The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

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This volume would make an excellent textbook and a splendid introduction to the world of the Vikings for any reader.

Well written, informational without being dry (for the most part, I will admit my eyes glazed at some of the battle history during the raiding chapters), and captivating. Hun omgang met de natuur, de Goden en elkaar is zoveel meer sophisticated dan je zou denken, voor ons in contradictie met het onderlinge geweld en de slaven die als menselijke offer gebracht worden. The Vikings were a violent people, and for hundreds of years it was the foundation of their economy. The reach of this work is exhaustive, covering everything from the social pressures that led to the first coastal raids to the surprising amount of gender fluidity that existed in Viking society.If you do not have this book as part of your Viking history book collection you are sadly lacking, I think. It covers all the areas of known Viking activity and gives us many new insights into the lives of the people from Scandinavia and elsewhere during the time of the Vikings. He possesses both an archaeologist’s ability to interpret large quantities of scholarship and data, and the skill to translate it creatively. Additionally, not a mistake of the author but certainly a mistake on the publishers behalf to label this history. The author states that there is not much a written record some much of how society function has to be reconstructed from Archeology - of which he is university professor is Sweden.

I wish he had spent more time discussing the four elements that supposedly determined how Vikings viewed themselves.The other two were The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

This is often barely mentioned in many histories but is given its proper place in this book together with the violence, misery and distress that this would have caused. Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world. Of course, there were many other contemporary societies, besides the Vikings, that also dealt in slaves. 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.De schrijver doet duidelijk veel moeite om zijn werk zo toegankelijk mogelijk te maken, zonder in te boeten op kwaliteit: er zijn verschillende foto’s toegevoegd, alsook een aantal pagina’s in kleurendruk, en daarnaast zijn er verschillende Vikingroddels en allerhande verhalen in opgenomen (legendes, vertalingen van Runen uit het dagelijkse leven, …), wat de geschiedenis concreter en dichterbij brengt.