Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (53 page)

It is not known how Somerled came to be the ruler of Argyll, but he must already have been a considerable figure when he married Olaf Godredsson’s daughter around 1140. The kings of Scots regarded Argyll, the heartland of the original Scots kingdom of Dál Riata, as part of their kingdom, but it is clear that from his first appearance in the historical record that he considered himself to be an independent ruler, a king in his own right. After his conquest of Man, nothing is known of Somerled’s activities until 1164, when he invaded Scotland, sailing down the Clyde with a Norse-Gaelic fleet of 160 ships from Argyll, the Hebrides, Man and Dublin. Somerled’s motive was probably defensive: King Malcolm IV had recently deposed Fergus of Galloway so Somerled was probably trying to pre-empt a similar move against him. At Renfrew, Somerled was engaged by a hastily gathered Scottish army and was killed in fierce fighting. As Somerled’s Gaelic and Norse warriors fled back to their ships, a priest cut off his head and gave it to the bishop of Glasgow. His body was later released to his kin and taken for burial on Iona. Somerled’s sea kingdom broke up after his death. In accordance with the Gaelic custom of partible inheritance, his lands were divided between his many sons, while Godred came back from exile and, with Norwegian support, recovered Man, Lewis and Harris. However, the rest of the Hebrides remained permanently under the rule of Somerled’s descendents, who, though they styled themselves kings, continued to acknowledge the kings of Norway as their ultimate overlords.

It was the growing power of the kings of Scotland that finally brought Norse influence in Man and the Hebrides to an end. Around 1200, the Scots seized the island of Bute and signaled their intention to become a power in the Isles by building a state-of-the-art castle at Rothesay. The Scots king Alexander II (r. 1214 – 49) entered into negotiations with Håkon IV (r. 1217 – 63) to buy the Hebrides from Norway. The negotiations came to nothing. Håkon had restored political stability to Norway after years of civil wars and had adopted his own expansionist policy, which aimed at uniting all the Norse Atlantic colonies under his rule: giving up part of his kingdom was not part of his plan. Frustrated, in 1249 Alexander decided to seize the Hebrides by force, but his campaign was abandoned after he fell ill and died on the island of Kerrara, off Oban. Alexander’s son Alexander III (r. 1249 – 86) made a second offer to purchase the islands in 1260 but when this was rebuffed he sent the earl of Ross to invade Skye. Another Scottish force seized the island of Arran. Lurid accounts of Scots atrocities and the political chaos in the isles convinced Håkon that he needed to intervene personally to restore royal authority in the area. Apparently, at the height of his power – Greenland and Iceland had just submitted to Norwegian rule – Håkon set sail for the Hebrides in July 1263 with what was claimed to be the most powerful fleet ever gathered in Norway. King Magnus Olafsson of Man and Dugald MacRory, whose lands had been ravaged by the Scots, both greeted Håkon warmly when he landed on the Isle of Skye. Other chiefs and petty kings, opposed equally to both Norwegian and Scottish domination, were less enthusiastic and only submitted after Håkon’s forces wasted their lands. By late summer Håkon had thoroughly cowed the Hebrides and he moved his fleet to Lamlash Bay on Arran in the Clyde estuary, where it was well-placed to strike into the heartland of the Scottish kingdom. Alexander III sent a party of Dominican friars to negotiate with Håkon, but this was just a delaying tactic. The Scots deliberately drew out the negotiations, making offers that they knew would be unacceptable, waiting for the onset of autumn to force Håkon’s withdrawal. Some bored members of the Norwegian army carved their names in runes on the wall of a local cave to entertain themselves while they waited. When Håkon became impatient of making any progress he sent sixty ships to sail up Loch Long to Arrochar. From there, their crews dragged the ships across a narrow isthmus into Loch Lomond, whose shores they plundered for weeks. The rest of Håkon’s fleet anchored off the Cumbrae Islands, close to the Ayrshire coast.

The Battle of Largs

At the end of September the weather turned bad. Ten ships returning from the raid on Loch Lomond were wrecked in a storm and on the night of 30 September/1 October a supply ship and a longship were driven ashore on the Scottish mainland at Largs, now a small seaside resort town. When day broke, the Scots tried to seize the beached ships but their crews fought them off until the main Norwegian fleet arrived and chased them away. The next morning King Håkon came on shore to supervise the recovery of the ships. While this was proceeding a large Scots force arrived and fierce fighting broke out as it tried to surround an isolated Norwegian scouting party on a hill overlooking the shore. The outnumbered Norwegians began to run back towards the ships in disarray, suffering many casualties, but they somehow managed to regroup and counter-attack. The Scots fell back under the unexpected assault, gifting the Norwegians enough time to reach their ships and escape. The Norwegians waited at anchor overnight and in the morning recovered their dead and sailed for home. The Battle of Largs had been in reality little more than a skirmish but, with the benefit of hindsight, it came to be seen as a decisive Norwegian defeat.

