A Brief History of the Vikings (18 page)

It was Maldon where the Anglo-Saxons would mount one of their most famous stands against the Vikings. Regardless of the unpheavals at the centre of the country, there were still local leaders who were able to put on a resistance. In Essex, the land of the East Saxons, the locals had managed to resist most attempts by Danes to settle, largely by organizing themselves on similar lines. The Vikings were not the only war-bands in the area – waiting for Crowbone at Maldon was the white-haired
Saxon earl Byrhtnoth. The Vikings followed their time-honoured strategies, picking an offshore island for protection. The Maldon area, however, is notorious for its mud flats and shallows; when the Saxons arrived, they climbed down off their horses and simply waited on the shoreline, while the Vikings on Northey island glumly stared down at the receding tide. A thin causeway joined Northey to the mainland, and neither side felt like wading through the mud on either side of it. Someone would have to attack along the causeway, and whoever did would be at a great disadvantage.

If we are to believe the surviving fragment of the English poem
The Battle of Maldon
, there was considerable confidence to be found on both sides. The Vikings on the island called out to Byrhtnoth, asking him if he was the richest man in the neighbourhood, thereby hoping to work out whether he was in a position to offer them money. Pointedly, the Vikings in the poem refer to the bribe they demand as ‘tribute’. But Byrhtnoth was not one of the Saxons who believed the Vikings could be bought off. His use of terms and phrasing in the poem implies that he stood with a force of several hundred men, easily the equal of the Viking numbers, and with the upper hand for as long as he stood on solid ground.

The standoff continued until the proud Byrhtnoth allowed the Vikings to come ashore. He had little choice – if he had forced them to remain on Northey, they would eventually have simply sailed away to raid elsewhere. By permitting them to come ashore along the narrow causeway and draw up in battle formation, Byrhtnoth hoped to settle things once and for all. Unfortunately, after granting them equal footing, he met his own death, as did many of his men, in a hard-fought battle on the shoreline. The progress of the battle was regarded with some bitterness by its poet, who took care to list the names of those who fought bravely, even after Byrhtnoth was cut down,
as well as those who fled from the Vikings, particularly one Godric, who galloped off on the dead Byrhtnoth’s horse, thereby giving some of the other men the impression that Byrhtnoth himself was running away. Although later sources would claim that the battle of Maldon was a pyrrhic victory for the English, Byrhtnoth’s last stand was not damaging enough to prevent Crowbone conducting further raids that season, and the Vikings were also able to demand crippling tributes from the people of Essex that year.

In 994, Crowbone returned with 94 ships, some of which were led by his brother-in-law Svein Forkbeard. Forkbeard had greater plans than a mere series of assaults – in a banquet with his allies, he swore that within three years he would invade England and seize the country for himself, driving out King Aethelred or killing him. The hordes of Swedes and Danes who had once sailed east in search of fortunes, now turned west again. Forkbeard was one of them, realizing that with the coffers of the Muslims empty, the next best source of ready coin at the edge of the Viking world would be among the wealthy English.

Forkbeard may have had another reason. Svein Forkbeard was the son of Harald Bluetooth, but Forkbeard’s modern sources are not even sure which of Bluetooth’s wives or concubines was Forkbeard’s mother. The Icelandic
Tale of Thorvald the Far-Travelled
baldly states that Svein only
‘claimed
to be the son of Harald Gormsson [Bluetooth] . . .’ and that ‘Svein was not settled in Denmark at that time because [Bluetooth] would not admit his paternity.’
¹¹
Is this a later slander by enemies of Svein? If true, it would certainly help explain his strange relationship with the ‘father’ he supposedly overthrew, and his long-term association with outcast war-bands like the Jomsvikings. It also casts new light on Forkbeard’s willingness to simply take England by force,
without any acknowledged right of kingship. If Denmark had not been his by birthright, why not steal England as well?

So it is that we have Forkbeard and Crowbone, raiding the coasts of England either to bolster Forkbeard’s Danish regime, or to raise enough funds to win it back from a forgotten usurper, or possibly simply because they felt like it. For outlaws intent on plunder, there had not been a better time to attack the English. No Alfred the Great appeared to unite the shires; instead, the hapless country was saddled with Aethelred Unraed and his coterie of self-interested nobles. As ‘England’, that confederacy of Angles, Saxons and Britons threatened to tear apart, Aethelred and his advisors were prepared to consider anything, appearing to blow hot and cold towards the raiders quite unpredictably.

