RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)There was a time, before the pandemic took her to the countryside, before a bitterly cold winter walk, when Chloe Dalton “knew nothing about hares and gave them little thought”. After a rural childhood, she carved out an urban, international existence as a political adviser. It is testament to the intelligence of her writing that she does not measure the urban against the rural and find it wanting. Eventually though, during lockdown, she itched to get back to the countryside (“I also knew that life could not stand still, and truthfully, I wanted and needed to go”).
Such threads of ambivalence run throughout the book, preventing the narrative from drifts towards cliché. On the February day when Dalton returns home clutching a baby hare nestled in handfuls of dead grass, she is in two minds about her actions: “I felt embarrassed and worried. I had no intention of taming the hare, only sheltering it, but it seemed that I had committed a bad error of judgement”.
It would have been easy to make a book like this about human agency and the writer’s journey of self-discovery. It is testament to Dalton that she does not make it so, by thinking beyond herself ... Holds within it the tension between the wild and domestic, the human and non- human ... Powerful and important.
Neil Price
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... the beauty of [Price\'s] book is his ability to move across the disciplines. An expert synthesiser, he brings together much of the latest historical and archaeological research in order to illuminate the Viking world in all its chronological and geographical expanse ... If the merits of the book ended here, it would still be well worth the read as the latest word in Viking age history. However, Price’s aim is more ambitious: to present the Vikings on their own terms, through their sense of self and their psychological relationship to the world. This is no easy task, but he is a past master of getting inside the Norse mind ... Price is no apologist, and never shies away from the \'horrendous\' conditions that many experienced, including horrifying levels of violence, entrenched patriarchal oppression and human enslavement as the driving force that powered much of society ... In seeking the deeper origins of the Viking age, he deftly connects different times and places all the way back to the fall of the western Roman empire ... In the final few chapters, there is perhaps less of the vigour and sparkle that characterises the book as a whole, although what remains is still a strong account of the latest historical research ... Not only a leading authority on the period, Price is also a wonderful writer, by turns philosophical, witty, lyrical and poignant. He possesses both an archaeologist’s ability to interpret large quantities of scholarship and data, and the skill to translate it creatively. His vivid prose illuminates both the physical and the psychological dimensions of the early medieval north, while at the same time leaving space for uncertainty: the possibility of future discoveries and theories that will alter the picture yet again. Nor is he afraid to face up to the absences and random gaps in the source material (such as what their music sounded like), and the confusions and inconsistencies that come from dealing with human nature ... The writing hums with life as Price summons up the voices of the past.
