The Vikings: Classic Histories Series E-Book

Magnus Magnusson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classic Histories Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 538

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Vikings hold a particular place in the history of the West, both symbolically and in the significant impact they had on Northern Europe. Magnus Magnusson's indispensable study of this great period presents a rounded and fascinating picture of a people who, in modern eyes, would seem to embody striking contradictions. They were undoubtedly pillagers, raiders and terrifying warriors, but they were also great pioneers, artists and traders - a dynamic people, whose skill and daring in their exploration of the world has left an indelible impression a thousand years on.

Leseprobe

THE

VIKINGS

THE

VIKINGS

MAGNUS MAGNUSSON KBE

Cover Illustration:

Leifur Eiríksson off the coast of Vineland. A.D. 1000. Painting by Wergeland.

© Bettmann/CORBIS

First published as Vikings! 1980

Illustrated edition published 2000

This edition first published 2003

Reprinted in 2008 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port,

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2016

All rights reserved

© Magnus Magnusson, 1980, 2000, 2003, 2008

The right of Magnus Magnusson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8077 7

Typesetting and origination by Tempus Publishing Limited.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1 The Hammer and the Raven

2 Bolt from the Blue

3 ‘From the Fury of the Northmen…’

4 ‘Hálfdan was Here’

5 England at Bay

6 ‘Bitter is the Wind…’

7 ‘An Island called Thule’

8 The Ultimate Outpost

9 Empire of the North Sea

10 ‘Here King Harold is Killed’

Notes

Bibliography

List of illustrations

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The genesis of this book was a ten-part TV series entitled Vikings! which was broadcast by the BBC in 1980. Revising it for this Tempus edition has brought back a host of happy memories of the years of research and the months of filming with colleagues in the BBC Chronicle production unit: especially producer Ray Sutcliffe and series producer David Collison and his assistant Alexandra Branson. They made the voyage of discovery to the Viking world invariably enjoyable and illuminating. Ray and David also provided all the illustrations in this book.

In the preparation of the book I was greatly helped by innumerable scholars right across the northern hemisphere, from Russia to North America. Many of them are named in the text and bibliography, but many others are not individually credited. My debt to them all, however, is evident on every page.

Above all, I wish to thank my friend and mentor Peter Sawyer, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Leeds (now resident in Norway), who was the historical adviser to the TV series and has given unsparingly of his erudition and sage counsel.

ONE

THE HAMMER AND THE RAVEN

The mythological, literary and historical context

The so-called ‘Viking Age’ began around AD 800 and lasted for nearly three centuries. In the pages of history it is presented as a clearly defined period of high drama, with a theatrical opening, a long middle act of mounting power and ferocity, and a spectacular finale on a battlefield in England. The dates are clear-cut, too: 793 to 1066. And throughout that time, war correspondents in the shape of literate monks and clerics kept their goose-quill pens sharpened with alarm, their glossy inks dyed bright with indignation. The Vikings were cast in the role of Antichrist, merciless barbarians who plundered and burned their way across the known world, heedless of their own lives or the lives of others, intent only on destruction and pillage; their emblems were Thór’s Hammer and Óðin’s Raven, symbolising the violence and black-hearted evil of their pagan gods.

It was never quite as one-sided as that – history seldom is. But it made a good story at the time, and it makes a good story still. It is basically the story which I shall be chronicling in this book; but it was never the whole story. Today there is emerging a much fuller and rounder version, not only through modern archaeology but also with the help of other scientific and literary disciplines, which presents the Vikings in a less lurid and more objective light. It is as much a matter of emphasis as anything else: less emphasis on the raiding, more on the trading; less on the pillage, more on the poetry and the artistry; less on the terror, more on the technology of these determined and dynamic people from the northlands of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the positive impact they had on the countries they affected.

Their influence was much more constructive, more pervasive and extensive than they are generally given credit for. They dominated much of northern Europe for long periods. They brought to the British Isles vigorous new art forms, and vigorous new settlers; they founded and developed great market towns, they injected new forms of administration and justice which have left their mark to this day. (As an Icelandic-born descendant of the Vikings, I can never resist reminding my sceptical friends that it was these allegedly pitiless savages who introduced the word law into the English language!) They crisscrossed half the world in their open boats and vastly extended its known boundaries; they voyaged farther north and west than any Europeans had ever been before, founding new and lasting colonies in the Faroes and Iceland, discovering and exploring and making settlements in Greenland and even in North America.-They penetrated the depths of Russia, founding city-states like Novgorod and Kiev, pioneering new trade routes along formidable rivers such as the Volga and the Dnieper, opening up the route to Asia in order to exploit the exotic markets of Persia and China. They served as hand-picked warriors in the celebrated Varangian Guard, the household troops of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. They went everywhere there was to go, they dared everything there was to dare – and they did it with a robust panache and audacity which have won the grudging admiration even of those who deplore their depredations.

But the Vikings did not happen suddenly; nor did they simply happen. Behind the Viking break-out lay centuries of Scandinavian history which archaeology has been bringing to light – a story of technological development and commercial expansion which helps to explain why the Viking Age came about in the first place.

The word ‘viking’ is itself a bit of a puzzle. It may be related to the Old Norse word vík, meaning ‘bay’ or ‘creek’; so a ‘Viking’ meant someone who kept his ship in a bay, either for trading or raiding. Others look for a derivation in the Old English word wic, borrowed from the Latin vicus, meaning a camp or a trading-place; so a ‘Viking’ might mean a warrior or a trader – or both.

To the people of the time, ‘Viking’ meant different things, too. For the Christian communities of western Europe, a Viking was synonymous with barbarian paganism. But to the people of Scandinavia, and especially to the saga-writers of Iceland in the thirteenth century, the Vikings represented an ideal of heroism and valour: young men went on Viking expeditions to prove their mettle. The Viking life was a sort of open-air university of the manly arts, something for every youngster to aspire to:

My mother once told me

She’d buy me a longship,

A handsome-oared vessel

To go sailing with Vikings:

To stand at the stern-post

And steer a fine warship

Then head back for harbour

And hew down some foemen.

