The first edition of The Viking Way was published in November 2002 by Uppsala University, as my PhD thesis in Archaeology at that institution (Swedish academic convention sees doctorates printed as part of the examination process). The initial print run sold out almost immediately, as did a reprint early the following year. Since then the work has been largely unavailable, other than as library copies and a number of bootleg pdfs appearing online.
This new edition, revised and extended, has come about in response to a demand that I had not expected, and still cannot quite believe. It has also taken me an inordinately long time to prepare, and I apologise to the many readers who have contacted me asking when (or, indeed, whether) the new edition was finally going to come out. The kindly editors at Oxbow Books have been patient far, far beyond any reasonable call of duty, and in mitigation for years of endlessly delayed revisions I can only say that, sometimes, life intervenes. I hope that both readers and publishers feel that the wait was worth it.
A very great deal of new work has appeared since the publication of the first edition, indeed on occasion in response to it. One of the (many) contributing factors in the long wait for this revised edition was a conscious decision to wait for other scholars to publish major works of relevance that were clearly on the way, thus enabling me to incorporate their findings here with proper acknowledgement.
My original plan was to completely revise the entire volume, essentially by rewriting it. However, it gradually became clear that the sheer quantity of new research (which also coincided with a dramatic expansion in academic Viking studies generally) would make this a near-impossible task. Moreover, I was also surprised to discover that, although they welcomed the inclusion of new material in principle, friends and colleagues were actually much keener to simply have access to the original. The resulting second edition
is therefore inevitably something of a compromise, but a deliberate and structured one.
If readers wish to use the original edition, they will find it all here, essentially unchanged and presented as before. The only alterations are minor edits to correct typos and basic errata, and also different pagination to fit a new format. In a few places, I have removed or edited short passages on method that only served a purpose in the context of a PhD thesis for examination, and also toned down some of the harsher critique. In chapter 7, the rather simplistic binary diagrams of the first edition have been replaced by prose, in my opinion a form that better fits the concluding narrative. The original Swedish summary has also been omitted in this new and different context.
The illustrations are largely unchanged, except that several are now reproduced in colour, and of course there are also some new finds that have been made since 2002; a few have been replaced due to copyright concerns. A number of new reconstructions are also included of burials discussed in the first edition, alongside the original text. Maps and tables have been fully updated.
Beyond the original content, the revisions and additions to the text come in two main forms.
First, in cases where specific matters that I discussed in the first edition – such as objects or individual burials – have since been expanded upon through new research, this has been incorporated directly. In chapters 6 and 8, a few brief passages have been incorporated from a couple of later publications (Price et al. 2019; Price in press). General references have also been updated throughout with the literature that has appeared since 2002. An exception to this is the section on archaeological theory in chapter 1. Intellectual currents have moved on substantially in the last 16 years (e.g. Harris & Cipolla 2017), and my own ideas have changed as part of that process. However, to comprehensively incorporate new theoretical works and perspectives would not only radically change the book, but would also alter the contextual purpose of this section in sketching a background for the arguments made in that first edition. For better or worse, the book played a significant role in the debate on archaeological interactions with the text-based disciplines, and was also one of the first attempts at a pluralistic approach to Viking studies. Both these discussions continue today, and even in the somewhat uneasy form of ideas preserved in aspic from 2002, I felt this section worth retaining for those reasons. For my theoretical thinking (such as it is) since then, readers are directed to my subsequent publications, listed in the bibliography.
Second, I have chosen to address more discursive developments in the specific themes of the work – arguments, ideas and interpretations – in the form of an entirely new eighth chapter that has also provided the subtitle for the book as a whole. Broadly following the sequence of the original contents, this summarises the current material and its implications, some of them quite significant. Those wishing to follow the debates in more depth will find all the references here. It is my hope that the resulting text thus provides a properly updated look at the field (to late 2018), while also giving readers full access to the content of the first edition that has been unavailable for so long. For the first time, the whole volume is now also indexed.
In all, this second edition has been expanded by some 35,000 words and includes references to more than 500 new works published since 2002.