As he sailed north back through the Hebrides Håkon must have felt that his great expedition had been in vain. King Alexander’s delaying tactics had worked perfectly, he had reached no diplomatic agreement that would prevent the Scots interfering in the Isles and he had been forced to withdraw without even fighting a proper battle. He must have been painfully aware, too, that his authority over the chiefs and petty kings of the Isles would last no longer than it took him to sail home to Norway. Shortly after he arrived in Orkney in early November, Håkon was taken ill and, sending most of his fleet home, he took up residence for the winter in the bishop’s palace at Kirkwall. Håkon’s condition steadily deteriorated and he was soon bed-ridden. As the king lay dying, he gathered the shades of his Viking ancestors around him. He could not sleep, so to help the long winter nights pass more easily, Håkon asked his attendants to read him all the sagas of the kings of Norway beginning with the legendary Halfdan the Black, the father of Harald Fairhair. Shortly after he had finished listening to the saga of his grandfather King Sverre, Håkon lost the power of speech and three days later, in the early hours of the morning on 16 December, he died aged fifty-nine: he was the last Norwegian king to lead a hostile fleet into British waters.

Within a few months of Håkon’s death, Alexander led a fleet to the Isle of Man and forced King Magnus Olafsson to become his feudal vassal. When Magnus died in November 1265, leaving only an illegitimate son called Godred, the rule of Norse kings over Man came to an end. Alexander also sent fleets to plunder and burn their way through the Hebrides. Håkon’s successor, his son Magnus VI (r. 1263 – 80), concluded, rightly, that trying to maintain sovereignty over Man and the Isles would cost far more than they were worth. By the Treaty of Perth in 1266 Magnus gave up all claims to the Kingdom of Man and the Isles in return for a payment of 4,000 marks (approximately 20,000 pounds of silver), an annuity of 100 marks, and a Scottish recognition of Norwegian sovereignty over Orkney and Shetland. It is thought that Norse language in the kingdom died out soon after the Scottish takeover.

It proved to be just as hard for the kings of Scotland to control the Isles as it had been for the kings of Norway. The Scots easily crushed a Manx rebellion under Godred Magnusson in 1275, but in 1290 the Isle of Man was occupied by the English. Thereafter the island changed hands several times before passing permanently to the English crown in 1399. The Gaelic chieftains of the Hebrides defied pacification and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the area was effectively autonomous under the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, who ruled from Finlaggan Castle on Islay. The lords maintained their authority with fleets of galleys called
birlinns
, direct descendants of the Vikings’ longships from which they differed only in having a stern-post rudder in place of a side rudder. Even after the lordship collapsed in 1493, the Hebrides remained turbulent and they did not finally come under firm government control until after the crushing of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. The Scots king James VI (r. 1567 – 1625) even considered genocide as a way to bring the islands under effective royal control.

The cession of the Kingdom of Man and the Isles to Scotland left Orkney and Shetland as the last Norse possessions in the British Isles. Although the islands were ruled by Scottish earls after 1236, their Norse character remained unaltered. In 1380 Norway and its Atlantic possessions came under the Danish crown through a dynastic union. The Danes took little interest in the islands until 1468 when King Christian I arranged the marriage of his daughter Margaret to the Scottish king James III. The cash-strapped Danish king could not afford to pay his daughter’s dowry and so offered the Orkney Islands to King James as surety for a loan of 50,000 Rhenish guilders. The following year Christian added Shetland to the bargain for an additional 8,000 guilders. It was Christian’s firm intention to redeem the islands as his agreement with King James included guarantees to preserve Norwegian law and customs, but the money was never paid so the arrangement became permanent. In 1471 King James abolished the earldom and annexed the islands as crown lands. The following year the bishopric of Orkney passed from the control of Nidaros to St Andrews. Gradually the islands became more Scottish in character. In 1611, Norwegian law was abolished and Norn, the local Norse dialect, finally died out in the eighteenth century, supplanted by English.

Hard times in Iceland

Though they did not lose their Norse culture and identity, the Norse colonies in Iceland and Greenland also lost their independence to the growing power of kings. Both also suffered severe population declines, which in Greenland’s case proved fatal, as a result of plague, economic isolation and climate change. Around 1250, the climate in the North Atlantic began to deteriorate as the Medieval Warm Period came to an end. By 1350, average temperatures had fallen substantially below those of the present day, beginning a period of intensely cold winters and cool summers to North America and Europe, which has become known as the Little Ice Age. During this period, which lasted until around 1850, the River Thames froze so hard in winter that Londoners held fairs, and even lit bonfires, on it; Venetians skated on the Lagoon; and once the Bosphorus froze at Istanbul so that it was possible to walk across it from Europe to Asia. Harvests often failed in the cool summers, bringing hunger to millions. One of the reasons why the Black Death which ravaged Europe in 1347 – 51 caused such massive mortality (up to 50 per cent of the population died) was that it fell on a weakened population.