Egils Saga, Ch. 40

Egils Saga is one of the major medieval Icelandic sagas, historical narratives written in prose but often studded with verse stanzas. It is the story of a great Viking warrior-poet named Egill Skallagrímsson (cf Ch. 6), and that boyish verse was composed in his childhood in Iceland early in the tenth century. His saga, it is thought, was written by Snorri Sturluson, who lived on the manor farm of Reykholt in southern Iceland.

The Icelandic sagas, written long after the events they report, were for centuries the major documentary source for the prehistory and history of the Viking lands and the Viking Age. They rank among the finest achievements of medieval European literature, but as historical sources they cannot be taken too literally. Snorri Sturluson, one of the few saga-writers whose name we know, was the outstanding scholar of his age. As a distinguished statesman deeply embroiled in Icelandic politics of the thirteenth century, he was fascinated by the politics and people of the Viking period; as an erudite Christian intellectual he was also fascinated by the pagan mythology of the Vikings, which he helped to preserve by recording and explaining some of the most ancient Germanic myths and legends. Building his work on earlier written sources, on oral traditions and on the remembered skaldic poetry of Scandinavian court poets, he tried to create a coherent framework for the past, a context within which to understand and illuminate the Viking experience.

At Reykholt, Snorri Sturluson wrote some of the towering masterpieces of the thirteenth century. His systematic account of Norse mythology is contained in a work called the Prose Edda, or Snorri’s Edda, which is in effect a handbook for poets, designed to teach the traditional techniques of the ancients and to explain the pagan literary allusions to be found in their poetry. He also wrote a monumental History of the Kings of Norway, popularly known as Heimskringla (‘Orb of the World’) from its opening words: ‘Kringla heimsins, sú er mannfólkit byggir…’ – ‘The orb of the world, which mankind inhabits…’

What a majestic opening! I like to reflect that at the time when, out in the far east, Genghis Khan was trying to subjugate the world by the sword, up in the far north a learned Christian antiquarian was trying to subject it to the power of the pen:

The orb of the world, which mankind inhabits, is riven by many fjords, so that great seas run into the land from the Outer Ocean. Thus, it is known that a great sea goes in through Nörvasund [Straits of Gibraltar] all the way to the land of Jerusalem. From that same sea a long bight stretches towards the north-east, called the Black Sea, which divides the three continents of the earth: to the east lies Asia, to the west lies Europe (which some call Aeneas-land), but to the north of the Black Sea lies Greater Sweden or Sweden the Cold [Russia] …

Through Greater Sweden [Russia], from the range of mountains which lie to the north beyond the edge of human habitation, there runs a river properly called the Tanaís [Don], which flows into the Black Sea. In Asia to the east of the Tanaís there was a land called Ásaland or Ásaheimur [Land of the Æsir]; its chief city was called Ásgarður [Home of the Æsir]. That city was ruled by a chieftain named Óðin, and it was a great centre for sacrifices…

Heimskringla: Ynglinga saga, Ch. 1

That was how Snorri Sturluson tried to rationalise the origin of the Norse gods, the Æsir, who lived in a heaven called Ásgarður. According to Snorri, they had been an Asiatic tribe who had migrated to Scandinavia in ancient times under the chieftain Óðin, who in Norse mythology became the chief god of the Viking pantheon, Óðin the All-Father.

The cult of Óðin was a dark and sacrificial business. Whole armies and individual enemies would be sacrificed to him. He was the god of the occult, and the god of war. From his throne in Ásgarður he could see out over all the universe. On his shoulders perched his two constant companions, two ravens named Huginn and Muninn (Mind and Memory) which kept him informed of what was happening; they were birds of carrion, the scavengers of the battlefield. In Ásgarður he had a palace called Valhöll (wrongly transliterated in English in its genetival plural form, Valhalla), where fallen warriors spent the afterlife in an orgy of feasting and fighting, preparing for the Last Battle which would spell the Doom of the Gods (Ragnarök).

Óðin was essentially the Lord of the Slain, the god of kings and chieftains; but he was also the god of poetry and wisdom. He sacrificed one of his eyes in his constant search for knowledge, and is usually portrayed as a one-eyed figure in disguise. He is also credited with the discovery of runes, the semi-magical system of writing incised on bone, wood or stone by the Norsemen before the introduction of the Roman alphabet. The runic alphabet consisted originally of sixteen twig-like letters known as the futhark from the values of its first six symbols; the full alphabet is to be found on an incised rib-bone now in the Culture History Museum in Lund, Sweden. Runes were mostly used for memorial inscriptions, but they were also used for secret charms or curses. Their magical association goes all the way back to an enigmatic myth about their discovery by Óðin after he had ritually hanged and stabbed himself:

I know that I hung

On the windswept tree

For nine whole nights,

Pierced by the spear

And given to Óðin

Myself given to myself

On that tree

No one knows.

They gave me not bread

Nor drink from the horn;

Into the depths I peered,

I grasped the runes,

Screaming I grasped them,

And then fell back.

Hávamál (Words of the High One)

The Norse pantheon was dominated by a trinity of gods. Óðin was nominally the chief god, All-Father. But another very important god was Thór, the Thunderer, who was probably the most widely venerated of all the Viking gods. Where Óðin was the aristocratic god, Thór was the patron god of seamen and farmers. He was a huge bluff figure, red-haired, red-bearded, red-eyed. He was god of the sky, the ruler of storms and tempests, wielder of thunderbolts. He rode the heavens in a chariot drawn by two sacred goats, and at his passage thunder crashed, the earth quaked and lightning cracked. He was the Lord Protector of the Universe, guarding the world with his mighty hammer Mjöllnir against the menace of the Giants who lurked just beyond the limits of civilisation. Thór’s Hammer, however, was more than just a symbol of supernatural strength and violence; it was also a fertility emblem, which was used to hallow weddings and marital homes as horseshoes were to do later. Numerous Thór’s Hammers have been found in the form of amulets and good-luck charms, as well as some moulds for casting them.

