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A review by wyntrchylde
River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandanavia to the Silk Road by Cat Jarman
3.0
River Kings
Author: Cat Jarman
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Publishing Date: 2022
Pgs: 324
Dewey: 948.022 JAR
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
=======================================
REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
Dr Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist, specializing in forensic techniques to research the paths of Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now over one thousand years old, she can determine childhood diet, and thereby where a person was likely born. With radiocarbon dating, she can ascertain a death date down to the range of a few years. And her research offers new visions of the likely roles of women and children in Viking culture.
In 2017, a carnelian bead came into her temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace its path back to eighth-century Baghdad and India, discovering along the way that the Vikings’ route was far more varied than we might think, that with them came people from the Middle East, not just Scandinavia, and that the reason for this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, and all the way to Britain.
Told as a riveting story of the Vikings and the methods we use to understand them, this is a major reassessment of the fierce, often-mythologized voyagers of the north, and of the global medieval world as we know it.
_________________________________________
Genre:
History
Non-Fiction
Maritime History
Piracy
Anthropology
Medieval Europe
Asian History
Vikings
Scandinavian History
English History
Why this book:
Vikings…I’m in.
_________________________________________
Overused Phrase/Concept:
“This may well be true, but…” It's like the author is having to disagree with themselves to head off disagreement. I wonder if Viking Archaeology and Egyptian Archaeology have that much in common, well, archaeologists. Hills and battlefields in academia have been marked out and anyone who strays from the path is labeled and forced into an outlier/pariah situation. There's a fair bit of equivocation here.
Tropes:
Note, please, that the author is following the science and the scientific culture as it exists vis-a-vis Viking culture and history.
Hmm Moments:
Never heard of the explanation for the discrepancy in radiocarbon dating caused by diet. If you eat fish or seafood primarily in your diet, it could throw off future radiocarbon dating of your bones by up to 400 years. This is because land-based diets have a specific carbon profile. Whereas sea-based diets are swimming around in a swirling medium that solubilizes carbon at different rates than the air and therefore the carbon half-life is different.
The odd thing is the dearth of Viqueen graves. Many and multiple male graves, but few females. What happened to them? The idea that there weren't women in the raiding parties and the camps has already been put aside. But what happened to them? Some of them are elaborate and DNA sequencing shows that some have roots that are far afield from where they were laid to rest.
After reading about the Rus funeral rituals observed by Ibn Fahad, it makes one wonder about the Repton mass grave. It shows signs of the same rituals. And its location there below the ruins of the monastery. It would be a most Viking thing to do it there at that location as a raised middle finger to the monks who they had driven from the monastery and those who continued to fight them from the south.
Uhm Moments:
Page 84 and the author has repeated the paradigm about the Vikings not leaving any records of detail and a dearth of physical evidence multiple times. There is physical evidence, but it's not in the amounts that Viking studies would like there to be. Too much is left up to the word-of-mouth reporting of the day or the records left behind by their victims, which are always going to slant the story. Considering that the author has spent as many pages explaining how they are building a more complete picture of the Viking past of Repton and environs, the harping back to the limited evidence when the whole book to this point has been about putting meat on the bones of legend and dragging it into the light feels repetitive and circular.
172 pages in and, we've just made it to the Eastern Baltic and are just starting to explore the River Kings concept but there aren't 172 more pages left in the book. Seems a long way to go to get to the beginning of the part that is your basic hypothesis of the book.
Calling the Ball:
So, the author does bring up infanticide as a possible explanation of the 7-to-1 disparity in male-to-female burials, at least as far as archaeology on partial skeletons can determine. Modern equivalent points towards China's one-child policy which resulted in a 3-to-1 disparity favoring male children. So, either Vikings were drowning or leaving female children out to die in the wilderness in epic proportions or something else was going on that hasn't been discovered yet. Or, and it’s a big or, chauvinism is mislabelling many of the skeletons and partial skeletons recovered in burial mounds.
WTF Moments/RUFKM Moments:
It always bothers me when otherwise intelligent people say something dumb, especially in print. The quote is "One explanation is that these people could be the slaves we struggle to identify but, as before, we have to consider whether such enslaved people were likely to have passed on their genes to a detectable extent." To which, I reply, Thomas Jefferson, et al.
Meh / PFFT Moments:
The concept that the Vikings are the most prolific slave traders in history is leftover Anglo-Saxon Catholic propaganda. In a world history where there have been the Persian-Arab-East Africa slave trade, the Greco-Roman-Catholic Europe-Islamic North Africa slave trade and the Triangle Slave Trade of West Africa-America-England, there's a lot of desire to play the yeah we were bad but look at these guys. That said the Vikings were the boogeyman of Northwestern Europe for hundreds of years
The Sigh:
The strontium isotope test that a lot of this research is based on being labeled this deep into the book as sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes the result means that they are from here and sometimes it just means that they're from a place like this, puts the lie to a lot of the assumptions in the book. Or at least make some of the assumptions seem less solid.
