This long-awaited second edition of Neil Price's 2002 doctoral dissertation, a specialist proof-of-concept collating the evidence and staking out the parameters of decades' worth of research, came out mere months ahead of his great synthetic survey of the Viking Age, Children of Ash and Elm (New York: Basic Books, 2020). This quirk of publication chronology juxtaposes two monumental works that bookend the first quarter-century or so of a soaring career. Readers seeking a polished overview will reach for the 2020 product; those more interested in glorious, messy process, keen to trek with Price from raw evidence to analytic conclusion, will be better served by its predecessor.

Like the original dissertation (henceforth "Price 2002"), this book ("Price 2019") is a work of staggering erudition and imagination. The cognitive archaeology Price practices calls for truly interdisciplinary chops, as well as a willingness to engage with dizzyingly varied sources and methodologies (and over a dozen languages). At the center of the investigation is seiðr, a type of Norse sorcery, which Price turns into a crowbar for prying open anything and everything viking: gender formations, warfare, myth and ritual, the power politics of the living and the enduring agency of the dead. Seiðr is for Price a paradigm of the viking way of being in the world. He sees it as embedded among a welter of cognate praxes, reluctantly termed "shamanism," common across the circumpolar zone. In the shamanic culture of the Viking Age Norse, Price posits, spiritual realities had as tangible a presence and effect on every aspect of life as material ones, and practitioners of seiðr (among others) could manipulate those realities just as you or I might open a door, look up at the sky, or inhale the night air.

Price 2019 reproduces Price 2002's content and structure, updating references, tweaking select passages, and adding a new chapter (330-344) to address post-2002 developments. Chapter 1 (1-21) sets the scene; chapter 2 (22-54) surveys the scholarship and the textual sources; chapter three, the longest by far (55-190), marshals the archaeological evidence for seiðr: accoutrements, representations, performers. Chapters 4 (191-229) and 5 (230-271) provide the contexts of Sámi and more broadly circumpolar shamanism. Chapter 6 (272-323) does most of the analytic heavy lifting, exploring supernatural facets of Viking Age violence: battle magic, valkyries, shape-shifters. A short chapter 7 (324-329) summarizes and generalizes the book's conclusions. Topping and tailing the discussion are a raft of prefatory materials (xi-xxxiii), a massive bibliography (345-386--over a thousand items, at a conservative estimate) and an index (387-398), sorely missed in Price 2002. By every parameter, this 28.5×21.5×3 cm, 1.75 kg tome is a hefty chunk of work.

Three basic questions must be put to such a book. First, did the work merit revision in the first place? Second, does the revision improve on the original? Third and finally, does the new edition stand on its own, as an independent contribution to the scholarship?

The first of these is easily dealt with. Hardly anyone, I think, would dispute that Price 2002 warranted reissuing. As Price documents, his was not the first attempt to explain Norse ritual practices through shamanism, but it was unquestionably the most holistic and influential such gambit to date. Recent discoveries and publications--including his own and his students'--have augmented, nuanced, and in some cases challenged his claims.

Answering the second is trickier. Price has opted to rewrite as little as possible (xxvii); the value added (beyond a straight-up reprint) is accordingly modest. New scholarship mostly appears as parenthetical references, tacked onto text unaltered from 2002. Those few passages in which Price weaves exciting new data into the discussion--a recently interpreted complex burial (113-115), previously overlooked texts attesting to warrior women (275-276), new archaeological clues for what could be a vǫlva's royal itinerary (110)--leave the reader thirsting for more.

Chapter 8, the only entirely novel element in the book, explicitly takes up recent scholarship by Eldar Heide, F.X. Dillmann, Clive Tolley, and others. Price is consistently generous and open-minded towards his interlocutors: "[Ing-Marie] Back Danielsson's arguments are complex, detailed, highly critical of [Price 2002]--and well worth reading in full" (340). Here, too, he could have engaged the new scholarship in greater depth rather than conceding, blandly, that "[t]hat said, I may be wrong, and [they] may not be" (340). One longs for an attempt to synthesize the accumulated new perspectives and, above all, for sustained reflection on how his own ideas have changed--thrived, mutated, evolved--over the past two decades. I spotted only two places where Price goes back briefly to engage with pre-2002 scholarship, addressing studies he had missed (159) and correcting an error in his reading of a Russian-language publication (160).

Beyond the additive element, a new edition offers the opportunity to fix mistakes, fill in lacunae, even change one's mind. New findings prompt Price to adjust his views in places, retracting some contested artifact identifications (156) or reinterpreting a sorceress's charms, formerly thought to be owl pellets, as something rather darker ("Were these the remains of cremations, rolled up into little balls of hair, ash and fat?" 111; but cf. 169). A long and (to my mind) misguided paragraph in the original, arguing against queer theory (2002: 45-46), has been excised (2019: 19; cf. also 2002: 215 with 2019: 176). Statements on the sexing of graves have been qualified throughout, culminating in the tantalizing suggestion that "[some] of the Birka 'sorceress' graves" might in fact be the resting places of "the 'missing' male sorcerers" (341). Illustrations have been revamped throughout, resulting in nearly universal enhancement to the visuals (though some sepia images now look rather faint, e.g. Fig. 3.95, 2019: 157; cf. Fig. 3.90, 2002: 197).