The third god of the Norse trinity was the fertility god, Freyr, closely associated with his twin sister, Freyja. Freyr was the paramount god of the Swedes, and the divine ancestor of their royal dynasty at Uppsala (cf Ch. 4). He is usually portrayed with a giant phallus erect, symbolising his powers of fertility and prosperous increase. Snorri Sturluson wrote of him: ‘Freyr is the noblest of the gods. He controls the rain and the sunshine and therefore the natural increase of the earth, and it is good to call upon him for fruitful seasons and for peace. He also controls the good fortunes of men.’ Freyja was his female mirror-image, loveliest and most lascivious of the goddesses, wanton and fecund.

There are now innumerable artefacts in museums throughout northern Europe which are thought to portray or allude to these gods: a beautiful little cast bronze figurine of a seated Thór grasping his beard and his hammer, dating from the tenth century and found in northern Iceland; an eleventh-century bronze statuette of a squatting Freyr from Rällinge in Sweden; various representations of a one-eyed man accompanied by bird motifs to suggest Óðin. But it is only in the poetry of the Edda (usually called the Poetic Edda or the Elder Edda to differentiate it from Snorri’s Edda) that the old gods and heroes come to life.

The Edda is a collection of thirty-nine poems, compiled in Iceland in the thirteenth century. The poems or lays themselves are very much older, however, and have their roots deep in the pre-Viking world of Germanic legend. Ten are mythological, for the most part stories about the gods and their adventures. The others are heroic lays about the great figures of Germanic folklore – Sigurður the Dragon-Slayer, Attila the Hun, Ermaneric the Goth.

One of the longest of the poems is a mythological lay known as Hávamál (‘Words of the High One’). It is a ninth-century compilation made from five or six earlier poems and consisting of gnomic advice and pragmatic sayings attributed to Óðin. Apart from the strange passage about Óðin hanging himself from a tree in search of the magic of the runes, it has nothing to do with mysticism or religion; it is a series of down-to-earth, sometimes cynical maxims for the ordinary Viking to live by – a sort of do-it-yourself?Viking handbook for survival:

Look carefully round doorways before you walk in; you never know when an enemy might be there.

There is no better load a man can carry than much common sense; no worse a load than too much drink.

Never part with your weapons when out in the fields; you never know when you will need your spear.

Be a friend to your friend, match gift with gift; meet smiles with smiles, and lies with dissimulation.

No need to give too much to a man, a little can buy much thanks; with half a loaf and a tilted jug I often won me a friend.

Confide in one, never in two; confide in three, and the whole world knows.

Praise no day until evening, no wife until buried, no sword until tested, no maid until bedded, no ice until crossed, no ale until drunk.

The halt can ride, the handless can herd, the deaf can fight with spirit; a blind man is better than a corpse on a pyre – a corpse is no good to anyone.

Wealth dies, kinsmen die, a man himself must likewise die; but word-fame never dies, for him who achieves it well.

One particular area has provided a priceless source of graphic material to supplement the literary sources, a whole portfolio of pictures on stone from the Baltic island of Gotland, off the east coast of Sweden (cf Ch. 4). Nearly four hundred of these carved and painted picture-stones have been found on Gotland, dating from the Migration Period in the fifth century to the eleventh. They have given posterity a marvellously vivid archive of the pre-Viking and Viking views of life and death in this world and the next.

One specimen, the Hunninge Stone from Klinte in Gotland, dating from the eighth century, tells the whole story of the Ages of?Viking Man. It is a sculpted saga in itself. It is a very large stone – about three metres high – and now forms part of the magnificent collection of picture-stones in Gotland’s Historical Museum (Fornsalen) in Visby, the capital town of Gotland.-At the bottom we see the Viking as farmer, carefully husbanding his land and livestock. In the middle section we see him on a Viking longship, skimming over the curling waves of the ‘whale’s-path’ to augment his income with a bit of private enterprise – the less acceptable face of-Viking capitalism to medieval eyes. And at the top we see him arriving in the afterworld which welcomed all true Vikings who died in battle: free transport on Óðin’s eight-legged magic steed, Sleipnir, to Valhöll, the Hall of the Slain; a welcome by a Valkyrie serving endless horns of ale; and an eternity of friendly battle in which the dead and the wounded are miraculously restored every evening.

The Valkyries were the ‘Choosers of the Slain’. In later myths they were represented somewhat romantically as the warrior handmaidens of Óðin, and they appear as such in Wagnerian opera. But originally they were demons of carnage and death who devoured corpses on the battlefield like wolves and ravens; in this they resembled the Greek Furies with their manic thirst for retribution and blood-revenge. After the Viking defeat at the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland in 1014 (cf Ch. 6), an Icelandic poet portrayed them in their primitive form, exulting in blood and weaving the web of war; the poem, known as the Darraðarljóð, is preserved in Njáls Saga (cf Ch. 7):

Blood rains

From the cloudy web

On the broad loom of slaughter.

The web of man,

Grey as armour,

Is now being woven;

The Valkyries

Will cross it

With a crimson weft.

The warp is made

Of human entrails;

Human heads

Are used as weights;

The heddle-rods

Are blood-wet spears;

The shafts are iron-bound,

And arrows are the shuttles.

With swords we shall weave

This web of battle.

It is terrible now

To look around,

As a blood-red cloud

Darkens the sky.

The heavens are stained

With the blood of men,

As the Valkyries

Sing their song…

Njáls Saga, Ch. 157

Such was the background of belief and conduct in the Viking Age and the centuries which preceded it. Such was the life of the mind which informed and reflected the reality of everyday activity in the Viking Age. And that reality, it is now recognised, involved the same kind of preoccupations which affect the realities of the twenty-first century: technological development, commercial competition, economic expansion – in a word, survival.

For centuries before the start of the Viking Age, the northlands had been engaged in trade with the south, the east and the west. The earliest Scandinavian trading-post we know of was Helgö, a settlement on an island in Lake Mälar in the Oppland province of Sweden; it was founded in the fifth century, or perhaps even earlier. Excavation there has revealed terraces of houses and craftsmen’s workshops, and a variety of imported goods from western and eastern Europe and even farther afield, perhaps from as far away as India, in the shape of a bronze figure of a Buddha dating from the sixth or seventh century. Helgö was a predecessor of the larger trade centre of Birka, a few kilometres to the west on Lake Mälar, which sprang up right at the start of the Viking Age in the ninth century (cf Ch. 4).