Your ~ism is Showing:
No such thing as a Viking genotype/genetic group. They may have been a tribe/nation, but their genetic identity was literally all over the place. This despite the racism inherent in much of the early archaeology associated with the exploration of unexplored and unreported Viking culture and history. Viking myth has been used to prop up the Confederacy, the KKK, and the Nazis. Based on what we know now about Viking culture, I doubt they would've approved. But, they weren't a monolithic society, more warring bands that came together to raid and plunder. Those who built trading outposts and settled down became part of the ongoing culture of the areas they conquered and settled in, but many did do yearlong and sometimes multi-yearlong raiding forays before returning to wherever they called home.
The author makes mention of the racism that impacted the conclusions of many in the archaeology field in the pre-modern era. As many of their conclusions continue to influence the research of modern scientists, their impact on the understanding of history continues. This doesn't just impact Viking studies but all the studies of people in history. Sexism too. The author, despite pointing this out, falls into this trap in the section about Viking women with the mention of so-called gender-specific work.
The isms of the past run deep. The assumption that burial mound remains of short stature are all female and the tall statures automatically mean male when the brow ridge of the skull or the pelvis is missing from the excavated remains in is a pretty big guess informed by nothing more than wishful thinking. Gwendolyn Christie and Brittany Griner would like a word.
Also, the question of whether the women in the Viking burials who were buried with weapons and the accouterments of war were warriors is asinine. If they accept that men, sans wounds, buried thusly are warriors then they have to accept the women as well. The disrespect for these potential female Viking warriors is gigantic. Effectively telling them to get back to the hearth/kitchen and that they are only cosplaying warriors in death.
For it not being the purported purpose of the document, this book does a good job of pointing out the ~isms inherent in Viking history and archaeology as told by the mytho/cultural bent studies of the past. Scholarship of the future will have to overcome that to build a real picture of the Vikings, their world, and their culture.
Wisdom:
Considering that there is historical evidence of LGBTQ Ancient Chinese, Indians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, why the reticence and resistance to that idea in Viking culture? Hey archaeologists and historians, there have always been gay people…dumbasses.
Juxtaposition:
So much for the myth of the noble barbarian that grew up around Vikings, the raiding and taking of captives, the desecration of holy sites, Christian propaganda amped that up eclipsing the other parts of the historical story: slavery and human sacrifice.
Yes, the Vikings were bloody raiders, labelling them the worst of the worst when most of their footprint on the world is invisible is modern history trying to hide its own shortcomings in the past. That's not a quibble with this author but with the historical authority in general.
The flow of the British genotype into Scandinavia revealed by genetic geography Is explained by Viking raiders bringing home slaves. They weren't just taking goods. The only slaves, that we know of, in history who didn’t leave a genetic imprint on their “masters” to a measurable degree were the slaves of the Roman Empire because of the horrific practice of sterilizing their victims.
The lack of Viking records beyond the Sagas leaves huge blank spaces in their history that DNA research and burial mound archaeology can only scratch at. And the Sagas for having some true historical information are also rife with mythology.
So the Viking and the Rus are the same people, interesting.
Erstwhile:
Gotta get this out of my hair...Damn Vikings! How dare they lure our women away with their huge mustaches, blonde and red hair, and blue and green eyes...and all their bathing and such. ...okay, got it off my chest. Has nothing to do with the book, but c'mon, wouldn't we all rather be Vikings in that world...at least as far as the bathing goes
The Unexpected:
Ingmar the Far-Travelled while being a historical figure, who did make a journey as far as Constantinople, has his wider travels mythologized. The story sounds like a pastiche of Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad, although in classic Viking fashion, and like the real Ingmar, those voyages ended in disaster and death.
The Poker Game/DND Table:
Triggered off by a Carnelian stone that was incongruous where it was found. ...sounds like the plot of a DND game or sword and sorcery movie.
Hacksilver and polyhedral weights and measures gives me DND vibes.
_________________________________________
Pacing:
For Non-Fiction, this was very well-paced.
Last Page Sound:
I wouldn't call this a strong theory, call it an interesting, working theory. Lotta guesswork. Makes a good working theory. There is obviously strong links between the Rus and the Vikings. And the Varangian Guard in Istambul/Constantinople did exist in Byzantine times. I do believe the theory is correct and that as more information comes to light it will have more meat on its bones. Good, interesting story/study.
