Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Neil Price is an archaeologist specializing in the Viking Age, and this Basic Books volume is his general academic history of the Vikings, synthesizing recent archaeological findings alongside the textual sources to present an updated picture of Norse society, belief and expansion. Its strength is that it incorporates archaeological evidence, much of it from recent decades, that earlier popular Viking histories built mainly on saga and chronicle material did not have access to, giving a more materially grounded account of everyday Norse life and religious practice. Its limit is that as a general single volume history covering an enormous geographic and chronological range, it necessarily summarizes rather than exhaustively documents any one specific site, saga or regional variation, so a narrow specialist claim is better checked against a focused archaeological or textual study of that specific topic.