In a paper delivered at a symposium on ‘The Vikings’ to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the University of Uppsala in Sweden in June 1977, Professor Peter Sawyer emphasised the growing scholarly awareness of the importance of trading activity in Dark Age Scandinavia.1 Furs from the far north and the countries east of the Baltic were highly prized in the royal courts and noble households of continental Europe, especially marten pelts, beaver and winter squirrel. Ivory from walrus tusks was also in great demand, for ornaments or as a costly substitute for wood in making caskets. Amber from the Baltic coasts was another luxury raw product, to be made into jewellery or amulets. Falcons from the far north were noted for their speed and rapacity when hunting. And there was always a ready market for that most perishable but inexhaustible of commodities – human slaves.

Germanic society was essentially reciprocal, and friendships were cemented by the constant exchange of costly gifts. Loyalty to one’s lord was reinforced by the distribution of largesse in the form of treasure, and poets sang the praises of open-handed ‘ring-givers’ and ‘bestowers of gold’. Precious objects and beautiful things were valued as status symbols in those days no less than they are today; conspicuous wealth and ostentatious generosity were considered virtues.

The growth of trade was clearly an important factor in the development of kingship. Trade was an obvious source of steady revenue for anyone who could control and exploit it; traders required protection which only kings could provide. Tolls and taxes on mercantile traffic through a king’s territory provided the wealth to finance armed forces which could supply that protection.

The growth of trade also required better forms of transport. In the early days much of the trade was conducted overland; and here the Swedish trading towns like Helgö and Birka, with access to the Baltic through Lake Mälar, had an immense natural advantage. During the winter, which was the optimum time for fur-trading, these island ports became, in effect,-inland towns, because the waterways for hundreds of kilometres in all directions were frozen solid, becoming easily negotiated highways for sledges. The Scandinavians were pioneers in the use of skis and skates. Bone skates fashioned from the metapodials of horses, cattle and deer have been found in vast numbers at many archaeological sites in Scandinavia, and also in the Viking city of York in England (cf Ch. 5); the Old Norse word for skate, ísleggr, means literally ‘ice leg-bone’. They were simply smoothed down on one side, and cut to fit a foot. The skate would be attached by thongs at heel and sometimes toe, and the skater would propel himself with spiked sticks, not lifting his feet from the ice. It sounds clumsy; but I tried them out on a frozen lake in Norway, and found it easy to work up to very respectable speeds after minimal practice.

However, the major form of transport would become the ship, which helped to make the Viking Age possible and has remained its most evocative symbol in the public perception. Oddly enough, the evolution of the Viking ship was a very slow and gradual business; the key factor was the development of a keel capable of supporting a mast. For many centuries, apparently, the Scandinavians were content to travel about their fjords and inshore waters in rowing-boats. The importance of the sail was that it enabled them to expand their horizons so dramatically.

But why did this expansion take so long, and why did it come to fruition at the particular time we call the Viking Age? After all, there was nothing new or revolutionary about the use of sails as such; the Vikings did not invent them. It seems to have come about as a function of the expansionism encouraged, in part at least, by new trade potential. The horizons needed extending, and so the Scandinavian shipwrights set about making it possible.

In ancient times, the Scandinavians seem to have used primitive dug-outs or hollowed logs. But it is more than likely that they also used skin boats – boats with wooden frames over which ox-hides would be stretched and fastened. This possibility was brilliantly demonstrated in the early 1970s by Professor Sverre Marstrander, Director of the University Museum of National Antiquities in Oslo. He had made a close study of the elaborate rock carvings of boats, dating from the Bronze Age 3,000 years ago, which are found all over southern Norway. Earlier scholars had suggested that they represented rafts, or dug-outs with outriggers, or even planked boats; but Professor Marstrander became convinced that these carvings, although doubtless ritualistic in intent, were realistic depictions of skin boats. He set out to prove his theory in the only practical way possible – by building one. Sponsored by the BBC TV archaeological programme Chronicle and with the enthusiastic encouragement of its founder and executive producer, Paul Johnstone, Professor Marstrander commissioned boat-builder Odd Johnsen of Frederikstad to create to his specifications a Bronze Age skin boat based on the rock carvings he had come to know so intimately. The result was a memorable television programme about experimental archaeology – and a Bronze Age boat which worked.

Professor Marstrander argued that the skin boats of the Bronze Age with their sturdy ribs would have developed naturally into the earliest plank-built vessels of the Iron Age which we know from archaeology. The oldest Nordic boat yet found, the Als Boat (also known as the Hjörtspring Boat), which was found in a bog in south-west Denmark in 1921, dates to around 350 BC. It is a war canoe about nineteen metres long and two metres wide, propelled by twenty-four paddles. Its bottom is the hollowed-out trunk of a lime tree.-The sides are each formed of two overlapping planks fastened together with stiching.

Next in the archaeological record comes the Björke Boat, found on an island west of Stockholm, which has been dated to around AD 100. It was basically a dug-out canoe to which a plank had been riveted, clinker-style, to give additional freeboard.

The next major development is seen in the Nydam oak boat, now on display in the Schleswig-Holstein Museum of Early and Pre-History at Schloss Gottorp. It was found in a bog in southern Jutland in 1863 and is dated to around AD 400 – the period of the great Continental migrations (AD 300-600). It is surely no coincidence that shipbuilding innovations should be found from a time when there was an urgent demand for transport. The Nydam Boat was a very large one, twenty-five metres long, clinker-built of broad oaken planks, with rowlocks for thirty oars on each side. It is the earliest boat yet found which was specifically designed to be rowed, not paddled. It did not have a proper keel, merely an extra-heavy plank at the bottom to take the strain of beaching. It had the high stem and stern which would become such a familiar feature of Viking Age boats, and a large steering-paddle on the starboard (‘steer-board’) side. It was in warships of this kind that the first Angles and Saxons reached England in the fifth century; and although there is still much learned argument about the exact way the Nydam Boat looked and performed, it can surely be seen as a direct forerunner of the Viking longship. It is also a clear precursor of the magnificent Anglo-Saxon galley excavated from a burial mound at Sutton Hoo in England in 1939, dated to around AD 600.

