Children of Ash and Elm

are descended all of humankind, down through the millennia, to our own time. The Vikings enjoy a popular recognition and interest shared by few other ancient cultures. More or less everyone has at least heard of them. Over just three centuries, from approximately 750 to 1,050 CE, the peoples of Scandinavia transformed the northern world in ways that are still felt today. They changed the political and cultural map of Europe and shaped new configurations of trade, economy, settlement, and conflict that ultimately stretched from the eastern American seaboard to the Asian steppe. The Vikings are known today for a stereotype of maritime aggression, those famous longships, the plunder and pillage, the fiery drama of a Viking funeral. Beyond the cliches, there's some truth in this, but the Scandinavians also exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered. In the process, they were themselves altered, developing new ways of life across a vast diaspora. The many small-scale kingdoms of their homelands would eventually become the nations of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which are still with us. While the traditional beliefs of the north were gradually subordinated by Christianity, that initially alien faith would fundamentally change their view of the world and the Scandinavian future. In a literal sense, the Vikings are, of course, people of the past, dead and gone. But at the same time, they inhabit a curiously haptic kind of prehistory, one that appears to return whatever pressure is applied to it. Many have been tempted to put their fingers on the scales of hindsight, and imagine that the impulse to do so came not from themselves, but through the revelation of hidden truths, buried by time. Medieval monks and scholars reinvented their pagan ancestors, either as nobly misguided forebears, or as agents of the devil. In the manuscript illuminations of romance literature, with a kind of Orientalist prejudice, they became Saracens, enemies of Christ, depicted with turbans and scimitars. In Shakespeare's England, the Vikings were taken up as violent catalysts in the early story of the kingdom's greatness. Rediscovered during the Enlightenment as a sort of noble savage, the figure of the Viking was enthusiastically adopted by the nationalist romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries. Searching for their own emerging identities, Victorian imperialists scoured Scandinavian literature, looking for suitably assertive northern role models, expressing the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxons through their Nordic cousins. The logical end of that trajectory came a century later, when the Nazis appropriated the Vikings in pursuit of their racist fictions, elevating them as a spurious Aryan archetype. Their modern successors still plague us today. Elements of the broad pagan community now seek a spiritual alternative that draws inspiration from Viking religion, with Tolkien-esque flavorings added to a cloudier Old Norse brew. All these and many more, including today's academics and the audiences for historical drama, have taken the fragmentary material and textual remains of the Vikings and recast them in molds of their choosing. At times, it can seem that the actual people have almost disappeared under the cumulative freight they have been made to bear. One recalls Brideshead Revisited and Antony Blanche, Oh, La Fatigue de Noir. What unites most of these perspectives is that they privilege the observer, looking in on the Vikings from the outside, and ignore how they themselves saw the world. This attitude has a long pedigree, and in fact dates back to the writings of the Vikings' victims, who can hardly be expected to be unbiased. Ironically, even the people with whom the Scandinavians came into contact, often at the point of a sword, were not always entirely sure whom they were really dealing with. To take a single example from the late 9th century, after a vicious war with an entire Viking army, King Alfred of Wessex, in southern England, could still entertain a non-combatant Norwegian merchant at his court, asking question after question, where did they come from, what did they do, how did they live? The king was not alone in his uncertainty and curiosity. Those same puzzles continued to be debated for the next thousand years, accelerating in the last two centuries or so with the growth of academic inquiry and scholarship. Here again, though, the focus has largely tended to be on what the Vikings did, rather than on what...