The Sea-King and the SorceressNeil Price, Allen Lane (UK)Basic Books (US), out 13 October The first thing to understand about the Vikings is that the people we label Vikings never called themselves by that name; it wasn’t their ethnic identity in the way “Roman” or “Puerto Rican” has been. The Old Norse word víkingr probably meant something like “pirate”, explains Neil Price on page 2 of his richly informative new book, The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and death in the Viking Age. It described a job or activity “that could be taken up or left off at different times in a life”.
During the Viking Age, roughly AD 750-1050, most Scandinavians were farmers: they “never went anywhere or did much harm to anyone”. The word “Viking” is a label that was applied to the Norse peoples of Scandinavia by others – specifically, by western European writers in the 1800s, centuries after the phenomenon had ended. From the start, these reports of Viking activity were tinged with political agendas.
Early accounts were viewed through a “distorting lens of racialized imperialism”, Price writes. These Vikings were seen as the ancestors of modern Europeans, whose thrusting and conquering ways helped to build modern civilisation. Many writers have had “an ideological crush on the Vikings”, writes Price: you can see it in the ideology and imagery of the Nazis and in the modern white supremacy movement.
To understand the Norse, we must begin by rejecting any notion of a monolithic Norse culture Price is an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he studies the Viking Age. His debut book The Children of Ash and Elm: A history of the Vikings was published to general acclaim in 2020. He subsequently worked as a historical consultant for the 2022 film The Northman, which inspired him to write about “a past that did not care in the slightest what we think of it”.
In The Sea-King and the Sorceress, his second book, Price tries to help us see the Norse people, and their practice of going a-viking, through new eyes. He does so by describing 21 burials, spanning four centuries and a wide geographical area. Each is given a title, like “the sea-king”, “the shapeshifter” and “the matriarch”.
The aim is to show the variety of lives that were being lived, and how they changed over the centuries. If we want to understand the Norse, Price writes, “we must begin by rejecting any notion of a monolithic Norse culture”. He certainly succeeds at showcasing the rich diversity of the Norse world: we meet not just warriors but also traders, farmers, nomads and slaves.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
