A new book review from The Movie Snob.
Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by Neil Price (2020). If you want to catch up on what archaeologists currently think about the Vikings, I think this is the place to do it. This 509-page book is interesting and generally very readable. The first half is about the pre-history of the Vikings, with discussions about Viking religion, artifacts, and especially what we have learned from studying their burial mounds. The second half is about the Viking Age itself, when the Vikings starting going on their famous voyages of pillage and exploration around 800 A.D. I definitely learned some things—like, the Vikings actually conquered and settled in a big chunk of Great Britain, a territory called “Danelaw.” On the whole, and notwithstanding a couple of clunky lines speculating about transgenderism among the pre-medieval Scandinavians, this was a much better and more enjoyable book than the other Viking book I recently read, The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World.
The Movie Court 
[…] The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World, by Arthur Herman (2021). I read some good reviews of this book, but I have to say if you want a popular history that really digs into what it was like to be a Viking, this is not it. There is plenty about the Vikings in the early part of the book, but it feels kind of superficial, then it keeps going and going about what the Scandinavians were up to during the Middle Ages and then up to the present day. The latter part of the book has a lot of information about Scandinavian immigration to the United States and lots of very short stories about famous descendants of those immigrants, such as Knute Rockne and Charles Lindbergh. Fine, but not great. And I thought the author’s constant references to “the Viking heart,” and how said heart evolved over the years, became tiresome. For a better read, check out Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. […]