I’m a gamer. I play lots of video games, and one of my favourite series is Assassin’s Creed, a long and convoluted series of stories that are set in various historical time periods and places. The games are meticulously researched: they go to great lengths to seek out the most recent scholarship on the people and places covered in a given game. Previous games have covered medieval Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, revolutionary America, Paris, and the Industrial Age in London. Next up is the Viking Era, so I figured I’d try to learn a bit more which brought me to Children of Ash and Elm.
Vikings are most famous for being raiders. Our popular images are of long ships filled with men wearing horned helmets wreaking havoc across northern Europe, pillaging their way through the villages of the Middle Ages. And yes, this is partly accurate: Vikings did raid. They did kidnap people into slavery. Where they went, bloodshed followed.
Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price argues that they were so much more than that. There is a tendency to write them off as a simplistic people, but they lived in a time of change. Christianity was being imported into the north, so they were in a confusing transition between the old Norse gods and the new faith. Men and women both fought and farmed, trying to keep their families alive and fed in a challenging environment.
Children of Ash and Elm breaks the usual routine of many history books by not telling the Viking’s story in a strict historical timeline. Rather than going chronologically from 800 to 1000 AD, Price starts with describing the people as they were: the social structures, the family life, what kind of clothes they wore, as well as what they believed, and how they interacted with the rest of the world. Even in the 900s they had access to luxuries from as far away as China, and they travelled themselves far south, all the way to what is now Istanbul, Turkey.
Part of my ancestry is Icelandic, so reading this book was interesting on an intellectual level, but also painted a picture of my long distant family history, going back a thousand years. Neil Price’s years of experience as an archaeologist and professor devoted to Vikings and Nordic history really comes through and he brings the Viking People to life, reminding us that behind every myth and legend is a real culture, full of the same nuances, the same wants and needs, as we have today.
Steven McCreedy is a library technician at the Cambie Branch of the Richmond Public Library
