Price provides extensive data indicating that in the early years of the Viking Age, they used their advantages in shipbuilding, navigation, and weapons to become successful raiders in distant lands. And, as they traveled to the Far East and Far West over more than 300 years, they learned the advantages of cooperating with the peoples of those distant lands, who had different goods to offer. In voluntary exchange, if each party offers something the other desires and is willing to pay for, both parties benefit. As the Vikings learned that trade is collectively more beneficial than fighting, their interactions with others evolved from raiding to trading.

How does Price’s history differ from the many earlier works on the Vikings? For one, he is an archeologist, not a historian, and draws on the latest archeological evidence. This is important because the Vikings did not write histories about themselves. They used runic symbols, but they did not develop an alphabet for writing. The first written records of the Vikings were done by Christians such as Icelander Snorri Sturluson. These early writings include the Icelandic Sagas, many of which began as oral traditions and were not written down until centuries after the events they describe. Price warns about the bias that Sturluson and other Christian writers had toward the Vikings and their polytheistic religion, but he does not completely reject their work. Further, he finds important consistencies between archaeological findings and the Sagas.

Chronology / The traditional period historians use for the Viking Age is 793‑1066 AD. Those end points mark, respectively, the Viking raid on the Lindisfarne Monastery that was the beginning of Viking raids in England, and the defeat and death of Viking king Harald Sigurdsson Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

Price argues those two end points are too rigid to delineate the Viking era, and that the extent of Viking influence on different parts of the world varied by region. For example, the old Norse religion persisted in some locations long after Iceland’s official adoption of Christianity in the year 1,000. (Strictly speaking, Norsemen were the people with a shared culture who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, while Vikings were the warrior members of that group.) In addition, to this day the Christian calendar reflects Norse influence, with days dedicated to Thor (Thursday) and Odin (Wednesday, for Wodin’s Day).

The rise of the Vikings was facilitated by the decline of the Carolingian Empire in Charlemagne’s later years and following his death. It was also made possible by a climate disaster that may have reduced the population in Scandinavia by 50 percent around 547. New elites became local kings in Scandinavia after violent battles. Those elites claimed genealogical descent from Odin, Freya, and other Norse gods. To demonstrate their success, they constructed elaborate halls surrounded by important villages, which have become rich sources of archeological data. For example, Uppsala (meaning “higher halls”) contained useful historical information, including burial mounds.

Push, pull, and trade / According to Price, both “push” and “pull” (supply and demand) factors contributed to the distant travels and raids of the Vikings. Push factors included major innovations in shipbuilding and navigation, and the introduction of improved sails to replace oars. Scandinavian shipping coincided with the rise of the regional emporia, that is, trading settlements. Pull factors from their travels included the discovery of wealth in distant lands that would become profitable targets for raids. Since trade cannot occur without security for traders’ property, the evolution toward trade required providing security for traders. As Price observes in Children, “A market wholly without guards would not last long.”

Early Viking emporia included Ribe and Hedeby in Denmark and Birka in Sweden. Vikings first traded in these relatively secure settlements before launching long-distance raids to the East and West. Applying the military skills of raiders to protect traders made raiding and trading complementary. Price mentions ceremonial congregations of people at Uppsala, near Birka, that functioned as something akin to religious practice but focused on commerce. These assemblies (called “Pings” or “Things”) evolved into representative government that limited the powers of leaders. Price observes that the subsequent rise in regional and international trade was not imposed from above by elites but was supplied in response to people’s demand.

The East / Travel to both the East and West covered huge distances and faced many obstacles, both natural and human. To the East, the Vikings followed the Baltic Sea toward what is now Narva, Estonia. From the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland, they followed the Neva River to what is now Staraja Ladoga, where the Volkhov River discharges into Lake Ladoga. From there they took a network of rivers, including required portages, to Kiev on the Dnieper River, then followed the Dnieper south to the Black Sea and eventually to Byzantium (modern Istanbul).

Vikings, also called Rus, arrived on the Eastern Baltic about 860 and imposed a tribute system on indigenous Slavs. Viking chieftain Rurik occupied an island off what is now Novgorod. Because of local violence, Slavs invited Rurik and the Rus to bring order to their land.

