THE VIKING HISTORY PAGE: THE WOLF AGE, first Scandinavian-authored Viking history in English & CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM, distinguished archaeologist writes

THE WOLF AGE: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire
TORE SKEIE (tr. Alison McCullough)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Thrilling history provides a new perspective on the Viking-Anglo Saxon conflicts and brings the bloody period vividly to life, perfect for fans of Dan Jones

The first major book on Vikings by a Scandinavian author to be published in English, The Wolf Age reframes the struggle for a North Sea empire and puts readers in the mindset of Vikings, providing new insight into their goals, values, and what they chose to live and die for.

Tore Skeie ("Norway's Most Important Young Historian") takes readers on a thrilling journey through the bloody shared history of England and Scandinavia, and on across early medieval Europe, from the wild Norwegian fjords to the wealthy cities of Muslim Andalusia.

Warfare, plotting, backstabbing and bribery abound as Skeie skillfully weaves sagas and skaldic poetry with breathless dramatization as he entertainingly brings the world of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to vivid life.

In the eleventh century, the rulers of the lands surrounding the North Sea are all hungry for power. To get power they need soldiers, to get soldiers they need silver, and to get silver there is no better way than war and plunder.

This vicious cycle draws all the lands of the north into a brutal struggle for supremacy and survival that will shatter kingdoms and forge an empire…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This Norwegian historian's viewpoint on the rise and spread of the late-Viking-era North Sea empire. The seeds of this immense stretch of territory coming under one ruler were set in the attacks of Harald Gormsson, King of Denmark, (whom we call "Bluetooth" and yes, he's the source of the name of the wireless connectivity protocol on your phone) on the rich and peaceful (therefore ripe for robbery) Anglo-Saxon Kingdom(s). His wars against the neighboring Saxon Kingdom along the Baltic Sea coast were costly, and even resulted in his loss of control over Norway; much money for rearming and hiring mercenaries was needed and, well, Anglaland ho! Alas, his death came before he could finish a war of conquest in what is today a coastal region of Poland.

Aethelred the Redeless, who fought Harald and Sweyn his whole life, on his coinage
We don't see much of Harald in English-language histories, but he was more than the raiding monarch seeking silver to pay for his wars. He was also the one who introduced a centralized coinage for Denmark, guaranteeing its value would always be the same wherever one was paid in it. And one means of assuring that? Go get silver from someone else. The English have lots! And so it came to pass that the immensity of the North Sea became the middle ground between two halves of one empire...in fact, for a brief time, and in imagination for a longer one.

Harald's son Sweyn (opponent of "Saint" Olaf Haraldsson for the title of King of Norway, who is pictured above), after successfully rebelling against him, continued his father's efforts to unite the coasts of the North Sea under his family. A period of uncertainty in his rule before his first reported raid on the murderers of his kinsfolk in their midst (the appalling St Brice's Day massacre!) beginning a long campaign of looting and terror against the English. This campaign turned into occupation; the occupation turned into becoming the King of the English in 1013. Leaving England in the hands of his second son, he hurried off to fight another war...and died before 1015.

He was thus not as successful as was his own son, King Canute as he is known in English and Cnut the Great at home (his coin portrait is at the right). He ruled all three kingdoms, Norway from 1028, Denmark from 1018, and England from 1015, for twenty years and made a decent fist of it. What happened, as happened to most all territorially great empires, was just the reality of physics. In an era without motorized transport, the chances of maintaining control over a huge swath of territory are not great. Cnut did not overcome the odds, dying in 1035 with England still barely under his control. His descendants continued to cherish hopes of reacquiring England until Edward the Confessor died in 1066, when Harald Hardrada was killed with his army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge defending his, um, very (very) extended family's claim on the wealthy English realm. This was the last gasp of the North Sea Empire as envisioned by Harald Gormsson a century before.

The territorial drive of the father, son, and grandsons wasn't out of character; wasn't unusually violently for the era; and is ripe for reconsideration by English-language readers to account for our lamentable tendency to simply unsee the viewpoints of others on our shared histories. This volume is the first translated, for the most part skilfully, into English. I'd say the one concerning lacuna in this rendering into English of a popular history written in Norwegian is the use of colloquially still prevalent "Anglo-Saxon" in reference to the people, not the culture, of England from the 6th through 11th centuries. It's established through the use of genomics that the people of England are still largely Britons. It's a minor cavil in a work of popular history.