Chronologically, the last ‘pre-Viking’ boat in the sequence is the Kvalsund Boat from western Norway, which is dated to around AD 700. Despite its fragmentary condition when found, it had the familiar full-bodied hull we associate with Viking boats; but more importantly, it had a rudimentary keel. It seems to have been designed as a rowing-boat, and there is no evidence that it ever carried a mast, but we can view the Kvalsund Boat with its sweeping prow as standing at the very threshold of the Viking Age – an intermediate boat in which we can recognise the immense sailing potential which would soon be realised to the full by the shipwrights of the Viking Age proper.

The Kvalsund Boat brings us hard up against the two most celebrated boat finds in Scandinavia – the Gokstad Ship and the Oseberg Ship (cf Ch. 2). The combination of sail and oars gave them a speed and manoeuvrability which took Europe totally by surprise; their shallowness of draught allowed them to penetrate rivers which gave them access to rich inland cities like London and Paris. They needed no harbours, for they were designed to be beached on any shelving sandy shore. They could land warriors and horses anywhere and everywhere, and in retreat they could reach islets in the shallow waters of estuaries which other boats could not navigate. They gave the Vikings a huge advantage over their opponents: for coastal attacks their boats were ocean-going landing-craft, while for attacks on inland cities their capacity to navigate shallow rivers gave them the element of surprise of airborne paratroops dropped behind the enemy defence lines.

Ships and the sea played an overwhelming part in the life and imagination of the Norsemen. They were a constant factor in their everyday activities. After death, the ship was supposed to carry the dead man to the afterworld, either as a funeral pyre as described by the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan among the Vikings in Russia in 922 (cf Ch. 4), or in boats which were buried and securely anchored in heaped burial mounds (cf Ch. 2), or in graves whose outlines were boldly marked by stone-settings in the form of ships (cf Ch. 3). In Norse mythology, the god Freyr counted among his greatest treasures a magic ship called Skíðblaðnir, which had been built by those consummate craftsmen of legend, the dwarves; according to Snorri Sturluson it always had a following wind, and it was so ingeniously constructed that it was large enough to carry the entire pantheon of the gods of Ásgarður, yet could be folded up and tucked into a pouch when not in use.

Viking poets waxed lyrical about their ships. In their esoteric skaldic court poetry, the ship constantly appears in elaborate figures of speech known as ‘kennings’: the ship was an ‘oar-steed’, a ‘horse of the breakers’, an ‘ocean-striding bison’, a ‘surf-dragon’, a ‘fjord-elk’, a ‘horse of the lobster’s heath’; a flotilla of ships was a ‘fleet of the otter’s world’.

To the Viking, his ship was not just his means of transport; it was his home, his way of life, his pilgrim’s way, something to love but also to fear. The storm and stress of the seafarer’s life, the love-hate relationship with his ship, are magnificently expressed in the elegiac Anglo-Saxon poem called The Seafarer:

I can sing

my own true story,

Tell of my travels,

how I have oft suffered

Times of hardship

in days of toil;

Bitter cares

have I often harboured,

And often learned

how troubled a home

Is a ship in a storm,

when I took my turn

At the arduous night-watch

at the vessel’s prow

As it beat past cliffs.

Oft were my feet

Fettered by frost

in frozen bonds,

Tortured by cold,

while searing anguish

Clutched at my heart,

and longing rent

My sea-weary mind…

…Yet now once more

My heart’s blood stirs me

to try again

The towering seas,

the salt-waves’ play;

My heart’s desires

always urge me

To go on the journey,

to visit the lands

Of foreign peoples

far over the sea…

The Seafarer: Exeter Book

The bulk of Viking shipping will have consisted of small ferry boats or larger cargo boats like the knörr (cf Ch. 7). But in the sagas, the spotlight is always on the longships, the thoroughbred racing warships. The longships were for heroes, for warriors. Naval warfare was simply an extension of hand-to-hand combat on land; the ships were roped close together in line abreast, and this floating line would then attack the enemy line head-on. The brunt of the battle was borne by the selected champions, who stood at the prows and absorbed the first fury of the impact; if the prow-man (stafnbúi) fell, another would step forward to take his place, while the men aft in the ships rained missiles and arrows on the opposing ranks. Victory would come when resistance on a ship had been so worn down that it was possible to board it and clear the decks of survivors. There were few niceties of tactics; it was a grim process of attrition, hammering away at one another until exhaustion or weight of numbers swung the balance. A Viking sea-battle was no place for the faint-hearted.

The ultimate in sea-heroism is enshrined in a late and semi-legendary Icelandic saga called Jómsvíkinga Saga. It concerns the activities of a warrior community of Baltic Vikings who lived in a fortress called Jómsborg; one of their alleged leaders, Thorkell hávi (the Tall), would play a prominent part in the Danish invasions of England in the early eleventh century led by King Sveinn tjúguskegg (Fork-Beard) (cf Ch. 9). The fortress of Jómsborg, if it ever existed at all, could perhaps be identified with the town of Wollin at the mouth of the Oder; archaeological excavations there in the 1930s revealed that Wollin in the late tenth century was a large and well-garrisoned trade centre with a mixed Norse and Slav population.

In the saga, the Jómsvíkings were in their heyday during this period, when King Haraldur blátönn (Blue-Tooth) Gormsson was on the throne of Denmark (cf Ch. 3). They were said to be a close-knit band of mercenaries greatly prized and feared for their fighting prowess; their fortress was a celibate community which no woman was ever allowed to enter, they were all between the ages of eighteen and fifty, and they were pledged by unbreakable oaths to keep the peace among themselves and to avenge one another’s deaths.

The climax and logical culmination of their raison d’être came around the year 980. One Yuletide they all got mortally drunk, and were goaded by the crafty Haraldur blátönn Gormsson of Denmark into making rash vows to crush his arch-enemy, Earl Håkon of Norway, or die in the attempt. Next morning, nursing vile hangovers, they trudged down to their ships and sailed away, sore-headed and frozen-bearded, to a famous battle, the Battle of Hjørungavåg (Hareid), where they were soundly trounced. Only seventy of them survived the slaughter; they were taken alive and roped together to await execution.

