Thank you for this. I loved Price's book because it conveyed that fundamental, lost, strangeness so well instead of trying to get us to identify with people from the distant past, which is a common tactic.
I have read, and continue to read, many books and journals on the subject, but his is, in my opinion, the best, and it's one of only a few I've read multiple times.
Indeed, the conditions under which they lived and the ideas that formed their worldview are so utterly different from ours that judgments of their character or actions are almost meaningless. Before Christianity reached them, even the idea of universal human brotherhood or personhood was alien to them, let alone any attempt to practice it. And when wealth was land, and land was useless if not worked, and where there were no machines to do the work, slavery would have been a simple economic necessity, questioned by no one. Then as now, we will justify any deed that puts bread on the table, but the business of putting bread on the table was so different then as to be almost inconceivable to us. And I have yet to see a TV portrayal that showed the rate of disease, of injury, of famine, of infection, of infant and maternal mortality that would have been the lived norm for people of this time and of centuries to follow.
If nothing else, the study of this kind of history provides a welcome sense of (by and large) how far we have come as people. Thucydides is one long trail of slaughter. The Crusades, the same. If we should rule out of history times and peoples who committed terrible violence, we'd have nothing left to study. I had a very similar path to yours, admiring the Vikings since high school, but realizing as I aged how brutal they were...great post.
'The River Kings' by Pat Jarman is a riveting re-telling of Viking history. I was utterly fascinated to follow their boats inland and see how they fared as River Kings...
I’m here after visiting Iona in Scotland last year and learned about how this remote island was attacked several times by Viking raids. I became very interested in this time in history, Columba, and the Vikings, so I’ve been reading. “Children of Ash and Elm” is very good. Thanks for writing these excellent essays!
"You or I cannot aspire to be one, because to do so would mean compromising a morality and social foundation that has changed so drastically since their time as to be unrecognizable to a denizen of that era."
Well if I was unsure you'd be a good follow on viking history I'm sure now.
here's a controversial perspective: the Viking's moral logic was correct, because human lives have no absolute value independent of the technological means to sustain them.
in a society with no surplus resources, every unproductive person was a liability. keeping the immediate kin-group alive in a harsh climate was dificult enough. nobody was handing out free food and shelter to large groups of strangers because of their inherent human dignity. sacrifice in battle was preferable to starvation, disease, and unproductive infirmity; slavery, in which life retained some value, was preferable to dying slowly—to say nothing of watching *your children* die slowly—in the wilderness. there are very few places in the world where isolated people can survive for long without a basic division of labor. taking on the costs of surplus people was unsustainable; wasting potential income by leaving would-be slaves to die was imprudent. the majority of human societies throughout history have made the exact same calculation at various points.
please note that this not an endorsement of slavery, rather, the moral atrocity of slavery is the logical endpoint of a civilization that, by choice or necessity, prioritizes expansion and domination over maximizing communal welfare.
that truth holds just as much in our world today as it did for the Vikings.
our world has the technological capability to sustain billions of lives.
our values reflect that.
our world is not their world.
they had no hospitals. they had no nursing homes. every winter carried off the young, the old, the weak and the sick.
their world had a rich afterlife where the honored Dead were looked after by the gods, freed from the burdens of embodiment--an afterlife that, in many important ways, was better than this one.
our world has no such afterlife.
we can make normative claims about every human life having absolute value, but that is not a *universal* constant across time and space. it is culturally and technologically contingent.
most importantly: our world still has slavery. it continues to sustain the economic system we enjoy, or at least tolerate, just as it did in their world.
but unlike them, most of us don't have the courage to look at it or acknowledge it.
and our world can still, always, become more like their world, if we let it.
Thank you for this. I loved Price's book because it conveyed that fundamental, lost, strangeness so well instead of trying to get us to identify with people from the distant past, which is a common tactic.
I have read, and continue to read, many books and journals on the subject, but his is, in my opinion, the best, and it's one of only a few I've read multiple times.
Indeed, the conditions under which they lived and the ideas that formed their worldview are so utterly different from ours that judgments of their character or actions are almost meaningless. Before Christianity reached them, even the idea of universal human brotherhood or personhood was alien to them, let alone any attempt to practice it. And when wealth was land, and land was useless if not worked, and where there were no machines to do the work, slavery would have been a simple economic necessity, questioned by no one. Then as now, we will justify any deed that puts bread on the table, but the business of putting bread on the table was so different then as to be almost inconceivable to us. And I have yet to see a TV portrayal that showed the rate of disease, of injury, of famine, of infection, of infant and maternal mortality that would have been the lived norm for people of this time and of centuries to follow.
If nothing else, the study of this kind of history provides a welcome sense of (by and large) how far we have come as people. Thucydides is one long trail of slaughter. The Crusades, the same. If we should rule out of history times and peoples who committed terrible violence, we'd have nothing left to study. I had a very similar path to yours, admiring the Vikings since high school, but realizing as I aged how brutal they were...great post.
'The River Kings' by Pat Jarman is a riveting re-telling of Viking history. I was utterly fascinated to follow their boats inland and see how they fared as River Kings...
I’m here after visiting Iona in Scotland last year and learned about how this remote island was attacked several times by Viking raids. I became very interested in this time in history, Columba, and the Vikings, so I’ve been reading. “Children of Ash and Elm” is very good. Thanks for writing these excellent essays!
"You or I cannot aspire to be one, because to do so would mean compromising a morality and social foundation that has changed so drastically since their time as to be unrecognizable to a denizen of that era."
Well if I was unsure you'd be a good follow on viking history I'm sure now.
Well said!!
here's a controversial perspective: the Viking's moral logic was correct, because human lives have no absolute value independent of the technological means to sustain them.
in a society with no surplus resources, every unproductive person was a liability. keeping the immediate kin-group alive in a harsh climate was dificult enough. nobody was handing out free food and shelter to large groups of strangers because of their inherent human dignity. sacrifice in battle was preferable to starvation, disease, and unproductive infirmity; slavery, in which life retained some value, was preferable to dying slowly—to say nothing of watching *your children* die slowly—in the wilderness. there are very few places in the world where isolated people can survive for long without a basic division of labor. taking on the costs of surplus people was unsustainable; wasting potential income by leaving would-be slaves to die was imprudent. the majority of human societies throughout history have made the exact same calculation at various points.
please note that this not an endorsement of slavery, rather, the moral atrocity of slavery is the logical endpoint of a civilization that, by choice or necessity, prioritizes expansion and domination over maximizing communal welfare.
that truth holds just as much in our world today as it did for the Vikings.
Each and every human life has absolutely value.
in our world, yes.
our world has the technological capability to sustain billions of lives.
our values reflect that.
our world is not their world.
they had no hospitals. they had no nursing homes. every winter carried off the young, the old, the weak and the sick.
their world had a rich afterlife where the honored Dead were looked after by the gods, freed from the burdens of embodiment--an afterlife that, in many important ways, was better than this one.
our world has no such afterlife.
we can make normative claims about every human life having absolute value, but that is not a *universal* constant across time and space. it is culturally and technologically contingent.
most importantly: our world still has slavery. it continues to sustain the economic system we enjoy, or at least tolerate, just as it did in their world.
but unlike them, most of us don't have the courage to look at it or acknowledge it.
and our world can still, always, become more like their world, if we let it.
Nope.
Thank you, jmichaelhall.