by Neil Price;
Needless to say, any and all errors that remain in this book are my own.
The Vikings are a perennially popular media topic, and I have been more fortunate than most in my collaborators and employers in that field; their conversations, ideas, and insights have very much fed into this book. In addition to some of the academics who appear above, my thanks to Ágúst Guðmundsson, Mark Caswell, Mike Fillipov, Peter Findlay, Sam Hanson, Michael Hirst and the cast of Vikings, Bettany Hughes, Lars Knudsen, Craig Lathrop, Linda Muir, Heather Pringle, Dan Snow, Rebecca Snow, Kenton Vaughan, and Michael Wood. Special thanks to Robert Eggers.
Most of the maps were produced by Ben Raffield and Daniel Löwenborg—my thanks to them both. Map 2 was made by Ingvild T. Bøckman and Frode Iversen, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo; it was originally published in Frode Iversen’s chapter ‘Between Tribe and Kingdom—People, Land, and Law in Scandza AD 500–1350’ in Dagfinn Skre (ed.), Rulership in 1st to 14th century Scandinavia (Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 114. De Gruyter, Berlin, 2019: 245–304), and I am very grateful for their kind permission to reproduce it here.
I am grateful to all the copyright holders who generously gave permission to reproduce images, and who assisted in sourcing them. Special thanks to Caroline Ahlström Arcini, James Barrett, Tom Christensen, Julie Lind, Lindsay Kerr, Ole Kastholm, Viacheslav Kuleshov, Chris Lowe, Max Marcus, Peter Pentz, Anneli Sundkvist, and Per Widerström. Those who know me or my work will be aware of my long-standing affection for reconstructions, and I would like to thank here Ragnar Børsheim and the team at Arkikon; Flemming Bau; Anders Kvåle Rue; Franziska Lorenz and Jochen Stuhrman; Tancredi Valeri; and especially Þórhallur Þráinsson, my artistic collaborator of many years.
My head of department at Uppsala University, Susanne Carlsson, has been fantastic in allowing me to rearrange my regular work schedule, and my colleagues have been very kind. I would especially like to thank Anneli Ekblom, who, unasked, saved me a whole week of time on an urgent report at a critical moment; that’s a lot.
Beyond my office and home (they are not quite the same thing, yet), this book has been written and revised in a variety of places. My grateful thanks to the American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis; the Nordic Museum, Seattle; the University of Iceland, Reykjavík; the many facilities of UCLA; Birka Museum, Björkö; and a succession of American, Canadian, Hawaiian, Japanese, Nordic, and Spanish hotels. On far too many occasions, my desk has been a seat table on a Scandinavian Airlines long-haul flight, and I would like to extend my warm appreciation to the onboard staff who have never been less than patiently accommodating to a stressed archaeologist.
These acknowledgements would not be complete without my nightmare fuel, the fiction reading I did in small bursts—usually at about 1:00 a.m.—to decompress before bed while nonetheless maintaining the edge of stressed paranoia that I somehow seem to require in order to write. In that context it will surprise no one that I’m a longtime fan of James Ellroy. His L.A. Quartet did the job back in the early 2000s when I was writing up my doctorate; for the final month of work on the first draft this time, I started with a reread of Perfidia and got to the finish line with This Storm, hot off the press. Dear God, such glee.
I have been fortunate in working with two outstanding editors. At Basic in New York, this book’s first home, Lara Heimert has improved the text immensely and also provided a firm hand on the tiller when necessary (and it was sadly necessary). Her team—Jessica Breen, Allison Finkel, Kait Howard, Amber Hoover, Roger Labrie, Katie Lambright, Olivia Loperfido, Abigail Mohr, Melissa Raymond, Megan Schindele, and Michelle Welsh-Horst—also have my grateful thanks. At Penguin in London, Stuart Proffitt made a close reading of the final manuscript, valuable indeed, ably assisted by Alice Skinner; my thanks also to Isabel Blake, Ania Gordon, and Julie Woon. Patrick Walsh, my unflappable agent, has believed in the Children and smoothed their path since our first serendipitous meeting. As ever, I owe a great debt to Tom Holland for that introduction.
For familial and moral support, my thanks to Ingrid and Jörgen Qviström, Louise and Richard Dennerståhl, and Nathalie and Anders Le Bouteillec-Ögren—and of course to my late parents, Jean and Geoffrey Price. Whether late at night at the kitchen table in Uppsala or on our Gotland veranda looking out at the sea, or for what felt like every single weekend, there were too many times when my laptop seemed always open. For several months I neglected my family for this book, and whatever its merits (or otherwise), there is really no excuse for that. Linda, Lucy, and Miranda not only have all my love but are also quite simply the most thoroughly decent human beings I know.
Neil Price
Uppsala, December 15, 2019
CREDIT: Linda Qviström
NEIL PRICE is distinguished professor and chair of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden. He has been researching, teaching, and writing on the Vikings for nearly thirty-five years and is the author of several books on the history of the Viking Age. He lives in Sweden.