Some updates, however, miss the mark. Runes, Price had written (2002: 100), "are encountered on wooden tags serving as trade marks, and as owner's [sic] labels on a variety of objects"; he now adds a third function: "and effectively as a form of early medieval Post-It notes" (2019: 61). A catchy analogy, but utterly invalid when you stop to think about it. When Price avers in both editions that he is "[m]indful of the kind of approaches that have evolved over the last three decades" (2019: 4 = 2002: 28), there is no telling which thirty-year period he has in mind. He touts the stripping away of some schematic diagrams as an upgrade (2019: xxvii), but the resulting narrative is in fact less readable (e.g.: "If we focus on this as a kind of socio-political construct..." 2019: 325, where "this" now has no obvious antecedent; cf. 2002: 390).

Errata also leave too much to be desired. As best I could spot, every (!) original typo has been reproduced. Translations are handled with baffling inconsistency: some quoted (242), many adapted (292), others rendered by Price himself (303). The same passage is sometimes cited in competing translations, with no apparent justification (38, 184). Price's own translations, unfortunately, engender little confidence: "þa skal flytia utt aa sio og sockua til gruna" (then [one] must take [practitioners of seiðr out to sea and sink [them] to the bottom) somehow becomes "then they shall be driven out beyond the parish bounds" (42). We all make mistakes, especially when "engag[ing] with material beyond one's expertise and competence" (335); we all depend on competent experts to catch our errors, however--if not the first time around, at least in revision.

Finally, then, how does Price 2019 stack up when viewed independently of Price 2002? Again, the answer is not clear-cut. There are many problems one could pause over, such as repeated lapses into anti-nominalism, committed to reading distinct terms as lining up with discrete realities (83, 119, 135-136, 287; contrast 129, 180, 277, 280), or meagre attention paid to the dominance of feud in small-scale societies, to runic inscriptions, and to scholarship on Viking Age masculinity (273, 309-310, 340). I leave these aside to focus on a handful of major issues.

Since 2017, Price has been taking a lot of flak (full disclosure: some of it from me) for an allegedly cavalier attitude towards textual, and especially literary, evidence. To rehash criticisms in detail would be redundant, but the nub of the matter is that even the most trusted sources must be approached with a wary eye to agenda and innuendo, historical and rhetorical shaping, rather than as simple repositories of information. Price knows this full well but, inexplicably, he sometimes ignores it: a detail from Norna-gests þáttr might be qualified as "most likely a later distortion" (188), in the same breath that a strophe from Vǫluspá, which most scholars flag as Christian interpolation, is embraced as dispositive evidence (187). Such procedure smacks of special pleading.

Some readings of archaeological evidence raise similar misgivings. The iron poles Price identifies as seiðr staffs bear a lot of weight in his argument. He acknowledges some doubts cast on such identifications (147ff, 336-340) but hardly comes to grips with their implications. Wooden staffs, he notes, seldom survive intact, and may not be "recorded even when found": an unusually well-preserved example was classified "among 'indeterminable wooden pieces'" at one site (162). If excavators saw nothing more than a stick, however, can we be confident the Norsemen who sealed the grave saw something more? Let alone that this something more was a sorceress's staff?

The chief flaw in Price 2019 is its abundant reliance on non-committal rhetoric to insinuate claims, making them seem plausible, without bothering to spell them out, much less interpret or clinch them. Examples are too numerous to cite in extenso, so I stick to just one: tracking the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of occurrences of "interesting(ly)" in the book--and analysing the work adjective and adverb perform--would be a productive exercise. "This is an extremely late source, but the idea is interestingly close to the pattern we have seen above" (183) distances Price from the text he is citing, yet leaves a faint evidentiary odor hanging in the air. "None of this proves the existence of the saga shield maidens, but it does provide an interesting new perspective on the possible practical involvement of Viking-Age [sic] Scandinavian women in warfare" (276); is "interesting" really the threshold we wish our burden of proof to meet? Such obfuscation leads to statements like "There are many other possibilities and I do not discount any of them" (341): on its face, an admirable, progressive stance that refuses to allow Price's modern biases to taint his interpretation of the evidence. But when an author refuses to establish a hierarchy of plausibilities, he puts the most outlandish reading on the same footing as the best-documented one. This is an abdication of interpretative responsibility.

Price 2019's vices are arguably outweighed by its virtues. The sheer scope and diversity of data processed here are worth pausing over, again, not just to admire the effort Price has put in but to take note of the book's usefulness as a compendium on numerous Norse graves and objects, on (sub-)arctic cognates to seiðr, and on the history of research into these topics. (The eBook version should allow for easier retrieval than the print copy.) Price's lucid explanations of archaeological analytic procedure--such as his reconstruction of a double burial, even though a single set of teeth were the only human remains recovered (88-95)--seem, to this non-archaeologist at any rate, compelling. Some passages (e.g. 1-4, 19, 327-328) are quite simply superb prose. And, when he is on his game, Price is capable of first-rate textual analysis, as in his subtle readings of Vǫlsa þáttr alongside Ibn Faḍlān's notoriously elusive Risāla (125, 178-179).

Creativity, a prodigious boldness in asking provocative questions ("What was it like to be [married to a] Viking who returned home from months of murderous rapine abroad?" 326) and proposing suggestive interpretations, has always been Price's forte. Such interventions can be immensely productive, as evident especially in his short articles, whether on Viking Age mortuary drama ("Passing into Poetry," 2010), on the Sutton Hoo helmet as an Óðinn mask ("An Eye for Odin?" with Paul Mortimer, 2014), or in a glorious overview of Norse religious attitudes ("Belief & Ritual," 2014; see https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/18825). Price 2019 lays bare the origins from which his seductive view of the viking world grew; for that alone it deserves a place of honor on any Nordicist's bookshelf. If it also highlights how thin the evidentiary ice on which Price's reconstructed viking world skates, this is a pity but also, in a sense, so much the better: informed debate requires delving into the proving process, not just responding sympathetically to the resonant end product.