In the area around modern Kiev, the Vikings were called the Kievan Rus, and the term “Rus” was the basis of the modern name for Russia, according to Price. (It should be noted the origin of the name “Russia” has been hotly debated and very politicized, especially in the old Soviet Union.) Some of the Kievan Rus employed their military skills to become mercenaries who guarded the Byzantine emperors around 950‑1050. They were called Varangian Guards, from the Old Norse term var that meant “vow” or “oath.” One of the most famous Varangian Guards was the aforementioned Harald Sigurdsson Hardrada, who later became king of Norway and sought to become king of England until he met his fate at Stamford Bridge. According to Price, many of the Kievan Rus became effectively “policemen on the Dnieper River.”

In Istanbul today, the Hagia Sofia is a museum containing runic inscriptions from the Viking days, when the imperial family was protected by Varangian Guards. Built in the 6th century as an Orthodox Basilica, it was converted into a mosque when Muslims took over the city.

The West / Normandy was an early Western destination. Viking attacks on the River Seine were so common that at some point near Paris one could cross the river by walking from one ship to another. In 911, the Frankish King Charles the Simple offered the Viking Rollo (Hrolfr) land along the Seine if he could restore order and prevent future raids. The arrangement has been described as employing poachers to act as gamekeepers. The province took the name “Normandy” after the Norsemen, and it retains that name today, more than 1,000 years later.

Viking attacks on England began at Lindisfarne. Olaf Tryggvason, descendant of Harald Fairhair, who spent his youth in exile in Kievan Rus, successfully extracted extortion payments called Danegeld from the English. Later, Olaf became king of Norway, but in 999 he was killed in battle against a triumvirate of rivals that included Svein Forkbeard, who ascended to the throne. Olaf II Haraldsson, later honored as St. Olaf, led a famous attack on England in 1014 that is commemorated in the nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Erik Bloodaxe was another Viking raider of England who became king of Northumbria. He was the king of Norway for 932–934, and he was one of many sons of Harald Fairhair.

The Viking period in England ended with the defeat at Stamford Bridge. But the English were not then free of Viking-connected invaders; just 19 days later, William, Duke of Normandy and a descendant of Rollo, later dubbed William the Conqueror, invaded England. He won the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, killed the English king Harald Godwinson, and became the first Norman king of England.

In Ireland, the Vikings founded Dublin in 841, and they continued west to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland. Eric the Red, who was exiled for killing a man, sailed westward, where he discovered Greenland in the 980s. Later he was part of a group that discovered North America circa 1,000. The Viking site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland was not rediscovered until the 1960s, when Norwegian archeologists found and excavated the site. The Vikings did not leave a permanent settlement there, but they did discover what would later be called America more than 500 years before Columbus.

At home / The Vikings influenced the regions they visited, but they were also influenced by the institutions of those regions. Around 960, Harald Bluetooth, king of Demark, was baptized into Christianity. There was a resistance to the new religion, and Harald was killed in 987 as part of a reaction against abandoning the old pagan religion. However, after a lag, Christianity came to dominate the entire region. The church and the king developed a symbiotic relationship in which the church provided legitimacy to the king and royalty, and the king provided power and property to the church. As Price writes in Children, the region became “ruled by one king with one god upheld by the same administrative and political foundations that supported their Christian contemporaries in Europe.”

The Vikings’ legacy is quite different in the West than in the East. In the West, they evolved from raiding to trading, prefacing the future politics of Western Europe, the United States, and Canada. Today, Western economies are grounded in voluntary trade, their national governments protect the property rights of traders, and the governments are limited democracies in which checks and balances constrain the leaders. In the East, however, the Viking and their subordinates continued to favor raiding and coercion over voluntary trade. Today, the regions’ autocracies are more like low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where 2022 gross domestic product per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) were $4,309 and $7,824 respectively. Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine reflects this fundamental difference in institutions and policies.

Slaves, women / Price’s Children has a chapter on the slave trade, an important coercive Viking activity. Some Viking men had multiple wives and mistresses, which made it difficult for the remaining men to find female partners. Price mentions this imbalance in numbers of men and eligible women as a possible influence on the slave trade. For example, DNA evidence indicates that most of the men who immigrated to Iceland were Norwegian, but most of the women were from the British Isles.