Jómsvíkinga Saga gives a marvellous description of how the executions began, as one man after another was freed from the rope and beheaded. The victorious Norwegians wanted to see if these Danish Jómsvíkings were as brave in the face of death as they were reputed to be, and the Jómsvíkings obliged with a show of nonchalant bravado. One asked his colleagues to watch carefully to see if any spark of life remained after his head flew off; he would try to lift the dagger in his hand if he could – but the axe fell, and so did the dagger. Another asked to be struck by the axe full in the face, so that all could see that he did not pale: ‘He did not pale, but his eyes closed as death overtook him.’

The eleventh man to be led to his execution was an eighteen-year-old boy with long silky golden hair. He asked that someone of warrior rank should hold his hair away from his head to prevent it becoming blood-stained. One of the earl’s henchmen stepped forward, took hold of the hair and twisted it round his hands. But as the axe fell, the young man jerked his head back sharply so that the blow fell on the man who was holding his hair, cutting off both his arms at the elbows. This brilliant ploy so delighted the Norwegians that the young Jómsvíking was offered his life; but he only accepted on condition that the rest of his companions were spared, too. And so they were.

Such preposterous heroics were meat and drink to the post-Viking Age readers of the Icelandic sagas. And they have continued to exert a strange fascination on people ever since. At Kendal in the north of England, museum-curator and archaeologist John Anstee spent many years trying to learn and emulate the subtle blacksmith’s art which produced the superb pattern-welded swords of the Vikings. In the United States, Mr Bob Asp of Hawley, Minnesota, spent eight years building a full-scale replica of the Gokstad Ship in an old potato warehouse. In Denmark, a cabinet-maker named Karl Heinz Gloy built, single-handed, a perfect replica of a Viking longhouse in his back garden, complete with beautifully carved barge-boards to keep the wind from lifting the turf roof. In Iceland, a farmer named Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson has started a revival of interest in the ancient Viking religion, the Ásatrú (Belief in the Æsir), which has attracted several unfanatical adherents. And throughout England the four hundred members of the Norse Film and Pageant Society, the largest active medieval society in Britain, feel impelled to spend their weekends enacting full-dress displays of dramatic episodes in Viking history – especially the more spectacularly bloody battles.

The power of the smith, the poetry of the sword and the ship, the heroism in the face of the hereafter: all these are the living ingredients still of the Viking experience. ‘Men do not limp while their legs are the same length,’ said one young Icelander, sorely afflicted with a boil on his instep, as he walked straight and steadfastly into the presence of a ruler of Norway.

And yet this heroism was hammered from a credo which was essentially fatalistic and without hope. The afterworld held no promise of redemption, no easy bribe of eternal bliss. The world of the Norse gods was doomed from the start, and the gods themselves knew it; Óðin the All-Father knew from the beginning that their destiny was destruction, remorseless and fore-ordained, when their world would be overwhelmed by the forces of chaos:

Brothers will battle

to bloody end,

And sister’s kin

commit foul acts.

There’s woe in the world,

wantonness rampant;

An axe-age, a sword-age,

shields are sundered;

A storm-age, a wolf-age,

before the world crumbles.

No mercy or quarter

will man give to man.

The sun grows dark,

earth sinks in the sea,

The bright stars

fall from the skies;

Flames rage

and fires leap high,

Heaven itself

is seared by heat.

Völuspá –The Sibyl’s Prophecy

The Viking gods were doomed to die in a cataclysmic Last Battle, at Ragnarök (Doom of the Gods). It took the Christian poet who wrote Völuspá, the opening poem in the Poetic Edda, to add, as consolation, a glimpse of a better world to come:

She sees arise

a second time

Earth from the sea,

green with growth.

Falls cascade,

the eagle flies high,

The one from the mountains

which stoops for fish.

She sees a hall,

more fair than the sun,

Thatched with gold,

at Gimlé;

There shall the gods

in innocence dwell,

Live for ever

a life of bliss.

And there once again,

rare and wonderful,

Found on the grass

are the golden chessmen,

The gods once owned

in olden times.

Then shall the Mighty One

come to his kingdom,

The strong from above,

who rules over all…

But even so, the Sibyl in Völuspá can see further, towards another turn in the relentless cyclical ordeal of purification by fire and sword; the last stanza echoes the dark and brooding images of the future which would befall the Viking gods:

Now comes flying

the dragon of darkness,

A glittering serpent

from Niðafell;

It flies over fields,

and bears on its wings

A naked corpse.

Destiny was inexorable. The absolute finality of death was inevitable. Even the gods themselves had to face it. And in the end they would face it with the same stoicism, the same heroic fatalism, as the best of heroes. They had only one consolation:

Wealth dies,

kinsmen die,

A man himself

must likewise die;

But one thing I know

which never dies –

The verdict on each man dead.

Hávamál

The ‘word-fame’ has lasted a thousand years. The ‘verdict on each man dead’ is changing, however. It is this word-fame, this changing verdict, which we shall be exploring in this book.

TWO

BOLT FROM THE BLUE

Norway from the first raids west-over-sea to Haraldur hárfagri (Fine-Hair)

England in the year of grace 793: a green and pleasant land, relatively peaceful in an era of general turbulence, islanded and apparently secure from outside attack. It was not yet a united nation, but a number of separate and often warring kingdoms: Northumbria in the north, Mercia in the Midlands, East Anglia to the east, Kent to the south-east, Wessex to the south-west. Northumbria was dominant in the seventh century, Mercia in the eighth, Wessex would come into its own in the ninth.

While kings fought and kings fell, their deeds and misdeeds claiming most of the attention of chroniclers and annalists, the general populace apparently prospered. Farmlands yielded good produce, trade expanded. The Church, founded by St Augustine late in the sixth century, had gradually tamed the ‘barbarian’ instincts of the hordes of pagan Angles and Saxons from continental Europe who had overrun England after the Roman legions had been withdrawn from Britain in AD 410. Learning and literature blossomed, craftsmen flourished. Saintly men founded monasteries, where scholars like the Venerable Bede could write great works; it was at the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow in the first half of the eighth century that Bede wrote his monumental Ecclesiastical History of the English People. And it was in these monasteries that books were embellished with superb illumination, like the magnificent eighth-century Codex Aureus (now in the Royal Library in Stockholm). Golden books, golden chalices, silver plate, carved ivories, precious jewellery, decorated weapons, artistic metalwork of every kind; and the finest of all this great outpouring of creative Anglo-Saxon art was the book known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, produced during the 690s on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, just off the north-eastern shoulder of England.

