As vivid as it is learned, as thrillingly cutting edge as it is deep-rooted in the distant past, this is as brilliant a history of the Vikings as one could possibly hope to read. Royal Armouries Trading and Enterprises Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 07374477 and VAT number 108 2359 28. His style of writing is really enjoyable, for a book of 600+ pages it never felt dry or boring even for a moment, in fact his sentences were quite poetic at times, and I really appreciate that. Polygyny, concubinage, and perhaps female infanticide left an underclass of young men without inheritance or marriage prospects.

I wish he had spent more time discussing the four elements that supposedly determined how Vikings viewed themselves. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read such an excellent example of a non-fiction history book, it was a pleasure. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. There were more than a few times when I doodled question marks in the margins because I wasn’t quite convinced by his use of the literary or documentary evidence.

Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology, their art and culture. Be it a single Buddha statue found in the Helgo treasure or a runic monument left by a woman, who went to travel to Jerusalem, material culture can tell so many stories if we are there to listen.

Of course, there were many other contemporary societies, besides the Vikings, that also dealt in slaves. Far from being all about Odin and Valhalla, the Vikings worshipped a pantheon of Gods who were tightly bound to the Vikings perceptions of their surroundings. Het tweede deel ( Het Vikingfenomeen) plaatst de Viking in zijn tijdperk, met de logica achter de plundertochten, de economische drijfveren erachter en de politiek van de krijgsheren. Verwacht dus geen verhalen van bloeddorstige plundertochten maar eerder een mooi overzicht in de denkwereld en tijdperk van de Vikingen.In die zin is deze Nieuwe Geschiedenis waarlijk nieuw en gaf het me goede inzichten in het Vikingtijdperk. It is important to acknowledge that the Vikings (1) were culturally and racially diverse, and (2) ritually did terrible things that really nobody should aspire to. He is so informative and descriptive that you can feel his hard work and passion on every single page. The descriptions were so vivid and thorough that I had no problem picturing everything from their ships to their jewelry to their funeral rituals - even though that last was probably one I could have done without picturing, because OMG THE RAPEY SLAUGHTER FESTIVAL was a LOT just to send someone to the afterlife.

He shows that this was a world in which gods, spirits and humans co-existed and one in which the savagery of warfare was counter-balanced by peaceful settlement as far away as Greenland and briefly North America. This is no easy task, but he is a past master of getting inside the Norse mind: a previous book, The Viking Way, was a groundbreaking study of Scandinavian paganism in the late iron age. No other history of the Vikings is as vibrant or expands the scope of the Viking world to encompass not just landscapes, but mindscapes.

This is a book for those who want to understand more than the sailing and raiding aspect of this culture. This book makes it clear that the same people conquering Iceland and sailing to North America were also present in Russia at the same. In 2001, he edited an anthology entitled The Archaeology of Shamanism for Routledge, and the following year published and defended his doctoral thesis, The Viking Way. I highly recommend this book but appreciate that not everyone will like it, those who somehow think that the Vikings were some sort of pure ethnic group for example (they never were), or those who are only focussed on their macho image; they were much, much more than either of those portrayals. She supports my not-available-via-the-library audiobooking needs via Audible that I don't want to pay for myself.