‘It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life’: Archaeologist Neil Price on the sea-kings, sorcerers and Sámi who lived during the Viking Age

In the early medieval period, the Vikings were just one part of a vast tapestry of Scandinavians who ruled, sailed, traded and fought around the world, from North America to Asia. In his new book, “The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age” (Basic Books, 2026), author Neil Price, professor and chair of archaeology at Uppsala University in Sweden, reveals the true diversity and complexity of people who lived during the Viking Age (often dating from A.D. 793 to 1066).

Price investigates more than 20 burials from the Viking Age, lingering on details that can tell us about these individuals and their world. He also shines a light on frequently overlooked groups, including the enslaved people known as thralls that the Norse ruled over and even sacrificed in some of their burials. Price also delves into the realms of powerful women, including a “shield-maiden” buried with war-grade weapons in Sweden, a “sorceress” in Denmark, and an elderly matriarch whose children carved out a local empire in Sweden.

In an interview with Live Science, Price talks about his new book, and the evidence we have for the familiar yet foreign lives they lived centuries ago.

Read an excerpt: ‘The back of her head had been removed by a single blow from a sharp blade’: Archaeological clues are revealing the horrific lives and deaths of the people enslaved by Vikings

Laura Geggel: The Vikings are popularly known for being brutish and bloodthirsty pillagers, but the individuals in your book show the rich diversity of people from this time. Why did you decide to write this book and feature their stories?

Neil Price: I think quite simply because of the cliche that you’ve just mentioned, the idea that the Vikings are all barbarian raiders who go about burning down churches and frightening the English and things. Those raiders were certainly real, but they were only ever a tiny minority of the Scandinavian population, and I wanted to bring out all the different kinds of Viking lives, and that’s why this book really came together.

It’s divided into chapters, each one of which looks at a different kind of person, you know, a farmer, or an ambassador, or someone who uses magic, or a hunter. And I’m quite pleased that the Viking — the sort of raiding and pillaging Viking — it takes a while to get to him.

LG: How would you define the epitome of a Viking from that age?

The actual Viking, it comes from an old Norse word from their own language: víkingr. And really it’s a job description, it means something like pirate — not necessarily negatively. It just describes maritime robbery with violence. So it is the classic image of the Viking stereotype.

But it was never a name for a people. If we could go back in time and just meet some people in Scandinavia and say, “Did you know that you’re all Vikings?” — they’d be astonished.

It’s a name, a collective name that we’ve given them. It started in the 19th century, really. So, they wouldn’t have called themselves that.

LG: Your book starts with the sea-king, a commander and his crew who were buried in boats with swords and shields in Estonia. Usually, the Viking Age is said to have begun in 793 with the raid on the island of Lindisfarne in the U.K., but you say this burial suggests that the Viking Age started earlier and in another part of Europe. Can you tell us more about this?

NP: When I started studying Vikings at college — so this is back in the early 1980s, a long, long time ago — the Viking Age did start not just in 793; It started on the eighth of June 793 with the Lindisfarne raid.

Obviously it’s absurd that an entire period of time starts on an afternoon, you know, not the day before or the day after. So it’s obvious that we’re talking about something that is really a matter of social processes, things that go on over a long period of time. But the thing that makes the finds that are in the sea-king chapter — they’re from this place called Salme in Estonia — really interesting is that they seem to be the remains of, or the traces of a raid.

It’s decades before Lindisfarne, it’s about 750. And obviously on an island on the Estonian coast, it’s going east, not west. So it really pushes that [raiding] behavior a lot earlier and it reorientates it. Even then, we shouldn’t see the Vikings in that find as being the first Vikings. Actually the Scandinavians had been raiding all over the place for generations.

LG: I really enjoyed your focus on women, since stereotypically the Viking Age is associated with burly male warriors. What are some roles that women held in the Viking Age that you don’t think most people know about?

NP: Something that particularly interests me, which is something I’ve worked on for a very long time now, is that when we think about Norse religion, everyone thinks about the gods. You know, they’re still around in Marvel movies and things — we think of Thor and Odin and Freya and so on.