Aethelred might have ordered the deaths of entire communities of Danes, but he also seemed keen to establish alliances with other Vikings. The
Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue
goes out of its way to describe him as a ‘good ruler’, always ready to help his Viking associates – he even bestows Gunnlaug with the trusty sword, Kingsgift, after Gunnlaug sings a song comparing him to God Almighty.
¹²
Christian Vikings, it appears, were friends that Aethelred was prepared to tolerate. He would even marry one, in a manner of speaking, when he wed Emma, the daughter of the Norman ruler Richard the Fearless in 1002. The marriage, it was hoped, would bring England and Normandy closer together, perhaps even into a union that might block the Channel and bottle up the Vikings in the North Sea. But there were other implications. Queen Emma was of Viking ancestry – her great-grandfather was the raider Hrolf the Walker, and she probably spoke reasonable Danish.
¹³
Emma was not the only new arrival with possible pro-Danish leanings. Other nobles in and outside the Danelaw took the hint, and tried to deal with the Vikings on their own
terms. The presence of the Danes in the midst of the English would eventually prove to be the most insidious assault of all – over the generations, the fearsome raiders from the sea gained a human face. The end result of Aethelred’s haphazard attempts at inclusion was to make Danish alliances, and ultimately Danish kings, seem acceptable to the English.

Another of Aethelred’s new allies was Crowbone himself. At some point in his adventures, Olaf ‘Crowbone’ Tryggvason became a Christian.
Heimskringla
suggests that he had a sudden conversion after hearing the ravings of the old man in the Scilly Isles. Possibly he was coming to realize the political advantages of tolerating Christians. Supposedly, after his conversion, Crowbone stopped raiding the coasts of Britain. He was baptized at Andover, in modern Hampshire, with King Aethelred himself serving as his godfather, a symbolic adoption, alliance and treaty that bore great similarities to the conversion of Guthrum by King Alfred. But unlike Guthrum, Crowbone did not appear to have any obvious designs on the British Isles. He seemed ready, like Hakon the Great before him, to acknowledge a friendship with the Anglo-Saxons that would allow him to return to Norway with his rear sufficiently guarded. As for Aethelred, although history famously records that he was badly advised, perhaps he was copying the actions of some of his forerunners on the French mainland. Had not the Franks successfully halted the Viking advance by setting other Vikings like Hrolf the Walker upon them? If Aethelred was prepared to do a deal with Crowbone for this reason, it could only mean that there was a Viking somewhere else in the world he feared more. In a textbook case of preferring the Christian devil he knew to the pagan devil he didn’t, Aethelred formed an alliance with Crowbone, thereby hoping to keep Forkbeard away.

His friendship with the English established, Crowbone had
begun a slow procession back to his native Norway. Now supposedly a Christian, he did his bit for godliness on the way, stopping off in the Orkneys and Hebrides en route, and threatening to put the locals to the sword and burn their houses to the ground unless they were prepared to submit to the love of Christ. Although hardly a Church-approved method of evangelizing, it did bring fast results, and Olaf sailed for Norway with newly Christianized territories at his back, hoping for similar results in Norway.

When matters of Christian evangelizing among Vikings are discussed, it is important to remember that for the early Church, the end often justified the means. Mass conversion under threat of execution hardly represented the acceptance of Christianity into a people’s hearts, but it did pave the way for further missionaries. Christian priests and bishops accompanied Crowbone in his later travels, and if any of them had any reservations about his bluntly barbaric methods, their complaints are not recorded. But the Church has always been able to think in the long term. While the reluctant promises of threatened farmers were unlikely to change their characters all that much, their children would grow up in towns with churches at their centre. Christianity had a toehold, and Europe would be fully Christianized within a few generations, thanks in part to the atrocities of men such as Crowbone.

Forkbeard, meanwhile, was making other plans. He married the widow of Erik the Victorious, a woman unnamed in the contemporary chronicles, but who may have been the Sigrid the Haughty of saga legend, who had seen off several earlier suitors, including the hapless Norwegian king Harald Grenske, by burning them alive.
¹⁴
She had also, according to legend, even rejected the advances of Crowbone himself, or rather, been rejected by him when she refused to give up her pagan ways.

