New Light on Vikings

I read all 599 pages of Neil Price's just-published Children of Ash and Elm, a detailed history of the Vikings, and I'm mighty proud of myself for persevering.  It's a long book bristling with details and data. The author, an archeologist, has made his own original contributions to Viking research. To produce this synthesis, he seems to have read every relevant article and monograph of generations of scholars. An impressive feat. I wonder, how much will my intermittently faulty memory retain? 

Has my understanding of the Vikings changed? Yes, I think it has. I knew that the Vikings were famous for cruelty, plunder, pillage and rape, but I had no idea that they were so deeply involved with human sacrifice and slavery.  "The Vikings," says Price, "were not only slavers, but the kidnapping, sale, and forced exploitation of human beings was always a central pillar of their culture." Slaving was "the main element" of commerce with Russian and Ukraine. The chapter on Viking slavery is grim reading indeed. It won't make you proud of your species. 

Here are a couple of Viking slave collars

 

 

Vikings were polygynous and when a minority of the males monopolize the women, the rest have to find companionship and satisfaction elsewhere. Vikings liked to locate a settlement, kill the men, and capture the women. Recent genetic studies have determined that the founding population if Iceland consisted in large part of Viking men and Scottish women. 

 

It's hard to believe that the age of the Vikings is only a thousand or so years into the past -- a blip in human history. To me, the hideous cruelty of their era figures the dark heart of European and probably all human history. Do not slave labor, pogroms, and genocide periodically erupt?  And yet the Scandinavian cultures that descend from the Vikings are now the most democratic, progressive, and egalitarian on earth. Perhaps there is hope.

 

Those are Viking teeth in the picture above. Price thinks that the filed grooves were filled with some sort of red dye, making the Viking smile truly terrifying.