Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Recommended by Fiery Cushman, Professor of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Recently I’ve been looking for nonfiction that transports me to some of the utterly different ways of thinking, living, and interacting that people have constructed, whether historically or cross-culturally. (This kick was inspired in part by “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow.) The most radical transportation — and, frankly, a horrifying one — was “Children of Ash and Elm” by Neil Price. It’s a history of the Viking empire but, in a way, it is written more like an ethnography. It is simply extraordinary to me how little we know of a civilization whose reach extended from the Gibraltar to Kiev, and only a thousand years ago. Equally striking is how their cultural values appear, in many ways, so diametrically opposed to those we hold today.