The Little Ice Age hit Iceland hard, but this was only part of its problems. As well as climatic deterioration, medieval Icelanders also had to cope with the consequences of major volcanic eruptions and serious environmental problems of their own making. The human impact on Iceland was massive and rapid. Most of Iceland’s woodlands had been felled for fuel and building materials by the end of the Landnám period (
c.
930) and over-grazing by sheep and cattle prevented any regeneration. Continued over-grazing began to expose the thin Icelandic soils to erosion by wind and rain. The impact was worst in the highlands, where large areas became cold deserts, but by 1300 soil erosion was also affecting the lowlands and it continued into modern times, causing a serious decline in the farming economy due to the poorer quality grazing. Only in the last few decades has this process been reversed with an ambitious woodland restoration programme. Volcanic eruptions also damaged agricultural productivity both by smothering grazing land with ash and by causing destructive flooding by melting the glaciers, which capped so many volcanoes. One of the worst incidents came in 1362 when an eruption burst through the vast Vatnajokul ice cap triggering massive floods that swept away two entire parishes and buried hundreds of square miles under knee-deep ash. The combined impact of these environmental disasters caused frequent famines that halved Iceland’s population by the fifteenth century.

By this time Iceland had lost its independence. The Althing provided Iceland with stable government while all the
goðar
were of roughly equal status, but it proved unable to cope with the emergence in the early thirteenth century of six pre-eminent chieftains, the
stórgoðar
(‘great chieftains’). These families competed for power, taking over the chieftaincies of lesser
goðar
in their attempts to create regional lordships, and imposing heavy burdens of taxation and military service on their followers. The country was riven by blood feuds and civil wars that eventually destroyed the Free State. To strengthen their positions many of the
stórgoðar
sought the support of Norway’s expansionist King Håkon IV and became royal vassals in return for promoting his ambitions to rule Iceland. Håkon steadily extended his influence over Iceland and in 1263 the Althing voted to accept Norwegian sovereignty. The rule of the
goðar
was abolished and, though the Althing continued to meet annually at Thingvellir until 1798, the members of the
Lögretta
were now royal appointees, whose decisions were subject to royal approval. Along with the loss of political independence, Iceland lost its economic autonomy. After the end of the Landnám period, Icelanders became increasingly dependent on foreigners to maintain their trade links. The lack of timber suitable for shipbuilding meant that once the original settlers’ ships had rotted they could not be replaced allowing Norwegian and, later German and English, merchants to take over Iceland’s trade and impose their own terms. Until it regained its independence in 1944, Iceland would remain one of Europe’s poorest countries.

In stark contrast to the political decay, the thirteenth century was also the age of Iceland’s greatest cultural achievement, its saga literature. Perhaps more than anything else, the sagas have helped give the Vikings, despite their many unsavoury habits, an undeniable aura of romance. Without the sagas, the Vikings would probably be just one more half-remembered bunch of barbarians like the Vandals and the Goths. In Icelandic,
saga
means ‘what is said’, so the tradition probably grew out of the oral storytelling that must have been a major source of entertainment on the long winter nights. Sagas cover many different subjects, including myths and legends, romances and saints’ lives. However, the two most important genres are the Íslendingasögur (‘sagas of Icelanders’) and royal biographies or
konungasögur
(‘kings’ sagas’). The anonymous Íslendingasögur are historical novels, in the form of family histories, based on the real people and events of Viking Age Iceland. The Íslendingasögur were a powerful response to Iceland’s troubled times, and they catered for an escapist desire to recreate a ‘golden age’ of a more heroic past while, at the same time, addressing present-day anxieties. It is no surprise that in such a strife-torn society, a common theme of these sagas is the working out of a blood feud and its tragic consequences across the generations. In
Njáls
saga
, which many critics regard as the finest of all the Íslendingasögur, ties of kinship, personal loyalty and friendship inexorably draw Njal, a good and peaceable man, into other people’s disputes, leading him ultimately to his own violent death when his enemies trap and burn him in his hall. Though the authors of the sagas are much concerned with the workings of fate, their characters are rarely helpless victims, they are in control of their own destinies, they have choices, and they usually meet their ends as a result of their own flawed characters and misjudgements. This gripping psychological realism gives the Íslendingasögur a strikingly modern feel, especially when compared with the chivalric romances then fashionable in Europe, with their stereotyped characters and frequent supernatural and fantastical elements.