Men fathering children with multiple women (wives, concubines, slaves) resulted in competition among sons, including violent competition between fathers and sons and between half-brothers. For example, King Harald Fairhair was said to have fathered sons with multiple women, and one son, Svein Forkbeard, led a revolt that killed his father. Who succeeds to the throne? How is inherited wealth distributed? Competition among half-brothers sometimes led mothers to hide their sons in remote locations to protect them from rivals. According to an apocryphal story, one king said he deliberately fathered children with different women all over the country to unify the country.

Children also describes the role of women in Viking society. Price emphasizes that they managed entire households, especially during the times when men were on long journeys. In addition to giving birth and caring for children and feeding families, women played a major role in providing textiles in various forms. They cared for sheep, obtained and processed the wool, converted it to cloth, and made clothes for the family. For the maritime Vikings, women made sails for the ships and, if they had spare time, decorative wall-hangings such as the famed Bayeux Tapestry. As an aside, Price informs the reader that, at meals, everyone carried a pocketknife for eating, including children.

Today’s descendants / What is the legacy of the Vikings? Price does not discuss current conditions in Scandinavia, but those countries are among the most prosperous in the world in terms of the World Bank’s measure of gross domestic product per capita. Their evolution from raiding to trading that included development of limited democratic governments is certainly conducive to economic success. If a skeptical reader is wondering whether the prosperity of Scandinavian countries might be attributable to their northern latitudes, one might ask why Russia did not gain from its northern location as well.

In 2022, Norway had the largest per capita GDP (adjusted for PPP) in the world ($121,259). It did benefit from inheriting large deposits of energy beneath its soil, but so did Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and other low-income countries that have failed to convert their energy endowments into prosperity. The United States had a per capita GDP of $76,330, and the other Scandinavian countries were just above or below that number: Denmark ($77,954), Iceland ($71,840), Sweden ($68,178), and Nordic neighbor Finland ($62,823). The incomes per capita of all these Nordic countries were above the averages for the European Union ($57,286) and far above the world as a whole ($20,846).

All these Nordic countries had GDPs per capita far above their Eastern raiding and autocratic neighbors Russia ($34,638) and Belarus ($22,551). Russia remains one of the poorest countries in Europe, and its dominance was harmful to the Baltic States, whose GDPs per capita had been similar to Russia at the time of their independence in 1995. After a transition period, the independent Baltic economies surged, and by 2023 their incomes per capita were all substantially above Russia: Lithuania ($50,969), Estonia ($48,168), and Latvia ($41,625).

Have the descendants of the Vikings achieved prosperity by sacrificing freedom? Certainly not. The 2023 edition of the Human Freedom Index, assembled by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute, covers 165 countries and ranks Denmark third, Sweden fifth, Iceland seventh, Finland ninth, and Norway 10th. Freedom today in the Nordic countries may have been a legacy of the assemblies that dated back to the Viking Age.

Switzerland ranked first and the United States 17th. By contrast, Russia ranked 121st and Belarus 133rd. The tradition of coercive institutions with autocratic rulers contributed to both poverty and the lack of freedom for the average citizens of Russia and Belarus.

Conclusion / So, should we think of the Vikings as raiders or traders? Price and Raffield conclude in The Vikings that “we should never ignore or suppress the brutal realities behind the clichés, the carnage of the raids, the slaving, the misogyny, but there was much, much, more to the Vikings.”

In the three centuries when they were active, the Vikings evolved from raiding to trading in a way that other Western countries followed much later. A conclusion of The Vikings is that “the legacies of the Viking-Age Scandinavians’ extraordinary run on the world stage still echo today.” But the effects of their evolution have been much greater on Western countries than on Russia and the East, where despotic rulers continue to lead their countries in raids on neighbors.

Readings

• Grennes, Thomas, 2024, “East Is East and West Is West: Baltic Vulnerability,” working paper, April 21.
• Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, Sergei Guriev, and Andrei Markevich, 2024, “New Russian Economic History,” Journal of Economic Literature 62(1): 47–114.