=======================================
Author: Cat Jarman
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Publishing Date: 2022
Pgs: 324
Dewey: 948.022 JAR
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
=======================================
REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
Dr Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist, specializing in forensic techniques to research the paths of Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now over one thousand years old, she can determine childhood diet, and thereby where a person was likely born. With radiocarbon dating, she can ascertain a death date down to the range of a few years. And her research offers new visions of the likely roles of women and children in Viking culture.
In 2017, a carnelian bead came into her temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace its path back to eighth-century Baghdad and India, discovering along the way that the Vikings’ route was far more varied than we might think, that with them came people from the Middle East, not just Scandinavia, and that the reason for this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, and all the way to Britain.
Told as a riveting story of the Vikings and the methods we use to understand them, this is a major reassessment of the fierce, often-mythologized voyagers of the north, and of the global medieval world as we know it.
_________________________________________
Genre:
History
Non-Fiction
Maritime History
Piracy
Anthropology
Medieval Europe
Asian History
Vikings
Scandinavian History
English History
Why this book:
Vikings…I’m in.
_________________________________________
Overused Phrase/Concept:
“This may well be true, but…” It's like the author is having to disagree with themselves to head off disagreement. I wonder if Viking Archaeology and Egyptian Archaeology have that much in common, well, archaeologists. Hills and battlefields in academia have been marked out and anyone who strays from the path is labeled and forced into an outlier/pariah situation. There's a fair bit of equivocation here.
Tropes:
Note, please, that the author is following the science and the scientific culture as it exists vis-a-vis Viking culture and history.
Hmm Moments:
Never heard of the explanation for the discrepancy in radiocarbon dating caused by diet. If you eat fish or seafood primarily in your diet, it could throw off future radiocarbon dating of your bones by up to 400 years. This is because land-based diets have a specific carbon profile. Whereas sea-based diets are swimming around in a swirling medium that solubilizes carbon at different rates than the air and therefore the carbon half-life is different.
The odd thing is the dearth of Viqueen graves. Many and multiple male graves, but few females. What happened to them? The idea that there weren't women in the raiding parties and the camps has already been put aside. But what happened to them? Some of them are elaborate and DNA sequencing shows that some have roots that are far afield from where they were laid to rest.
After reading about the Rus funeral rituals observed by Ibn Fahad, it makes one wonder about the Repton mass grave. It shows signs of the same rituals. And its location there below the ruins of the monastery. It would be a most Viking thing to do it there at that location as a raised middle finger to the monks who they had driven from the monastery and those who continued to fight them from the south.
Uhm Moments:
Page 84 and the author has repeated the paradigm about the Vikings not leaving any records of detail and a dearth of physical evidence multiple times. There is physical evidence, but it's not in the amounts that Viking studies would like there to be. Too much is left up to the word-of-mouth reporting of the day or the records left behind by their victims, which are always going to slant the story. Considering that the author has spent as many pages explaining how they are building a more complete picture of the Viking past of Repton and environs, the harping back to the limited evidence when the whole book to this point has been about putting meat on the bones of legend and dragging it into the light feels repetitive and circular.
172 pages in and, we've just made it to the Eastern Baltic and are just starting to explore the River Kings concept but there aren't 172 more pages left in the book. Seems a long way to go to get to the beginning of the part that is your basic hypothesis of the book.
Calling the Ball:
So, the author does bring up infanticide as a possible explanation of the 7-to-1 disparity in male-to-female burials, at least as far as archaeology on partial skeletons can determine. Modern equivalent points towards China's one-child policy which resulted in a 3-to-1 disparity favoring male children. So, either Vikings were drowning or leaving female children out to die in the wilderness in epic proportions or something else was going on that hasn't been discovered yet. Or, and it’s a big or, chauvinism is mislabelling many of the skeletons and partial skeletons recovered in burial mounds.
WTF Moments/RUFKM Moments:
It always bothers me when otherwise intelligent people say something dumb, especially in print. The quote is "One explanation is that these people could be the slaves we struggle to identify but, as before, we have to consider whether such enslaved people were likely to have passed on their genes to a detectable extent." To which, I reply, Thomas Jefferson, et al.
Meh / PFFT Moments:
The concept that the Vikings are the most prolific slave traders in history is leftover Anglo-Saxon Catholic propaganda. In a world history where there have been the Persian-Arab-East Africa slave trade, the Greco-Roman-Catholic Europe-Islamic North Africa slave trade and the Triangle Slave Trade of West Africa-America-England, there's a lot of desire to play the yeah we were bad but look at these guys. That said the Vikings were the boogeyman of Northwestern Europe for hundreds of years
The Sigh:
The strontium isotope test that a lot of this research is based on being labeled this deep into the book as sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes the result means that they are from here and sometimes it just means that they're from a place like this, puts the lie to a lot of the assumptions in the book. Or at least make some of the assumptions seem less solid.
