New Scientist recommends a fascinating deep dive into the real Vikings — SkimNews
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- Neil Price, an archaeologist at Uppsala University, publishes his second book The Sea-King and the Sorceress (Allen Lane/Basic Books, out 13 October) after his acclaimed 2020 debut The Children of Ash and Elm and consultancy work on the 2022 film The Northman.
- The book examines 21 burials across four centuries to argue there was no single Norse culture, introducing readers to warriors, traders, farmers, nomads and slaves rather than a unified 'Viking' people.
- Price notes the Old Norse word víkingr meant something like 'pirate' — a job that could be taken up or left off — and was only applied as a label by 19th-century western European writers long after the Viking Age ended.
- The Salme ship burials on Saaremaa Island, Estonia, discovered by accident in 2008 and dated to around AD 750, provide the earliest archaeological evidence of a Viking raiding party — nearly 50 years before the 793 attack on Lindisfarne Abbey traditionally cited as the start of the era.
- The 'shield-maiden' burial (c. AD 950), excavated in 1878 and long assumed male, was confirmed female through a 2017 DNA study Price worked on; he pushes back on both the original assumption and modern efforts to cast her as a 'kickass feminist role model,' noting Vikings routinely enslaved people.
- The reviewer flags that the book's episodic, chronologically arranged structure with no overall narrative makes it 'a bit of a struggle to read all the way through,' recommending it be dipped into a chapter at a time.
- Price portrays the Norse as 'a mess of contradictions,' simultaneously running shockingly ruthless raids and slave networks while pioneering trading routes across the Atlantic and Silk Roads and developing deliberative 'things' or forums.
Why it matters: By centering 21 individual burials rather than a grand narrative, Price reframes a pop-culture mythology built on 19th-century racialized writing — and his shield-maiden DNA finding has already forced public reckoning with how archaeological assumptions get baked into identity narratives for over a century.
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