It is one of the most splendid manuscript books in the world, 258 folio pages of beautiful half-uncial script and magnificent coloured illustrations: a matchless masterpiece from the early English Church in the so-called ‘Dark Ages’, when Northumbria was one of the foremost centres of culture and scholarship in all Europe.

And then, suddenly, came terror:

793. In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria which sorely affrighted the inhabitants: there were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying through the air. A great famine followed hard upon these signs; and a little later in that same year, on the 8th of June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Laud MS

The Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793, a smash-and-grab assault by a prowling band of Norwegian marauders, is cited in every textbook as the start of the Viking Age. It makes a hauntingly evocative scene. On the bare and windswept tidal islet of Lindisfarne, long revered as a cradle of Christianity, peaceful monks are going about their devotions as usual. Suddenly all hell breaks loose, we are told. Grim-prowed ships with square sails and snarling dragon-heads loom menacingly over the sea-horizon to the east; oaken keels scrape noisily up the shelving sandy beaches; fierce-bearded Vikings, ravening for Christian blood and plunder, leap ashore with manic abandon, and in a trice all is confusion and slaughter:

And they came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers; some they took away with them in fetters; many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults; and some they drowned in the sea.

Simeon of Durham

Lindisfarne was only a curtain-raiser. In the next few years there was a flurry of raids on other monasteries and abbeys: Wearmouth and Jarrow, Bede’s old monastery, in 794, Iona in 795, and again in 802 and 806, Rathlin Island off Ireland in 795. By 799 the first raiders were reported at various islands off the Aquitaine coast of France. The flood-gates had opened.

But Lindisfarne was exceptional. The attack on Lindisfarne was construed as an attack on civilisation itself, a shocking affront. An early church and monastery had been founded there in the 630s by a missionary monk, St Aidan, from that other ‘Holy Island’, Iona, where St Columba had established a mother church of Celtic monasticism off the west coast of Scotland. Fifty years later, in 687, Lindisfarne had become the burial place of the most celebrated of Northumbrian saints, St Cuthbert, whose relics are now enshrined in Durham Cathedral (cf Ch. 6).

To this day, the memory of 793 still seems to haunt the island. There are the sombre ruins of the medieval church and priory, all weathered red sandstone and Romanesque arches, and it is all too easy for the thousands of visitors who go there on pilgrimage every year to associate them with that historic Viking raid. In fact, though, they are the ruins of a Norman priory which was not built until three centuries later, and it owed its dereliction more to the ravages of time and the Tudor Dissolution than anything else.

Then there is the celebrated Lindisfarne Stone, which was dug up more than fifty years ago from under the ruins of the Norman priory. It has always been taken to commemorate the actual Viking raid of 793. On one side it depicts a menacing file of seven warriors brandishing swords and axes, wearing heavy jerkins and tight trousers; on the other side are carved the Cross, the sun and moon, God’s hands, and two worshippers. But is it really a commemorative picture-stone, a cartoon, in effect, of that Viking bolt from the blue?

Dr Brian Hope-Taylor, an archaeologist who has studied the area in considerable depth, thinks not. He points out that the stone is a grave-marker from a cemetery, not a commemorative stone, and that although it can be dated stylistically to the ninth century, the Viking battle scene is of a type best known from carved and engraved stones in pagan Scandinavia. So who carved it? And for whom? Was it done by a Christian Anglo-Saxon craftsman on Lindisfarne who had been quick to pick up the Viking artistic idiom? Is it realistic to suppose that the Vikings themselves were so pleased with their handiwork of 793 that they went back to commemorate it?

The Lindisfarne Stone, which is now in the British Museum (there is also a rather raw-looking replica in the small museum on the island), is an evocative little riddle which we are never really likely to solve. But whatever its provenance it has a symbolic significance, as part of the greater symbolic importance of Lindisfarne itself. There may well have been isolated raids on undefended churches elsewhere before 793, because churches and monasteries were the repositories of harvest wealth and craft skills – the local banks of the time, in effect. But because of its position as a major centre of Christian learning, it was Lindisfarne which sent the first shock-waves of real alarm spreading through Europe.

At the time of the raid the great Northumbrian scholar, Alcuin, was working in France as a teacher at the invitation of the Emperor Charlemagne. He was the scion of a noble Northumbrian family and had been educated at the monastic school in York. Not unnaturally he took the news hard. He reacted by writing no fewer than five letters to England about the raid – a positive barrage of correspondence for those days. They contain suitable expressions of horror and dismay, of course; but for the most part their tone is admonitory: Alcuin used the raid as occasion for a sermon, but a sermon against the English rather than the Vikings. The Viking attack, he claimed, was a direct visitation of divine wrath against the sins of the English: sins which included peccadillos like fornications, adulteries and incests; avarice, robbery and violent judgements; luxuriousness, long hair and flashy clothing…

But the most intriguing passage comes in his letter to the king of Northumbria, King Æthelred:

Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our forefathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race; nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made [or such a sea-disaster could happen].

Dorothy Whitelock: English Historical Documents

Evidently what was so shattering about Lindisfarne was the stark fact that it could have happened at all. Churches and monasteries all over Europe had been built in exposed coastal positions in the blithe belief that they were invulnerable from the sea. Yet here was deadly proof of the rise of a new sea-power which was quite capable of achieving such ‘in-roads from the sea’ or ‘sea-disasters’ all the way across the North Sea from Norway.

Obviously it was the Viking ship with its advanced technology which made this possible. And when we think of-Viking ships, we think inevitably of the Gokstad Ship, which was excavated from a burial mound in south-western Norway in 1880 and is now proudly displayed in the Viking Ship Hall at Bygdøy in Oslo.

