kg sail, cooking gear, food, carved boxes, a chair, an ornate bucket, at least eight chests, a 500 litre barrel, and 32 kg of pillows. Next, a stone cairn was built around the burial chamber that left the entrance clear. Traces of fire, says Price, may suggest a night-time ritual. The cairn was then buried under a huge earthen mound, still only covering half the ship, with the burial chamber entrance still open. It probably remained so for at least a couple of months.
At some point during all this, no less than fifteen horses were brutally slaughtered and buried around the boat :
Several of them had been felled by forceful blows to the head, poleaxed so that they fell directly on the spot; most had been decapitated by massive blade cuts that would have resulted in sprays of arterial blood. Four dogs, probably hunting hounds, had also been killed and their bodies deposited in the grave. A great heap of dead flesh, bloody and stinking, thus covered one side of the ship. The soil around the ship would have turned crimson, saturated with litres of blood that soaked into participant's shoes. Pools of gore would have covered the deck. People's clothes would have been spattered with red. Think of the flies. Think of the stench.
Still this was not the end. Quite suddenly, the rest of the burial was covered up, almost with a sense of fear. The entrance was boarded up with the speed expected of someone evacuating their home, with boards placed at random and broken nails and and boards from missed hammer-blows, "as if they were afraid of what was inside the chamber"*. Yet more objects were placed – or possibly thrown, with some apparently broken on impact – onto the exposed foredeck, including a wagon, a sled, rope, a saddle and a cauldron. The ship itself was tied to an anchor stone. The whole thing was now covered in more stone and finally buried in its enormous earthen mound.
* Maybe they just wanted to get away from the stinky horses ?
These two burials alone, even if they were exceptional events, mark the Viking world view as unarguably and drastically different from ours. Price also relates the famous funerary description of Ibn Fadlan, which describes some of the violent sexual rituals which occurred, as well as noting that people could drink so much alcohol at funerals that they actually died*. After the initial care and preparation, and the obvious reverence for the interred – you don't give 32 kg of pillows to just anybody – the final parts of the funeral were not solemn rituals but more of a Bacchic frenzy.
*A make-work plan for undertakers ?
All of this accentuates the most alien parts of medieval Norse culture. We have no records of why any of this was done. Price also notes from Fadlan the practice of a naked man covering his mouth and keeping his anus pointed away from the grave, as if trying to prevent something from entering him. Was something similar happening at Oseberg, given the apparent haste of the apparent final stages ? It may seem strange that these women were held in reverence in life (the elder was almost certainly a queen), buried initially which such care, only to then later be viewed as a danger, but this does fit with the sagas. Becoming a draugr seems to have little to do with how one behaved in life; perhaps instead the burial may have attracted evil spirits, but this wouldn't fit Ibn Fadlan's description which implies a more immediate danger.
We have no idea how common any of this was, but the fact that it occurred at all – and there are certainly graves which point to human sacrifice – implies a much wider world in which it was at least conceivable and acceptable. Given that we started with silly Christmas dances, it seems appropriate to end with a quote from Hogfather : the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood.
It's all about as far from anything modern, let alone progressive, as could possibly be imagined. And yet there are elements of Viking behaviour which are much closer to modern ideas of how we should treat other people. From female empowerment to racial toleration, alternative lifestyles and animal rights, you could, if you really wanted to, paint a picture of the Norse world that was practically hipster. But be warned. As we'll see in the next post, these aspects are deceptively familiar. If at times we may see our own world mirrored in theirs, then this is very much seen through a mirror darkly. We've seen the Sea-King, now it's time to meet the Sorceress.
