The Amber Road (46 page)

THE NORTH

One of the pleasures of researching the
Warrior of Rome
novels is learning about new areas of the classical world. The superb articles, maps, plans and illustrations in
The Spoils of Victory: The North in the Shadow of the Roman Empire
(Copenhagen, 2003), a catalogue of two exhibitions held at the National Museum in Copenhagen in 2003–4, edited by L. Jørgensen, B. Storgaard and L. G. Thomsen, opened my eyes to ancient Scandinavia.

Other extremely useful articles are to be found in O. Crumlin-Pedersen (ed.),
Aspects of Maritime Scandinavia
AD
200–1200
(Roskilde, 1991); A. N. Jørgensen and B. L. Clausen (eds.),
Military Aspects of Scandinavian Society in a European Perspective,
AD
1–1300
(Copenhagen, 1997); B. Storgaard (ed.),
Aspects of the Aristocracy in Barbaricum in the Roman and Early Migration Periods
(Copenhagen, 2001); and T. Grane (ed.),
Beyond the Roman Frontier: Roman Influences on the Northern Barbaricum
(Rome, 2007).

Map of the North

We have no literary source which describes the north in the third century
AD
. To people this world I have drawn on earlier classical works, especially the
Germania
of Tacitus and the
Geography
of Ptolemy, and later Anglo-Saxon poetry, mainly
Beowulf
and
Widsith
, as well as various much later Norse sagas. It should be stressed that the map makes no claims to historicity. The tribes on it may not have been contemporary with each other, may not all have been in those areas at that time, or ever, and in some cases may not have existed at all. The map just sets out to create a plausible world.

Himlingøje (Hlymdale in the novel)

The archaeology is well published in U. Lund Hansen et al. (eds.),
Himlingøje
–
Seeland – Europa
(Copenhagen, 1995). This very important site is a large burial ground. I have given it a port, and a settlement further inland by a forest. For what it is worth, although they have not been identified, the former must have existed, and most likely the latter did, too. Pollen analysis shows there were woodlands at a distance. The two graves described in Chapters 24 and 25 are composites, rather than based on specific examples. The construction technique is borrowed from Mound 2 at Sutton Hoo: M. Carver,
Sutton Hoo: Burial Ground of Kings?
(London, 1998). Somehow, although a northern setting seems to demand them, I managed to stop myself including both an anachronistic ship burial, and the Viking sex and death stuff from Ibn Fadlan.

The name Hlymdale is borrowed from
The Saga of the Volsungs.

The ‘treasure-fires’ kept alight on top of the funeral mounds are invented from the idea in the Norse sagas that the location of buried hoards was revealed by supernatural fires, e.g.
Grettir’s Saga
, ch. 18.

Gudme and Lundeborg (Gudmestrand in the novel)

A brief and thought-provoking introduction to these linked sites is provided by L. Hedeager,
Iron Age Myth and Materiality: An Archaeology of Scandinavia
AD
400–1000
(Abingdon and New York, 2011), 150–63, 184–6. Neither site has been fully published, but substantial articles can be found in P. O. Nielsen, K. Randsborg and H. Thrane (eds.),
The Archaeology of Gudme and Lundeborg
(Copenhagen 1994).

The name Gudme may well be ancient. Lundeborg is not, so in this novel it is given the fictional name Gudmestrand.

Gudsø Vig (Norvasund in the novel)

Illustrations and discussion of the sea barrage at Gudsø Vig are provided by A. N. Jørgensen, ‘Fortifications and the Control of Land and Sea Traffic in the Pre-Roman and Roman Iron Age’, in Jørgensen et al.,
The Spoils of Victory
(2003), 194–209. The village demolished to create palisades is borrowed from Priorsløkke; ibid., 206–8. The name Norvasund usually referred to the Straits of Gibraltar, but here is taken from an unidentified place in
The Saga of the Volsungs
, 9.

