Few groups in history have been so variously defined, quarrelled over, misrepresented and appropriated as the Vikings. Their identity elusive, they have been passed around like historiographical tokens to the detriment of a deeper understanding of their cultural and political milieu. Neil Price’s The Sea-King and the Sorceress sidesteps these often sterile debates by examining the lives – and deaths – of more than twenty figures from the Viking Age and using them to shed light on wider themes, a bottom-up approach which is both logical and engaging.

Price’s is not a straightforward chronological account – there are many of those, not least the author’s own The Children of Ash and Elm (2020) – but newcomers to the subject will quickly find their bearings. The book proceeds in great sweeps of time, from a ship burial at Saaremaa in modern Estonia in the mid-eighth century to a Swedish matriarch around three hundred years later who raised a runestone to a husband who perished in faraway Greece. The geographical canvas is equally broad, stretching from the tiny Norse church at Brattahlið in Greenland to runes carved by bored Varangian guardsmen in the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Yet each of the author’s chapters is focused on an individual (‘The Hunter’, ‘The Ambassador’, ‘The Farmer’), so the reader does not drift too far in the wider historical currents.

Price is an archaeologist; his lens is focused on artefacts and objects rather than texts. But he uses them skilfully to evoke a sense of intense physicality, reminding us that these were lives lived in the subject’s present, not in our hindsight. The four hunting hounds and fifteen horses found