Turns out the Vikings didn’t wear horn helmets.

This is the second year in a row where I’ve deliberately decided to increase the number of nonfiction books I read. Last year I read a decent number of broad survey types of histories; books called The Assyrians, or A History of Japan, or maybe just India. And, while I can’t really claim this was a new realization, it became clear pretty quickly that that type of history is hard to do well, especially in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. I read a lot of biography and a lot of histories about specific events or smaller chunks of history; World War II, for an obvious example, is a pretty broad topic, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to write a single-volume history of that than an entire country or ethnic group over hundreds of years, right? Those types of histories are a lot easier to write, or at the very least I’ve read a lot more good ones.

Children of Ash and Elm, as a broad survey history of an ethnic group over a few hundred years, definitely felt kinda risky, despite the fact that Vikings are automatically interesting. A few hundred years of history, minimum, of a group of people that, to put it mildly, moved around a lot. I was going to save my two favorite anecdotes from this book for the end, but they’re relevant now: there is evidence that the Vikings raided both Constantinople and Alexandria, and remember, that was by boat, meaning that they had to sail around the entirety of Europe and through the entire Mediterranean to get there. In addition, they’ve found a Viking burial site in Greenland, dating to roughly 1000 CE, which in and of itself isn’t especially surprising. What was surprising? The corpse was wearing a cloak made of buffalo hide.

That’s mind-blowing, even if the most reasonable explanation is that the hide was traded a time or two on its way from the American Great Plains all the way up to, what, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, then presumably bought or looted by the Viking, who eventually made his way back to Greenland and died, to be buried in what surely had to be his favorite cloak. I doubt there were ever any Vikings out meeting with the Comanche a thousand years ago, but hell, who knows?

Point is, this could have been much drier than it was. Children of Ash and Elm dodges every pitfall of this type of broad history and remains engaging and lively throughout; this was a great, fast read, and I plowed through its 500 pages in just a couple of days. I know you’re used to me saying that about big books, but history usually takes a bit longer, and I was fully expecting this book to take me a week. History doesn’t often keep me up late. This book cost me some sleep– sleep I was happy to spend, but nonetheless. And as I can’t claim any particular depth of knowledge in pre-Christian Scandinavia, I’m comfortable saying that the author did a great job of making the book accessible to non-historians. If you have any interest in the subject matter at all– and it’s the bloody Vikings, who doesn’t think they’re interesting?– definitely grab this one.