It is little short of a miracle that the Gokstad Ship has survived. It was built around AD 850, and some time afterwards – perhaps ten, perhaps fifty years later – it was hauled ashore to provide the setting for a royal funeral. Near the town of Sandefjord on the western side of Oslo Fjord, some three kilometres from the sea, it was lowered into a deep trench cut into the blue clay underlying the ground surface. Just aft of amidships a wooden burial chamber was set into the ship, and a dead king was laid on the bed inside. He was a powerfully built man in his fifties who had suffered severely from arthritis or gout. Round the body the mourners laid out his weapons and accoutrements and personal possessions, and an odd menagerie of slaughtered animals – twelve horses, six dogs and a peacock. Then they heaped the blue clay over the grave to form a high, elongated barrow which from then on would be known locally as Kongshaugen, the King’s Mound.

As good luck would have it, the blue clay had remarkable preservative properties because it sealed the ship completely from any contact with the air; only where the tall stem and stern posts had protruded above the bed of clay was there any decaying of the timbers. Grave-robbers broke into the mound some time in antiquity to steal the valuables which had been buried with the king; apart from that, the Gokstad Ship lay undisturbed and unmouldering for a thousand years until it was excavated by Nicolay Nicolaysen, president of the Antiquarian Society in Oslo.

To my mind, quite simply, Gokstad is the most beautiful ship ever built – such is its grace of line, the lean power of its hull. Its vital statistics are: 23.33 metres long overall; 5.25 metres broad; 1.95 metres deep from the gunwale amidships to the bottom of the keel. It was built almost entirely of oak; the hull weighs more than seven tons, yet even when fully laden with another ten tons of equipment and freight it drew only about one metre of water. It carried a stout pine mast with a large sail made up of double-thickness strips of red and white woven cloth (vaðmál), which would have given either a striped or a chequered effect depending on how the sail was made up. The ship was steered by a rudder-paddle ingeniously mounted aft on the starboard quarter.

Gokstad was essentially a sailing ship, but it could also be rowed: there were oar-holes for sixteen pairs of long, narrow-bladed spruce oars, cut to differing lengths so that they would all strike the water simultaneously in short choppy strokes. There were no fixed rowing benches; the oarsmen must have used their sea-chests to sit on when rowing was called for, either for manoeuvring in close waters or when the wind failed. It suggests a crew of about thirty-two men; but surprisingly enough, Gokstad was found with not thirty-two but sixty-four shields slung inboard from a pierced lath just below the gunwales. Arne Emil Christensen, a curator at the University Museum of National Antiquities in Oslo and a leading authority on Viking ships, interpreted this as meaning that the Gokstad Ship carried a double crew, one resting while the other rowed. To have two men to an oar would have been very useful when it came to hand-to-hand fighting, but it must have made conditions on board during long voyages incredibly cramped and uncomfortable. Imagine seventy burly men curled up in sleeping-bags on the deck!

The remains of three smaller boats were found in the Gokstad mound, beautifully made and measuring 9.75, 8 and 6.6 metres respectively. An exact replica of the smallest boat, a four-oared sailing dinghy (færing), was built and sea-tested by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich; it is now on display at the Jórvík Viking Centre in York (cf Ch. 5).

Constructing likenesses of Gokstad has become something of an industry. Everyone with any interest in the history of ships, both lay and learned alike, is fascinated to know just how good Gokstad would have been in the water: would its performance have matched the perfection of its lines?

The first and most celebrated replica, or near-replica, was built in 1893 to show the flag for Norway at the Chicago World Fair of that year. This project was sparked off by the news that Spain was planning to send replicas of the three caravels on which Christopher Columbus had discovered South America four centuries earlier. The challenge was taken up by Magnus Andersen, the editor of a Norwegian shipping journal, as a means not only of proving that the Vikings had discovered America (Vínland – cf Ch. 8) long before Columbus, but also of demonstrating the continuing virility of Norwegian shipping in a highly competitive field. The idea met with predictable hostility from the archaeological establishment of his day, especially from the Gokstad excavator, Nicolay Nicolaysen, but Andersen went ahead with it none the less, buoyed up by a wave of nationalist feeling both at home and among Norwegian émigrés in the United States.

Alan L. Binns, senior lecturer in the department of English at Hull University, noted that Andersen was no academic purist when it came to building his replica, the Viking, and made several modifications to the original specifications; but the Viking is still the most accurate Gokstad replica yet built. The keel was deeper, to give greater stability; the draught was 1.5 metres; there was a big fender made of reindeer hair along the outside of the top strakes of the gunwales to give the ship extra buoyancy if it should be swamped; and it carried extra sails. In addition to the single rectangular sail of the Viking ships, Andersen rigged up a pair of small triangular topsails from the ends of the yard-arm up to the mast-head, and also rigged a pair of stunsails or studding-sails on extra yards on either side of the main sail. Even so, as Arne Emil Christensen pointed out, with all extra sails set, the sail area of the Viking was still less than some of the suggested rigging reconstructions of Gokstad.

The Viking left Bergen at noon on Sunday, 30 April 1893, with a crew of twelve, two chronometers, spare fittings galore, and a thousand bottles of beer. Fully laden, the total weight of the ship was more than thirty tons – much higher than seems feasible for the historical Gokstad. The voyage was frequently stormy, but the rudder proved equal to all occasions, and the hull turned out to be amazingly supple:

The bottom together with the keel gave with every movement of the ship, and in a strong head-sea the keel could move up and down as much as three-quarters of an inch. But strangely enough the ship stayed completely watertight.

The ship’s remarkable elasticity was also apparent in other ways; in heavy seas, for instance, the gunwales would twist out of true by as much as six inches.

Magnus Andersen: Vikingfærden, 1895

The serpentine flexibility of the hull proved a distinct advantage in sailing, and the Viking regularly logged speeds of ten knots or more. They saw Bacalao light on Newfoundland at 4 a.m. on 27 May; they were then twenty-eight days out from Bergen – a tremendous achievement, to have crossed from Norway to North America in four weeks in an open sailing boat. The Viking caused a stir wherever it docked, and was the hit of the Chicago World Fair; it had achieved its primary purpose of putting old Norse and modern Norwegian shipbuilding on the map. The Viking