THE HIMLING DYNASTY

From the start, back in 2006 when I began planning the
Warrior of Rome
series, the hero had to be an outsider. In a classicist’s terms, he had to be Polybius rather than Tacitus of the
Annals
. An outsider may lack the depth of understanding, but he always comments more openly and naturally on what an insider may take for granted. Ballista became Germanic because we know more about that culture than that of any other people beyond the frontiers, thanks to the
Germania
of Tacitus (obviously, here the Roman senator was writing as an outsider). Having gone that far, I made Ballista an Angle because his descendants, if they survive, will one day become English. At that stage, I imagined his father as a petty northern chieftain. Archaeology was to prove me wrong.

From the mid-second century
AD
the archaeology of southern Scandinavia shows a great increase in riches and Roman imports. These are found both in deposits of war booty and in aristocratic burials, the latter particularly at the site of Himlingøje on the Danish island of Sealand. Danish archaeologists have argued convincingly that from the Marcomannic wars (
AD
162–80) onwards, the Roman empire backed the rise of a Baltic hegemony ruled by the native dynasty which interred its dead at Himlingøje. Both sides benefited. The new client kingdom received rich diplomatic gifts, possibly weapons, and could send some of its potentially troublesome young men overseas. Rome got the service of additional northern warriors, and a friendly power to the rear of the ones on the frontier, who were often hostile. For an accessible introduction to the ‘Himlingøje empire’, see B. Storgaard, ‘Cosmopolitan Aristocrats’, in Jørgensen et al.,
The Spoils of Victory
(2003), 106–25.

As a newcomer to this field of study, it struck me that the modern literature conspicuously avoids addressing two issues. First is the relationship of the burial site of Himlingøje on Sealand with the rise of the settlement of Gudme on Funen. Second, and far more understandable, scholars are reluctant to link any of the peoples named in literary sources to the dynasty of Himlin
Ø
je (see above, ‘Map of the North’). A novelist need not be so constrained. In
The Amber Road
I create a fictional narrative that joins Himlingøje and Gudme. The Angles were recorded in Denmark both before and after the third century. So were lots of other peoples, but none had the same resonance for me. The name of the fictional dynasty was created by abbreviating the modern place name for the burial site.

Ballista’s father, Isangrim, stands revealed as a ruler of the highest consequence.

NORTHERN BATTLE STANDARDS

The tribes of the north used standards in battle. When discovered at Vimose in 1849 the gilded bronze head of a gryphon originally from a Roman parade helmet had been mounted on a pole with a red and blue flag (X. Pauli Jensen, ‘The Vimose Find’, in Jørgensen et al.,
The Spoils of the North
(2003), 237). I gave this standard to the Heathobards. For the others, I used images from contemporary art (the page references are to illustrations in Jørgensen, ibid.): the bull with silver horns of the Brondings of Abalos (p. 13), the golden dormouse of Varinsey (p. 244), the gold and black rampant lion of the Wylfings of Hindafell (p. 268), the double-headed beast of the Geats of Solfell (p. 273), the silver (changed from gold) on black wolf of Unferth (p. 286), the three-headed man of the Wrosns, the deer and fawn of Varinsey, and the killer and slain man of the Dauciones (p. 293). The white horse of the Himlings of Hedinsey and Ballista’s own white
draco
have been described already in previous novels.

SHIPS

The majority of scholars consider that northern ships lacked masts and sails in the third century
AD
(e.g. O. Crumlin-Pedersen, ‘Large and Small Warships of the North’, in A. N. Jørgensen and B. L. Clausen (eds.),
Military Aspects of Scandinavian Society in a European Perspective,
AD
1–1300
(Copenhagen, 1997), 184–94). For a robust attack on this view, see J. Haywood,
Dark Age Naval Power: A Reassessment of Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Seafaring Activity
(revised edn, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, 1999).

AMBER

The most important discussion of amber in classical literature is in Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
XXXVII.xi.30–xiii.53. It contains the fascinating story of a Roman equestrian who was sent to the Baltic to procure amber to adorn a display of gladiators in the reign of Nero. This anecdote was the original inspiration for
The Amber Road.

