Children Of Ash And Elm A History Of The Vikings Neil Price by Neil Price 9781541601116, 1541601114 instant download after payment.

"Not the least of Price's achievement is to rescue Viking history from the grasp of white supremacists who claim a specious lineage with it. He does so not by asserting any sort of moral superiority for the Vikings–theirs was a brutal society that practiced human sacrifice & slavery, as Price makes abundantly clear–but by restoring their rich & strange particularity....I'll long remember Price's evocation of the wafer-thin squares of gold, stamped with images of otherworldly beings, that adorned the great halls where visitors drank & fought & recited poetry. Firelight would have animated those static images. Price has done something similar here." – Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, The Best Books We Read in 2020

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The definitive history of the Vikings — from arts & culture to politics & astronomy — by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise.

The Viking Age — 750-1050 — saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders & raiders, explorers & 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 & Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, & more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness & sophistication of their culture.

Based on the latest archaeological & textual evidence, Children of Ash & Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology & religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, & beliefs to the lands & peoples they encountered. From Eirík Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash & Elm is a remarkable history of the Vikings & their time.