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

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Every year from 834 through 838, Danes sacked and burned the wealthy Dorestad emporium, on the Rhine in Holland, killing, taking shiploads of slaves. Boldly imaginative in the best sense, rigorously attentive to what evidence can and can't tell us, this is a remarkable book. Contained in this book are some fascinating examinations not only on the Vikings themselves, but also human thought, history and philosophy.

Es un libro interesante, bien investigado y escrito, pero en lo que yo buscaba, no ha sido tan completo como lo esperaba. I'm done with the constant speculations about finds, followed immediately by cautious caveats about how we can't really know.

What follows in subsequent chapters is the progression from raiding to invasions, conquests and settlements, in the context of the piratical sea-kings and large-scale trading networks that were opening up across the world.

I highly recommend this book but appreciate that not everyone will like it, those who somehow think that the Vikings were some sort of pure ethnic group for example (they never were), or those who are only focussed on their macho image; they were much, much more than either of those portrayals. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around August 25, 2020. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I enjoyed the book for the most part, appreciated the writing style and the wry humour when it occasionally appears, and learned a lot about the Vikings along the way.

This book makes it clear that the same people conquering Iceland and sailing to North America were also present in Russia at the same. Al met al een mooi gebalanceerd overzicht voor iedereen die kennis wil maken met het fenomeen Viking. Throughout the book’s pages the worldview of the Vikings and their beliefs is always there in the background.

Crushes a few of the old Viking cliches but certainly highlights the brutality of some of their beliefs and customs. Ik las dit boek deels in Denemarken, waarbij we ook regelmatig Vikinguitstapjes maakten, en het was dan wel fijn om ook over deze plaatsen in dit boek te lezen. Besides being exhaustive, this book is aggressively objective in a manner that I fast grew to appreciate. However, I don’t see this book being dethroned as arguably one of the best existing histories on the Vikings anytime in the foreseeable future.The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of the Wessex kings give contemporary accounts of Viking raids by surviving victims, late 700s– , pp. This was the time of the raids and their gradual escalation from isolated attacks to invasions of conquest, in the ever-present context of expanding trade networks.

There were long paragraphs where I spaced out for a bit, reading the words but not really living them. I also found the organisation of the last third of the book to be somewhat jumbled, with chapters whose titles didn’t quite match their topics and whose overarching goals perhaps weren’t as clearly defined as they could be. Reason for the 4 stars- at times I lost interest and wanted to skip through some sections (but I didn't! And having recently read The Bear and the Nightingale, I was excited to see the Rus' make an appearance.Some of the agricultural-elite Norwegians settled Iceland, beginning around 870 CE, to escape pirate rule. His style of writing is really enjoyable, for a book of 600+ pages it never felt dry or boring even for a moment, in fact his sentences were quite poetic at times, and I really appreciate that.