ZENO

Aulus Voconius Zeno is known via one inscription (
AE
1915, 51). He was appointed
a Studiis
while governor of Cilicia under Gallienus (
PLRE
Zeno 9). L. de Blois,
The Policy of the Emperor Gallienus
(Leiden, 1976), 49, n.21, reverses these posts. The Zeno of
The Amber Road
owes a lot to various of the
Characters
of Theophrastus: Obsequiousness (no. 5); Petty Ambition (no. 21); and Cowardice (no. 25). He is given an origin in Arcadia in the novel and used to explore some of the ambiguities of being a Greek under Roman rule. A good introduction to this fascinating topic is Greg Woolf, ‘Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East’,
PCPhS
40 (1994), 116–43. A more comprehensive study is provided by Simon Swain,
Hellenism and Empire
(Oxford, 1996). In the novel, the irony that Zeno affects to despise Virgil while often thinking in images from the
Aeneid
is quite intentional.

QUOTES

The battle song of the Angles in Prologue One is adapted from the translation by J. L. Byock of the anonymous
Saga of King Hrolf Kraki
(London, 1998, p. 41).

When the
Iliad
of Homer is recited – by Gallienus in Chapter 2, Zeno in Chapter 14 – it is, as ever in these novels, in the translation of Richard Lattimore (Chicago and London, 1951).

The passage of the
Odyssey
wheeled out by Zeno in Chapter 14 is in the translation of Robert Faggles (London, 1997).

In Chapter 5, Simplicinius Genialis’s quotations from the
Letters
and the
Panegyric
of Pliny are in the translation by Betty Radice (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1969).

The
Historia Augusta
,
Gallieni Duo
11.7–9, claims that the epithalamium in Chapter 12 was composed by Gallienus. The translation here is by D. Magie (Cambridge, Mass., 1932). The lines that slip the emperor’s mind in this novel can be found in the
Latin Anthology
, i.2, p. 176, no. 711.

The defence speech of the father with the Cynic son in Chapter 16 is from
The Lesser Declamations
attributed to Quintillian abridged and slightly altered from the translation of D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2006) – which would be particularly fitting if they were really written by Postumus Iunior, as in the unlikely claim of the
Historia Augusta
(
Tyranni Triginta
4).

The prophesies of the witch in Chapter 20 are taken from the
Völuspá
in
The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore
, translated by A. Orchard (London, 2011). The scene also takes sentences verbatim from
Eirik’s Saga
, translated by M. Magnusson and H. Palsson in
The Vinland Sagas
(Harmondsworth, 1965), and the curse at the end draws on
Grettir’s Saga
in the translation by J. Byock (Oxford, 2009).

All lines from
The Aeneid
of Virgil are translated by F. Ahl (Oxford, 2007): Oslac in Chapter 20; Zeno in Chapter 32 and Epilogue Two.

In Chapter 21, the line of
Beowulf
which comes to Ballista is in the translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland in
The Anglo-Saxon World
(Woodbridge, 1982), with
wyrd
reinstated for the modern English ‘fate’.

Kadlin’s thoughts of
Wulf and Eadwacer
in Chapters 22 and 32, and
The Wife’s Complaint
in Chapter 32 are from M. Alexander,
The Earliest English Poetry
(London, 1991).

The invocation on the Scorn-Pole in Chapter 24 is altered from
Egil’s Saga
, translated by B. Scudder (London, 1997).

Rikiar the Vandal’s poems in Chapters 26, 27 and 29 are taken, and in places adapted, from
Egil’s Saga
, as translated by B. Scudder (London, 1997).

OTHER NOVELS

In all my novels I include homages to a couple of writers who have given me pleasure and inspiration.

As
The Amber Road
involves much travelling up a river in small boats, I reread
Black Robe
by Brian Moore (1985). As I remembered, its authenticity and action, combined with its character development and profundity of theme, brings the historical novel close to perfection. Probably it says something that all I took from it were some images of paddling.

Consciously, I borrowed just the subtitle from
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
(1985), but the influences of Cormac McCarthy’s magnificent prose and unflinching vision are both challenging and inescapable.

Something at a very different level occurred to me as I was typing up the contents page. Hyperboria was the world of Conan the Barbarian. When I was twelve or thirteen, I loved the pulp fiction of Robert E. Howard. Not having reread any, I cannot tell if it has left its mark.