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In his very interesting online talk, Dr. Neil Price of the University of Uppsala suggested that the Eastern Vikings are the next frontier in Viking studies. Whereas 20 years ago it was unproven that they had gone east of the Urals, it now seems that they went as far as Central Asia and even to western China. Dr. Price even mentioned that the Chinese character in season 4 of the Irish/Canadian TV show Vikings was not at all unpalatable.

He further said that one of the reasons why the eastern Vikings have been under researched so far was due to the Cold War. It was very hard for western scholars to be granted access to the Soviet Union and even to communicate with people there, which has led to an overemphasis on the raids, trade and settlements in the west, rather than on a Viking worldview that stretched from North America to China.

Among his other points was that the first documented Viking raid took place not in Lindisfarne in England in 793 but on the Estonian island of Saaremaa in 750. What we now call the Viking Age probably had its roots in around 500 CE, with the major shifts that occurred with the end of the Western Roman Empire.

For more information, his book Children of Ash and Elm is widely available and the Facebook page for the talk can be found here

A review of The Children of Ash and Elm: A New History of the Vikings by Neil Price has appeared in the “Socially Distant Summer Issue” of the London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 16, 13 August 2020. Price is an archaeologist and professor at the University of Uppsala and is also associated with this program. His previous book is The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

The review is written by Tom Shippey and titled “Did they even hang bears?”, a reference to the ritual sacrifices at Uppsala which may have included larger animals than previously thought. Shippey recounts some of Price’s conclusions, such as the fact that 125 million silver dirhams are thought to have gone north from the Caliphate to Scandinavia in the 10th Century. Meanwhile, only seven million pennies did so from the Frankish Empire, which still amounted to around 14 percent of the Franks output. No one knows why so many of the coins were put into burial mounds but it can hardly have been an accident. Price suggests ritual as a possible explanation.

Even more interesting is the mystery of why the Viking Age started. Price points to a couple of factors, such as lack of central power following the collapse of the Roman Empire as well as the many volcanic eruptions of the 6th Century, which may have destroyed crops all over but hit the Nordic Countries with their limited agriculture particularly hard. More immediately, the feuds between the successors in the Frankish Empire in the 9th Century may have led to new opportunities to acquire loot.

Perhaps most interestingly, there may have been a considerable male surplus in Scandinavia in the period, as male children seem to have been better looked after and less likely to suffer from malnutrition. This may have led to raids to find funds to impress the girls back home or a chance to find and abduct entirely new girls.

Finally, Shippey finds many examples of the Vikings being alternately heroic and cruel in Price’s text, saying that the idea that they were simply one or the other belongs in the realm of comic books.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-shippey/did-they-even-hang-bears

Tag Archives: Franks

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