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REFERENCES
THE ACADEMIC AND POPULAR LITERATURE on the Vikings is truly vast, and inevitably only a small selection can be given here. The relevant specific sources are cited individually by chapter in the following, but the reader may also be interested in general works, any of which can serve as inroads to wider study.
1. GENERAL BACKGROUND
Perhaps the best one-volume academic treatment of the period ever written is now a half century old and inevitably outdated in some ways, but still rewards a close reading. The Viking Achievement by Peter Foote and David M. Wilson (Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1970) will probably never be surpassed in this respect.
The standard academic source book is currently still The Viking World (Routledge, London & New York, 2008), edited by Stefan Brink and myself, containing nearly fifty chapters by the leading specialists in the field and covering most aspects of the period. For the latest authoritative syntheses of the Viking Age, see Else Roesdahl, The Vikings (3rd edn., Penguin, London, 2016); Jörn Staecker and Matthias Toplak (eds.), Die Wikinger (Propyläen, Berlin, 2019); and Jeanette Varberg, Viking (Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 2019). For an excellent survey of the Vikings’ material world, see Steve Ashby and Alison Leonard, Pocket Museum: Vikings (Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2018).
In addition, any of the following (including some older classics) will provide useful overviews up to their publication dates:
Gunnar Andersson (ed.), We Call Them Vikings (Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, 2016).
James Graham-Campbell, The Viking World (2nd edn., Francis Lincoln, London, 1989).
James Graham-Campbell, Colleen Batey, Helen Clarke, R. I. Page, and Neil Price, Cultural Atlas of the Viking World (Andromeda, Oxford, 1994).
Richard Hall, The World of the Vikings (Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2007).
Dick Harrison and Kristina Svensson, Vikingaliv (Natur & Kultur, Stockholm, 2007).
Lotte Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia AD 400–1000 (Routledge, London & New York, 2011).
Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, London & New York, 2015).
Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984).
Alexander Koch (ed.), Die Wikinger (Minerva, Munich, 2008).
Anna Lihammer, Vikingatidens härskare (Historiska Media, Lund, 2012).
F. Donald Logan, The Vikings in History (3rd edn., Routledge, London & New York, 2005).
Julian D. Richards, The Vikings: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005).
Else Roesdahl and David M. Wilson (eds.), From Viking to Crusader: Scandinavia and Europe 800–1200 (Nordic Council, Copenhagen, 1992).
Birgit Sawyer and Peter Sawyer, Die Welt der Wikinger (Siedler, Berlin, 2002).
&nbs
p; Peter Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (2nd edn., Arnold, London, 1971).
Peter Sawyer, Kings and Vikings (Methuen, London & New York, 1982).
Peter Sawyer (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997).
Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz, and Matthias Wemhoff (eds.), Viking: Life and Legend (British Museum, London, 2014).
Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2014).
Although it has been superseded by subsequent work, honourable mention should also be made of David M. Wilson’s The Vikings and Their Origins (Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 1970), as it is the only English-language work prior to this one which truly tries to set the Vikings in their longer-term context.
For readers interested in following avenues of enquiry with specialist help, two monumental encyclopaedic works are essential. The first is the Kulturhistoriskt lexikon för nordisk medeltid (‘Cultural Historical Lexicon of the Nordic Middle Ages’), a trilingual work in the Scandinavian languages that appeared in twenty-two volumes between 1956 and 1978, consisting of thousands of short entries by leading scholars. German speakers may consult a similar work, the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, of which several editions exist: the initial four volumes from 1911 to 1919; the massive new series from 1968 to 2008, with more than one hundred supplementary specialist volumes that are still appearing as this book goes to press and which together comprise more than fifty thousand pages of text; and its internet successor, Germanische Altertumskunde Online, available by subscription from De Gruyter, which includes everything previously published together with continual updates.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Reference is given here to accurate translations in English, wherein the interested reader will find a full guide to the critical editions of the original works.
There are a number of good translations of the Poetic Edda, but my personal favourite is by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996). See also The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore by Andy Orchard (Penguin, London, 2011). An excellent scholarly edition with the Old Norse text and parallel English translation is by the late Ursula Dronke, The Poetic Edda (3 vols., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1969–2011). If this book prompts no other response in you than this, read the Poetic Edda! Unless otherwise noted, translations of Eddic poems in this book are from Larrington’s edition.
Snorri Sturluson’s works are of central importance. The best English translations of his Prose Edda are by Anthony Faulkes (Everyman, London, 1984) and Jesse Byock (Penguin, London, 2005). The Heimskringla, Snorri’s collected histories of the kings of Norway, is translated by Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes (3 vols., Viking Society for Northern Research, London, 2011–2015).
