Expanding the Viking world

One task for the new centre of excellence is to clarify the true scale of the Viking world. For it is quite clear that the Vikings travelled much further east and south than was previously realised, as researchers have gradually begun to understand.

“There are several parts of Eurasia that have not really received attention. We know that they penetrated far into the steppes of Central Asia. We know they were in the Middle East, Baghdad for example. However, their trade contacts encompassed a much wider world, and this dimension remains relatively unexplored. They had contacts with East Asia, probably western parts of China. We’re working on the idea that Scandinavians travelled there as well, at least to some extent,” says Price.

One of the very most important trade routes during the Viking Age was the Silk Road that ran from Europe through the Middle East and Central Asia all the way to China. The Vikings knew about it, the question is how far along it they travelled.

“One important point is that all these journeys are not just one-way traffic, people are moving in the other direction too. It’s an exchange in many, many different ways, involving masses of different communities and individuals. There’s a mutual exchange of goods, there’s an exchange of ideas, of experiences, masses of things. If you’re looking for a key word for the Viking Age it’s diversity. It’s a world of wide-ranging contacts,” Price argues.

The Viking Phenomenon

These ideas have grown out of The Viking Phenomenon, a ten-year research project led by Price together with his colleagues Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson and John Ljungkvist. The project investigates what happened in society at that time that prompted people to start setting off on Viking expeditions. How could they undertake such large-scale operations, with all the preparations this demanded?

It seems as if something radical occurred in the eighth century, when the Vendel Age began to change into the Viking Age. In their quest for answers, they are studying finds from the burial ground at Valsgärde north of Gamla Uppsala, which was excavated between 1928 and 1952. The burial ground was used between the fifth and twelfth centuries, which means it spans the entire Later Iron Age.

“It’s a window into a society over time. Particularly the beginning of the Viking Age. What we are doing, in part, is to erase the boundary between the Vendel Age and the Viking Age. To understand what’s going on in the Viking Age, you have to go further back in time, several hundred years. So that’s what we’re doing.”

Boat graves in Estonia

Two boat graves from the same period in Salme on the Estonian island of Ösel have added vital pieces of the puzzle.

“The people buried there have taken part in what looks like a Viking expedition in Estonia, and they come from somewhere in Uppland and this area, perhaps even from Valsgärde. So this means we get an insight into the first Vikings at home and away, figuratively speaking. Salme dates to around the year 750, which is the very beginning of the Viking Age,” Price says.

His own interest in Vikings was aroused by two documentary series that he saw on British TV as a 15-year-old growing up in London. At the same time he was reading Icelandic sagas.

“It was exactly the time in life when you start to think about what you’re interested in, what you’re going to do and all that. I was tremendously interested in the Viking Age. I thought it was really exciting. I was also interested in archaeology in general,” Price reminisces.

Wanted to be an archaeologist

Though surely being an archaeologist wasn’t a real job? It was just something you saw on TV, he thought. Gradually he realised it was actually something you could be. It just required some education.

“Then I started to work as a field archaeologist, which you could do in Britain without a qualification at that time. Though now we’re talking about a very long time ago, the early 1980s. After that I read archaeology at university in London and did postgraduate research in York,” Price recalls.

He came to Sweden in the 1990s to take part in the major excavations that were then under way at the Viking town of Birka in Lake Mälaren. Two years later he moved here for good.

So what does he personally think makes the Vikings so fascinating?

“That’s a difficult question. It was a very colourful world and I’m interested in the way people looked at the world. How they try to understand the world. The Vikings’ pre-Christian worldview was highly complex, exciting, alien and scary. And that makes it very interesting,” he says.

Innovative doctoral thesis

Price’s research has helped to broaden the picture of the Viking Age. It started with his doctoral thesis, The Viking Way (2002), which has now come out in a second edition. It attracted a great deal of attention right from the start because it was considered so innovative and it even won a prize from the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

“My career builds on that book and its reception. Until the beginning of this century, research on the Vikings was terribly conservative. Naturally there were exceptions, but it was a very conservative image of a period that was anything but conservative. And I tried to convey my view of the Viking Age in that book, based on a certain body of material. I hope I expressed myself in a constructive way when I described my dissatisfaction with the state of research on the Viking Age,” he says, adding that he was far from the only person to question the dominant scholarly view at that time.

Price enjoys writing books and the contact with readers it brings. The next book due out in Swedish is Ask och Emblas barn – vikingarnas historia. It will be released in a couple of months, but has already been available in English as Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings since 2020 and has been translated into 15 other languages.

Åsa Malmberg