The influence of Neil Price's 2002 The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia on the field of Viking studies cannot be overstated. As such, this second edition is a long-awaited publication that will no doubt serve as an invaluable resource for scholars of a variety of fields—archaeology, folkloristics, history, literary and textual studies, religious studies—not only for its sweeping breadth of material and textual evidences, but also for its pluralistic approach to reconstructing, in Price's words, “the Viking mind.” Price argues that “many aspects of Viking-Age ritual were fundamentally shamanistic in nature . . . [and] one of the main purposes of this shamanism was as a kind of battle magic. The supernatural empowerment of violence . . . formed a link between the sacred and profane in a ritualisation of the aggression crucial to a warrior society,” and consequently “becoming a Viking may . ....

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