Children of Ash and Elm. A History of the Vikings. Neil Price

"Children of Ash and Elm" is one of the most profound modern works about the Vikings, the northerners who forever changed medieval Europe. British archaeologist and historian Neil Price rethinks the established image of the Scandinavians as barbarians and invaders, shaped by their victims and enemies, and presents a community that, despite violence, brought new ideas, technologies and customs to the conquered lands. This book is an attempt to see the world of the Vikings from the inside, as they saw it themselves. Their life appears as a bizarre unity of religion, culture, politics and the search for daily bread. Women also played a significant role in the wars, trade and rituals of the era, and family migrations determined the waves of colonization. Price puts forward a bold but well-argued thesis about the ethnic, not just cultural, nature of the Vikings. He enriches their image, propagated by mass culture, with interdisciplinary scientific knowledge. Relying on archaeological and written sources, molecular genetics, linguistics, folklore and mythology, the author leads us along the paths of the Scandinavians - from the islands of the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from the east coast of America to the Asian steppes, not bypassing the territories of the future Rus, where their trade and expansion reached. For the Ukrainian reader, "Children of Ash and Elm" is not only a synthesis of European history, but also an important source for understanding our Middle Ages, where the Varangian diaspora became one of the elements of Ukrainian history.