More frustrating to me is the lack of maps in the DRC. There are (see above) very nice black-and-white illustrations at the chapter opens but in my DRC, there weren't maps and, in any history text that discusses battles, that is a serious omission. I am aware that there are indeed maps in your final copies, I hasten to say, but I haven't seen them and can't comment on their effectiveness at conveying information they're meant to. I left off only a half-star in my rating, however, because that lack was both unique to the DRC and somewhat compensated for by the sheer pleasure of reading the skillfully translated text. Alison McCullough deserves much praise. While there is a sense of the original text's depth of scholarship, the primary affect of this book is one of absorbing, intelligent conversation overheard by the reader...not all the references or historical figures will stay in one's mind, available for instant recall, but even at lazier moments when I didn't feel like chasing a reference or an actor in the endnotes, or the "Overview of Persons" as this text charmingly calls the Dramatis Personae, I was carried along by what felt to me like very readable, accessible prose. Enough explanation was offered to my non-specialist brain to enable me to move forward with a real sense of the ethos in which events transpired.

Overall, the point of a book such as this...a lovely illustrated trade-paper edition of popular history about the pre-Norman Conquest world of England...is to please and intrigue the history buff on your gifting list. (Or you, of course.) I feel confident that it will serve that purpose.

Pushkin Press continues its streak of fascinating, unusual in the US, points of view presented in beautiful and pleasurable format.

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CHILDREN OF ASH AND ELM: A History of the Vikings
NEIL PRICE
Basic Books
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The definitive history of the Vikings—from arts and culture to politics and cosmology—by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise

The Viking Age—from 750 to 1050—saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

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 and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed.

From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Far broader in scope than The Wolf Age reviewed above, this is the most compact (at under 650 pages) and the most comprehensive overview I've ever read of the "Viking Age" Norse as we here to their South call the multiple groups of Scandinavian traders, slavers, warriors, and rapists who burst the seams of their colossally cold homeland in search of new lands and lots of money. Spoiler alert: they got them.

If the data from the Continental written sources is combined, the protection money paid to the Vikingsduring the ninth century totalled about thirty thousand pounds' weight of silver, most of it in cash: a sum equivalent to seven million silver pennies over a period when the estimated total output of the Frankish mints was in the region of fifty million coins. This equates to approximately 14 percent of the entire monetary output of the Frankish empire—for a century—evaporated in the payment of extortion demands that produced no tangible positive gain, and, in many cases, failed to appease the Vikings anyway.

(italics in the original)

There is so much to unpack in that passage...it's shockingly obvious that appeasement is seldom a worthwhile strategy, and is always an expensive one; the reputation of the Norse people as warriors was such that they merely needed to show up to be given boatloads of money to go away again; and the tribute in kind, not just the cash they brought home, kept the balance of hunger on the rightful owners of the land and food not the invaders. The Frankish kingdom, then, was more changed by its experience of Viking invasion than was even England, though both countries saw significant influxes of Norse population, arriving to make the country their home...with variable amounts of success. (See above for St. Brice's Massacre.)

That is all part of the middle, or "Viking" era that this volume is divided into. The first part of the text is called the "Migration" era. It is the time that saw huge cultural and climatic changes in Europe. There was pressure to find land to farm and patches of sea to exploit during this time, as well as the successor states to the Roman Empire arising and contending with each other for influence and territory. And ending the book is a kind of summation of the influence this phenomenally active and successful force in the world.

I was delighted to have the maps to help me interpret the movements and stations of Norse cultural expansion. I was also impressed wt the copiousness of the in-line illustrations. It is expensive to make a book this attractive and it's not a terribly pricey purchase at $35 for a hardcover. Basic Books has done a creditable job of this without making it a coffee-table book or a category-gift book.

Author Neil Price is a professional archaeologist. It is evident from the tone and tenor of his writing that his primary interest is in making you aware of the facts; he doesn't make the same amount of effort with the storytelling aspects of his writing. I've excerpted one of the typical passages where he's clearly making the effort to show the reader how phenomenally effective the Vikings were at their chosen task of redistributing others' wealth back to themselves. It's a fact, presented factually, that conveys a gigantic emotive affect of the Viking warriors. It is laudably clear; it is admirably placed for effect within the text (you'll have to trust me on that one); but it doesn't rise as high into the rhetorical clouds as Author Tore's book does.

It is, as a gift item, a good value; as a gift received, a real pleasure on all levels. It's a hefty tome, though, so for your friends whose needs are more for thinner reads, the ebook is a dead cheap choice!

Either way anyone wanting an accessible, enjoyable, and thoroughgoing overview of the Vikings as historical actors is in luck this Yule.