Your ~ism is Showing:
No such thing as a Viking genotype/genetic group. They may have been a tribe/nation, but their genetic identity was literally all over the place. This despite the racism inherent in much of the early archaeology associated with the exploration of unexplored and unreported Viking culture and history. Viking myth has been used to prop up the Confederacy, the KKK, and the Nazis. Based on what we know now about Viking culture, I doubt they would've approved. But, they weren't a monolithic society, more warring bands that came together to raid and plunder. Those who built trading outposts and settled down became part of the ongoing culture of the areas they conquered and settled in, but many did do yearlong and sometimes multi-yearlong raiding forays before returning to wherever they called home.
The author makes mention of the racism that impacted the conclusions of many in the archaeology field in the pre-modern era. As many of their conclusions continue to influence the research of modern scientists, their impact on the understanding of history continues. This doesn't just impact Viking studies but all the studies of people in history. Sexism too. The author, despite pointing this out, falls into this trap in the section about Viking women with the mention of so-called gender-specific work.
The isms of the past run deep. The assumption that burial mound remains of short stature are all female and the tall statures automatically mean male when the brow ridge of the skull or the pelvis is missing from the excavated remains in is a pretty big guess informed by nothing more than wishful thinking. Gwendolyn Christie and Brittany Griner would like a word.
Also, the question of whether the women in the Viking burials who were buried with weapons and the accouterments of war were warriors is asinine. If they accept that men, sans wounds, buried thusly are warriors then they have to accept the women as well. The disrespect for these potential female Viking warriors is gigantic. Effectively telling them to get back to the hearth/kitchen and that they are only cosplaying warriors in death.
For it not being the purported purpose of the document, this book does a good job of pointing out the ~isms inherent in Viking history and archaeology as told by the mytho/cultural bent studies of the past. Scholarship of the future will have to overcome that to build a real picture of the Vikings, their world, and their culture.
Wisdom:
Considering that there is historical evidence of LGBTQ Ancient Chinese, Indians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, why the reticence and resistance to that idea in Viking culture? Hey archaeologists and historians, there have always been gay people…dumbasses.
Juxtaposition:
So much for the myth of the noble barbarian that grew up around Vikings, the raiding and taking of captives, the desecration of holy sites, Christian propaganda amped that up eclipsing the other parts of the historical story: slavery and human sacrifice.
Yes, the Vikings were bloody raiders, labelling them the worst of the worst when most of their footprint on the world is invisible is modern history trying to hide its own shortcomings in the past. That's not a quibble with this author but with the historical authority in general.
The flow of the British genotype into Scandinavia revealed by genetic geography Is explained by Viking raiders bringing home slaves. They weren't just taking goods. The only slaves, that we know of, in history who didn’t leave a genetic imprint on their “masters” to a measurable degree were the slaves of the Roman Empire because of the horrific practice of sterilizing their victims.
The lack of Viking records beyond the Sagas leaves huge blank spaces in their history that DNA research and burial mound archaeology can only scratch at. And the Sagas for having some true historical information are also rife with mythology.
So the Viking and the Rus are the same people, interesting.
Erstwhile:
Gotta get this out of my hair...Damn Vikings! How dare they lure our women away with their huge mustaches, blonde and red hair, and blue and green eyes...and all their bathing and such. ...okay, got it off my chest. Has nothing to do with the book, but c'mon, wouldn't we all rather be Vikings in that world...at least as far as the bathing goes
The Unexpected:
Ingmar the Far-Travelled while being a historical figure, who did make a journey as far as Constantinople, has his wider travels mythologized. The story sounds like a pastiche of Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad, although in classic Viking fashion, and like the real Ingmar, those voyages ended in disaster and death.
The Poker Game/DND Table:
Triggered off by a Carnelian stone that was incongruous where it was found. ...sounds like the plot of a DND game or sword and sorcery movie.
Hacksilver and polyhedral weights and measures gives me DND vibes.
_________________________________________
Pacing:
For Non-Fiction, this was very well-paced.
Last Page Sound:
I wouldn't call this a strong theory, call it an interesting, working theory. Lotta guesswork. Makes a good working theory. There is obviously strong links between the Rus and the Vikings. And the Varangian Guard in Istambul/Constantinople did exist in Byzantine times. I do believe the theory is correct and that as more information comes to light it will have more meat on its bones. Good, interesting story/study.
=======================================