But actually, the [thing that was] far more present than the gods in people’s lives were lots of kinds of local spirits and creatures and the elves that live in the stone behind your house. Getting in contact with that world of supernatural creatures and forces and powers — or whatever we call them — was something that was very much in the domain of women.

And it’s a really important thing. So we shouldn’t just say, “Oh, and some of them did magic.” They’re like negotiators, because you want to get on well with all these little creatures. If you don’t, they could mess up your life, you know — your cattle could die, your crops could fail, that kind of thing. You could get sick.

So the practice of, it’s hard to know what to call it in English. Sorcery or magic — they’re not very good words, but there’s lots of Norse words for it. To be able to do that is a very powerful thing and it’s a very prominent role in society. And this was very much in the domain of women.

I think actually women could take on many of the roles that we conventionally assign to men. In terms of capability, of course they could. There are some, rather few I think, but there are some female Vikings, like actual Vikings, there are women conducting trade, owning property, investing in business ventures, things like that. So they have a very prominent role in Norse society.

We talked about Lindisfarne just now. When I started studying the Vikings, Viking women were one display case in the museum exhibition, next to the display case on pottery or something. Not half the population, and that has really changed. I think we look at Viking Age people now, not just assuming they’re male by default.

LG: Actually, to linger, you described a number of women and their professions. Could you tell me more about these two amazing women in your book from Birka: the merchant and the warrior?

NP: Birka is this huge town. It’s Sweden’s first urban center, and it’s absolutely surrounded by burial mounds. So you have the area of the town and then all the people who lived in it. You can wander through their cemetery, which is a pretty spectacular place — there’s 5,000 burial mounds.

The merchant woman that you mentioned, she’s one of the earlier graves [circa 840s], so she’s one of the first people who would have identified as being someone who lives in a town. Today we talk about “I’m a city person” or a “country person,” and that’s an identity that was only just beginning to be created in the Viking Age, because everybody was country people. With the first towns, people start to live in a different way, and this woman was one of them.

If we look in her grave, she has things that have come from all over the western Viking world, things that I think probably came as loot from the raids, so she knew somebody who was involved in those things.

But you look at the stuff that’s there, it seems pretty likely that she is a merchant in her own right, perhaps someone dealing in textiles. This idea of a businesswoman setting up a shop in Birka and maybe importing textiles or making them, having them made, because she’s probably not working the loom, you know. It gives us a glimpse of a different kind of Viking life, one that I don’t think we’re accustomed to seeing and we should.

And then the warrior is about 100 years later than the merchant woman, when Birka has grown; it’s quite a big settlement by then that’s a really powerful place.

It’s become quite militarized, so it has a fortification wall and it has a fortress, and there’s a garrison building, which is a really amazing structure actually. It’s partly made of weapons. There are weapons in the walls and on the floors. Around the building are a number of burials with lots of weapons in them. It’s quite easy to say that a burial with lots of weapons is a warrior, but that’s an interpretation. We can’t be sure that the things buried with the dead were their possessions. We kind of assume that that’s the case, but clearly not always. So there’s a bit of a question mark there.

This burial was excavated like most of the ones in Birka in the 1870s, so a long time ago. And this grave is absolutely full of weapons. It’s got all the weapons. And out of all the about 1,100 burials that were excavated on Birka, only two have a complete set of weapons, so this is rare. It’s a very spectacular grave.

This burial has been reprinted again and again. [Iit’s] in like every book on the Vikings. So it’s been put forward as a kind of ultimate Viking: This is what proper Vikings looked like, you know, all the gear. And because it was excavated in the 1870s, it’s always been assumed that this person was male. It’s not hard to see where that assumption comes from, but it’s actually been consistent ever since.

Then, between 2011 and 2017, first a series of osteological studies looking at the bones, and then DNA, confirmed that this person was female. And actually the team that worked on it, which included me, none of us were particularly surprised.

It was kind of exciting and interesting, but it’s like, “Oh wow, you know, they really did have female warriors.” So all the previous interpretations, it seemed to us, were pretty valid, it’s just that this is a female, the ultimate Viking.

[Editor’s note: Following the 2017 study, there was an intense reaction to the interpretation that the woman in the grave was a Viking Age warrior.]

