I live a thousand miles from the Gulf of Mexico and 1600 miles from the nearest ocean, and yet this week I was directly affected by a hurricane. The Pacific Hurricane Polo made landfall over Baja California this week. It proceeded to dump rain over northwestern Mexico, the American Southwest, Texas, and its remnants caused storms up into the Upper Midwest, where I live. It reached us on Wednesday, dropping a record amount of rainfall for one day. The official total was just over 6” (152mm), but some parts of town recorded up to 10” (254mm), with most of that falling in about four hours that evening. Needless to say, we experienced some flooding. Fortunately, the city spent years on flood mitigation projects and those paid off. Our creeks, streams, and a couple of parks were completely inundated, but the water mostly stayed out of neighborhoods. Some homes have been damaged and a few roads around the county are still closed. The weather has been sunny and dry since then and will be for a while, so we will be able to dry out a bit after a very rainy September. Recently Read:
Neil Price is well-known in the field of Norse studies, and has consulted for Robert Eggers’ film The Northman, which served as part of the inspiration for Price’s latest popular history book about Scandinavian societies during the Viking Age. The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age. In this book, Price discusses the diversity of northern European populations and the boundaries of what we can know about them using inscriptions, graves, grave goods, and skeletal remains of people from across the lands that the Vikings lived in from around 750CE to around 1050 CE. Price is quick to denounce the racist motivations some groups use to promote their false views of a pure white Viking society, and he uses actual physical evidence to back up his arguments. The Rus’, Norse, and Sami societies engaged in extensive trade with other parts of Europe and Asia, and analysis of their grave goods shows this. They also traveled extensively, leaving behind evidence of their presence from the Byzantine Empire to the shores of eastern Canada. Though he has written academically-minded books before, The Sea-King and the Sorceress is more of a popular history like Children of Ash and Elm. Price keeps his discussion of the evidence readable for the layperson without sacrificing the more technical aspects of it, like when he talks about strontium analysis of dentition being able to point to where people grew up and how that shows the distances that some people traveled during their lives and how others stayed near their childhood homes. The chapters are fairly short, providing a good deal of detail about each of the burial sites Price has chosen to discuss without going so far into the weeds that the average reader’s eyes will start to glaze over. I always appreciate how Price is able to use the evidence to give us a window into the Viking Age while also reiterating the fact that we will never truly know what the Norse, Rus’ Sami, and other people of the past thought about their world and their lives. Still, though we can’t fully understand the people of the past, books like The Sea-King and the Sorceress go a long way to helping us get an inkling of what life was like for these people in all its violence, strangeness, and often mundanity. As much as I enjoy a good period drama on TV or at the movie theater, I prefer non-fiction works like Price’s that aren’t afraid to show how alien these societies were as compared to our modern ones. They give us all the drama of the past along with the facts as we know them, thanks to techniques like ancient DNA analysis and mineral analysis that can show where the people and their things came from. Some like to claim that populations were homogenous because they couldn’t travel very much, but these analytic techniques show just how far they could actually travel. I thoroughly enjoyed The Sea-King and the Sorceress and learned a lot about the people and diversity of the Viking Age. Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Books for the advance e-book for review. A couple of interesting articles I read on Substack this week: 
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