Norway was unstable once more, and Crowbone arrived in the hope of winning a kingdom for himself. Trondheim’s Earl Hakon had not helped matters by imposing his own variant of the
droit de seigneur
on a couple of prominent locals.
Heimskringla
recounts at least two occasions when the pagan lord decided to borrow another man’s wife, sending his warriors over to the lawful husband, and demanding that his spouse be handed over like a common whore for his use. The placing of the stories by Snorri Sturluson immediately invites suspicion – they crop up at exactly the moment that Crowbone returns with his Christian message, as if Crowbone himself was using them as reasons why the Trondheimers might find Christianity to be a more appealing religion than the ‘old ways’.

Whatever the truth regarding Earl Hakon’s behaviour, the farmers were in open revolt by the time Crowbone arrived – whether to avenge their stolen womenfolk, or to depose a leader who had lost Odin’s mandate depends on one’s sense of story. Crowbone was welcomed by a large sector of the population, and promised riches to whoever brought him Hakon’s head. According to
Heimskringla
, a disguised Earl Hakon heard this proclamation, and decided to hide in a pigsty, accompanied only by his faithful servant Kark, who, realizing which way the wind was blowing, knifed the old earl in the throat, hacking off his head and bringing it to Crowbone. For technical reasons, however, Kark’s reward for his betrayal was to be beheaded himself.

Crowbone became the ruler of Trondheim, causing Earl Hakon’s relatives to flee to Sweden. As a descendant of the famous Harald Fairhair, Crowbone also enjoyed a good claim to southern Norway, and with Grenske dead, it fell to him by default. Undoubtedly, there would be resistance from the Danes under Forkbeard, and Crowbone had a brief window of opportunity to establish himself before war broke out again.

Crowbone began his campaign of Christianizing Norway, marching from the Vik up to the west and north, accompanied by his army. In each new township, he presented the case – accept the love of the Christian God, or die resisting. While the sagas present Crowbone’s march as a largely religious venture, it also mopped up a lot of political resistance, firmly establishing the new order along with the new beliefs. There are reports of fights and skirmishes, but also of mass conversions and treaties sealed by marriages. Crowbone smartly targeted not just the wielders of temporal power, but also their allies in the pagan religion. A proclamation went ahead of him, demanding that all ‘sorcerers’ leave the country. It was, at least, a witch-hunt that permitted the victims a chance to escape. Those that chose to remain were burned at the stake or otherwise executed. Among Crowbone’s victims was a distant cousin, Eyvind Kelda, a descendant of Harald Fairhair, left to drown on a tidebound skerry.

Even though Crowbone’s achievements are lovingly recounted by later Christian authors, there are still some strange contradictions. His habit of observing the omens and other pagan beliefs seems to have stayed with him for his whole life. Even
Heimskringla
, the work of the pious Snorri, recounts a folktale that grew up around one particular visitor – an old one-eyed man who entered the hall at Ogvaldsness, where Crowbone was staying. Crowbone found him to be an entertaining conversationalist, and with no skald around to sing stories of times past, Crowbone talked to the old man through the night. The one-eyed stranger seemed to have an answer for anything; he was even able to provide a detailed account of how Ogvaldsness got its name.

It was only late in the night that Crowbone was ushered to bed by the Christian bishop who had been at his side through the long campaign, but even then, he woke in the night and
asked where the stranger was. The stranger could not be found, although the bemused kitchen staff reported that he had admonished them on leaving for the meagre fare they were preparing for the king’s table. He offered them two sides of beef and was never seen again. Crowbone ordered the meat destroyed, claiming that it was surely a gift from the pagan Lord of Hosts, Odin, and not to be accepted by good Christian folk.
¹⁵

The tale of Crowbone’s mystery visitor may have been a bad dream given shape and meaning by later scribes, but if it has any roots in the real world, it could also be an allegory of Crowbone’s own doubts. There is certainly something suspicious in the behaviour of the bishop, who all but orders Crowbone to bed – was this famous figure less a soldier of Christ than another puppet? The tale of the one-eyed man hints that Crowbone still had some hankering for his old religion.