LG: So you weren’t expecting the backlash that occurred afterward?

No, we weren’t, it was extreme. I’m not going to go into that in any detail, but some people were very, very happy, and some people were really not, and there we are.

It also highlights that all of these things are interpretations. You very rarely find something that is beyond any doubt what it is. Then there’s also things with all of the burials in the book and all the burials that we excavate — people have quite long lives, hopefully. And if you were a warrior when you’re 18 and you live to be 70, are you buried with all the weapons? Maybe not. Who knows?

That applies to any other kind of profession. So we don’t know [if the different events and professions] in somebody’s life course [are] represented in the burial. Is it when they die, or is it somebody who did something famous when they were young, and that is in the grave. We don’t know. So there’s lots of question marks, but the one thing it does show is the diversity of life in the Viking Age. There’s so many different kinds of people, which is not a surprise, really, but it’s something I just wanted to bring out in the book.

LG: You don’t just talk about Vikings, but about those who lived alongside them. In one chapter, you describe a Sámi burial of a bear that they had killed and feasted on. What do we know about bear burials and why the Sámi did them? [Editor’s note: The Sámi are an Indigenous people who currently live in the northern Nordic countries and part of Russia.]

NP: Well, the bear is a holy animal to the Sámi, and it’s obviously a massive source of protein and food and pelts, you know, all kinds of useful things. But what I really wanted to get at was the idea of personhood. If you think about all the different kinds of prejudice, some people are sort of “more people” than others. Think about racism, for example.

In the Viking Age, not every human was [seen as] a person, but not every person was human. There are animal persons as well, sentient animals. Everything is sentient actually, and the idea that you converse with animals, that you talk to them, you respect them, they have their personalities.

I wanted to bring out in that chapter a different kind of way of looking at “persons.” So the fact that the Sámi bury the bears they hunt with tremendous respect, it’s partly to ensure that the bear will come back in the future from the spirit world as another bear, so that the cycle of hunting and life can go on.

LG: You also talk about “thralls,” people who were enslaved by the Norse. Can you share some of the archaeological evidence we have for thralls and what their burials look like?

NP: We don’t really know whether they have burials at all, actually. The institution of slavery, or thralldom, is absolutely central to the Norse economy, and just putting that back into the picture is very important, I think.

They are a group of people who have been neglected in our studies. There’s a lot of people working on this, this isn’t just me by any means. When we find them in the burials — well, when we think we find them, because it’s extremely rare to find someone buried in their own right that we think might have been enslaved. But there’s also the question of how do we tell? Unless somebody’s sort of buried in chains or something, it’s very hard.

But we do find — not often, but it’s not that uncommon — that people have been killed in the course of funerals. You have a burial of a man or a woman, and then an extra body is in the grave, which has clearly been treated very differently. So their hands might be tied or they’ve been decapitated or something, and there’s people who have very clearly been killed at the funeral.

Just the fact of that presumably means that they have a very different kind of status to the primary occupant of the burial. [They’re] not necessarily enslaved; they could be prisoners or criminals. But there’s been more recent studies looking at the diet of those people. You can use isotopes to study what people have eaten. [Editor’s note: Isotopes are variations of elements. When people consume different foods and water, different amounts of certain isotopes are incorporated into their teeth and bones.] And in some cases, the people who’ve been killed at funerals have a much, much worse diet than other people, which implies that they have a much lower status and poorer nutrition and so on.

So the implication really is that they might be enslaved. So I think that’s where we are with the burials of enslaved people.

LG: You spend an entire chapter on Viking Age children. What was it like to grow up in Scandinavia during this time, and what can we learn about their lives from grave goods and skeletal analyses?

NP: The first thing is that an awful lot of people didn’t make it out of childhood at all. Putting numbers on this is a bit of a game, but probably less than half the population got past the age of 10. So child mortality is massive.

When we imagine the Viking Age or think back to it, remember that almost every single family will have lost children, with the psychological effects of that and the emotional effects and so on. And we shouldn’t be entirely sure what those effects were, because if child mortality is so high, they have different coping mechanisms. But it still must have been utterly awful.