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (Including 49 Tales) have been translated in five volumes under the editorship of Viðar Hreinsson for Leifur Eiríksson Publishing (Reykjavík, 1997). Selections from this set, as a slightly smaller collection and as individual sagas, have been published separately since then by Penguin, London. Translations of individual legendary sagas are referenced by chapter in the following.
The corpus of skaldic poetry is being steadily published in definitive new editions, including translations, edited by Margaret Clunies Ross, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (8 vols., Brepols, Leiden, 2008–).
A different kind of early medieval work, The History of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus, has been translated by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Peter Fisher (2nd edn., Brewer, Cambridge, 1996).
The Book of Settlements, Landnámabók, is translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg, 2006); Íslendingabók, the Book of the Icelanders, is translated by Siân Grønlie (Viking Society for Northern Research, London, 2006).
A small number of books provide a general taster of the Old Norse written sources. Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths (British Museum Press, London, 1995), by the late Ray Page, is a marvellously eclectic collection. Page was one of the best prose stylists that Viking studies has ever produced, and his commentary on the difficult interpretation of written sources combines both insight and wit. Textual primary sources of all kinds are usefully collated by Angus A. Somerville and R. Andrew McDonald (eds.), The Viking Age: A Reader (3rd edn., University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2020). A wider net is cast by the Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures, which also sets the Norse material in its cultural context (eds. Richard North, Joe Allard, and Patricia Gilles, Longman, Harlow, 2011). For elegant samples of the verse, see R. G. Poole, Viking Poems on War and Peace (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991) and Judith Jesch, Viking Poetry of Love and War (British Museum Press, London, 2013).
Runic inscriptions are designated in this book according to Scandinavian convention. In Sweden, each inscription is lettered by the province where it occurs (the most common being U, for Uppland) followed by a sequential number as each text was recorded in turn; Danish and Norwegian inscription numbers are prefixed by DR and NIyR respectively. The Swedish runic texts, which form the majority by far, are mostly covered by Sveriges Runinskrifter, published in fifteen volumes (some with several parts) from 1900 to 1981; updates on new finds can be found online from the Swedish National Heritage Board’s ‘runverket’. The easiest point of access to the entire corpus is through the online Scandinavian Rune-Text Database from Uppsala University. When runic inscriptions are mentioned in this book, references are given below to their identifying numbers, which can then be consulted in the aforementioned works.
A general introduction can be found in Martin Findell, Runes (British Museum Press, London, 2014). For overviews of the Scandinavian inscriptions, see Sven B. F. Jansson, Runes in Sweden (Gidlunds, Stockholm, 1987); Terje Spurkland, Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions (Boydell, Woodbridge, 2005); and Lisbeth M. Imer, Danmarks Runesten (National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, 2016). These works contain hundreds of translated inscriptions, and I recommend browsing any of them to get the raw flavour of life in the Viking Age.
Most of the primary English and Continental sources on the Vikings have been translated, and all quotes from these texts come from the following editions:
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. Michael Swanton (2nd edn., Phoenix, London, 2000).
Carolingian Chronicles [Royal Frankish Annals & Nithard’s Histories], trans. Bernard Walter Scholtz (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1972).
The Annals of St-Bertin, trans. Janet L. Nelson (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1991).
The Annals of Fulda, trans. Timothy Reuter (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992).
Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, trans. David A. Warner (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001).
Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. Francis J. Tschan (Columbia University Press, New York, 1959).
The Annals of Ulster (to AD. 1131), eds. S. Mac Airt and G. Mac Niocaill (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, 1983).
The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill or The Invasions of Ireland by the Danes and Other Norsemen, trans. J. H. Todd (Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, London, 1867).
The main Arab, Byzantine, and Russian sources are also available in excellent editions:
Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, Mission to the Volga, ed. and trans. James E. Montgomery, in Tim Mackintosh-Smith and James E. Montgomery (eds.), Two Arabic Travel Books (NYU Press, New York, 2015), 165–298.
Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, trans. Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone (Penguin, London, 2012); also includes ibn Hayyān, Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb, Miskawayh, and others.
Þórir Hraundal, The Rus in Arabic Sources: Cultural Contacts and Identity (University of Oslo, Oslo, 2013).
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, eds. and trans. Gyula Moravcsik and Romily Je
nkins (Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, 1967).
John Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History 811–1057, trans. John Wortley (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010).
The Russian Primary Chronicle, trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, MA, 1953).
A much earlier, Roman text is mentioned several times in these pages as a vital source for the European heritage of the North. Cornelius Tacitus’s study of Germania is often published together with his book on Britain, the Agricola:
Tacitus, Agricola, Germany, trans. A. R. Birley (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999).
2. CHAPTER NOTES
Needless to say, like any academic my knowledge is to a very substantial degree reliant on the work of others. The names of individual scholars have been omitted from the main text to improve flow, but it is important that the ideas discussed here are correctly attributed if they do not originate with me. The following notes credit these fellow Viking specialists and provide references to these secondary sources and points of entry for readers wishing to travel deeper into the Viking world.
