In The Sea-King and the Sorceress, the historian Neil Price examines 21 individuals from ancient Norse burial sites, unearthing strange, sinister and profound surprises.
By Gerard DeGroot
The word “viking”, Neil Price argues, is just a job description, rather like plumber or dentist. Hence why he refers to them with a lower-case v. In the Viking Age, which dates from 750 to 1050, there were very few actual vikings — pirates or “perpetrators of maritime robbery with violence”. They were “a minority whom hardly anyone of the time would have readily identified with, or arguably even recognised”. Vikings have nevertheless dominated perception, leading to a distorted image of the period. To understand that era, we need to shove aside those bearded marauders.
Price, the chair of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden, offers instead the more inclusive term Norse, a resourceful people addicted to travel. “They ranged from the seaboard of North America to the Asian Steppe… from the High Arctic to North Africa.” Most were farmers, but “there was never a typical Norse”. Underneath the viking stereotype lurks a vast, multilayered diaspora.
Price reconstructs that diaspora through 21 individuals — tiny jigsaw pieces in a huge, complicated puzzle. He includes a farmer and a slave, a dwarf and a diplomat, a shaman and a sorceress, a settler and an immigrant, a hunter and, yes, a viking. There’s even a bear because bears were sacred beings worthy of respectful burial. These individuals are examined through the stories their graves stubbornly yield. “We see them as they were buried,” Price explains, “not as they walked and breathed.”
Price begins with a grave on the Estonian island of Saaremaa that dates from about 750. It holds the eponymous Sea-King, along with his warriors, 38 in total. They were carefully arranged in two boats buried 40m apart near the shore, positioned to suggest they were rowing. The men were well armed for the afterlife — they had a huge array of lethal weapons. There was also plenty of food — meat from six cows, eight sheep, two pigs and a goat.
Pieces from a board game were strewn over the men, with the king piece placed in the mouth of the commander. The men all died violently, presumably in a raid that went wrong. They are important because they were a harbinger of a new era of conquest, not just westwards but in all directions.
Under a huge mound at Oseberg, in Norway, a ship roughly 22m long was discovered in the early 1900s. Dating from about 834, it is an archetypal ship burial — the most impressive Viking Age grave. Since the mound was covered in blue clay and moist turf, the oxygen necessary for decomposition was excluded, so nearly everything was well preserved — timber, cloth, leather, even food. The inventory of items runs to 2,000 pages. There was a fully stocked kitchen with a whole ox, dough waiting to be formed into loaves and a basket of apples — no reason to go hungry in the afterlife. A full complement of bed linen sat ready for slumber. A sleigh was provided for when winter came.
The grave was constructed not for warriors but for two women, who lay side by side on a bed. One was about 80 at the time of her death, the other perhaps 50. They aren’t as well preserved, probably because their bodies decomposed while the grave was being prepared. The older woman is identifiably Norse, but the other has Persian ancestry. Both lived well. The opulence of the grave suggests that one of the women was royalty, or perhaps both were. But who were they and how were they related? Did they die together, or was one killed to accompany the other into Valhalla? The vast array of artefacts raises more questions than it answers. Interpretations, Price writes, are “neither provably correct nor demonstrably wrong… in the end we simply do not know”.
Mystery is a constant. In stark contrast to the Oseberg site is the grave of a thrall, or slave, found on the Isle of Man. The Norse economic system depended on forced servitude, but few thrall graves have been found. In this one lies a woman who has been murdered; the back of her head has been sliced off with a sharp sword. Her corpse was covered by a thick layer of cremated animal bones — from oxen, horses, sheep and dogs. What’s going on here? She was probably a sex slave, but was this a ritual killing or an impulsive act? Again, we really don’t know.
So much doesn’t make sense, perhaps because we are applying modern logic. A youth of about 12 years old was buried with a huge double-edged sword, two lances, a recently slaughtered stallion, a large hunting dog and one bear claw. Those accoutrements suggest that this was a boy, but we can’t be sure since feminine items are also present (notably, two bronze dress pins found on the chest). Price uses the grave to riff on the precarities of life in the Viking Age. Half the population did not live beyond the age of ten. Perhaps this youth was so equipped to enjoy the life he had been denied. That’s possible, but there’s something disturbingly ritualised about this grave.
How should we interpret the Shield-Maiden, dressed in military uniform, buried with a mare and a stallion? She was heavily armed — a sword, battle knife, war axe, bow and arrows, plus two shields. When the grave was discovered in 1878 it was automatically assumed to be that of a high-status male warrior. In 2017, however, the remains were found to carry XX chromosomes — he was a she. The internet went berserk, dismissing the findings or trying desperately to accommodate them without affirming the existence of female warriors. Price calmly suggests that gender may have been fluid in the Viking Age. Women sometimes even changed pronouns when they took up arms.
Price’s The Children of Ash and Elm was The Times History Book of the Year in 2020. This book is at least as good. He has a talent for visual reconstruction; it’s like being with him on these digs, watching as ancient secrets are revealed. Nearly every page brings a surprise, sometimes disturbing, often moving, always profound. Price doesn’t worry about those conundrums. Uncertainty, he accepts, is inevitable. Unanswered questions merely enhance the mystery.
“Anonymity is the curse of prehistory,” he writes, “and Norse culture is no exception.” Only one of his 21 individuals can be identified by name; the rest will remain for ever unknown. But anonymity doesn’t prevent empathy; the scattered bones are reconstructed into distinct individuals who lived and loved, struggled and died.
They are also, as Price intends, archetypes who reveal something important about Norse culture. The dwarf suggests a surprising acceptance of disability. A townswoman demonstrates that a materialistic culture was emerging — she liked her bling. The Sorceress wore “so many shiny objects… that she must have glittered and sparkled as she moved”. She reveals that this was a time of magic.
What results is something so much more interesting than the old monothematic world of the vikings. My favourite story concerns a woman who lived a good life, had robust health and dressed to impress. Closer examination reveals that she had an elongated skull, caused by binding the head in infancy. That was a custom common among the Huns of the western Steppe and would have set her apart in the sheltered Gotland community where she died. How she got there is unknown, but in the end perhaps unimportant. What matters is that the grandeur of her burial proves that she was loved, a delightful contrast to our image of vicious vikings.
This article was originally published in The Times on August 26, 2026.