We don’t find as many child burials as we should. There are a couple of written sources that mention that dead children are effectively discarded, and maybe this is connected with a coping mechanism for child mortality that people don’t become sort of “full people” until they get to a certain age. We don’t know.

But there are child burials and, quite often they’re buried with scaled-down versions of the things that adults have. So young girls are buried with women’s jewelry, but smaller. And they obviously had their possessions; they had their clothes and their jewelry, and we find toys, not in the graves, but on settlement sites — we find dolls, wooden animals, there’s a fantastic horse on wheels that you can roll it about, lots and lots of little wooden boats that you can sail down. So they’re thinking about boats quite early. I think their lives are quite recognizable up to a point, though very hard.

The age of maturity seems to be somewhere between about 14 and 16. After that, you’re an adult, and then you’re just out there with the rest.

LG: To us that seems young, but for them to make it that far would have been an accomplishment.

NP: And even in adults — you asked about skeletal analysis — there are an awful lot of adults that are malnourished as children, and it leaves traces in their bones.

There’s also a rather grim set of data from a fairly small sample, but still — the proportion of adult women who were malnourished as children is much greater than the proportion of men. In other words, if food was scarce, they gave it to the boys. So it’s also a glimpse of their priorities and the realities of their world.

LG: The Scandinavians settled in the Rus’ in what is now Ukraine. What do we know about these people? Were they traders, warriors, or a mix of many things?

NP: I think [it’s] a mixture. The identity of the Rus’ is one of the big questions of the Viking Age. They used to be seen very simply as what the Vikings are called when they go east. And there’s some truth to that. They seem to be culturally Scandinavian in the beginning, so we’re talking the early ninth century or probably the eighth century.

Over time, as they travel on the eastern rivers, they become much more ethnically diverse. So it’s a culture that grows up around an activity, rather than people from a particular place. Probably the closest parallel [is] if you think of the fur trade on the Canadian rivers and some parts of the states as well — the sort of 1600s and 1700s.

They’re certainly militaristic though; they’re armed traders. There’s no doubt about that. And they found trading settlements, together with local people and other incomers as well. And they settle there. After a time, they’re not actually [newcomers], they live there. And then, over time, quite late in the Viking Age and on into the Middle Ages, you get this Rus’ state, with its capital of Kiev. But they range over a very large part of Eastern Europe and actually I think further east as well.

LG: You focus on this group of Rus’ warriors, the Varangians, and you give the example of them leaving graffiti on a marble lion statue that’s now in Venice. Can you tell us the story about these runes they carved?

NP: Yeah sure, it’s a bit strange that the best monument to these guys is a lion that’s much, much older than the Viking Age. It’s from classical antiquity. It’s outside the Arsenal now in Venice, but it used to stand in the harbor of Athens at a place called Piraeus.

The Varangians were kind of a subset of the Rus’, but they’re basically Scandinavians who take very clear contracted employment in the armies of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire. So they’re mercenaries, and they were very sought after, and there’s lots and lots of written sources about them.

This lion, which once stood in the Athenian harbor, had three inscriptions in runes over its shoulders and legs and things. Two of the inscriptions are very fragmentary, so you can’t get much from them. But the biggest one is a memorial to a guy called Haursi. It actually calls him Haursi the farmer, so it really does emphasize that you could be a farmer, but maybe you do a season in the army down in Greece and make a bit of money and go home. So people have professions and they have choices, and they do this for a bit, but then they go back and do what they did before.

This inscription is written by this guy’s friends or his comrades, and it specifically says that he was killed before he got paid. And it’s kind of a hint. It’s “So, pay up, because you owe him, or you owe his family.”

You get this little vignette of a soldier’s life. And also carving the inscription on this lion is a pretty major job. This isn’t like scribbling on a wall or something — they’re carving it, and so they’re there a long time. And presumably have control of the harbor because you can’t just chisel this thing on, you know, people are trying to stop you.

We can think of the Varangians being stationed in Athens or waiting for a ship or something like that. It’s this wonderful snapshot.

LG: Your book is loaded with details about Viking Age people. What do you hope readers will take away from your work?

NP: That they were more than actual Vikings. The people of the Viking Age were individuals, every bit as varied and complicated as we are. So that’s it.

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