The Pirate Queen (42 page)

According to Saxo, Alfhild wasn't the only woman, like the Irish pirate queen, to have “impudently passed the part of womanhood and been a great spoiler and chief commander and director of thieves and murderers at sea.” In fact, he recounts:

There were once women among the Danes who dressed themselves to look like men, and devoted almost every instant of their lives to the pursuit of war, that they might not suffer their valor to be unstrung or dulled by the infection of luxury. For they abhorred all dainty living, and used to harden their minds and bodies with toil and endurance. They put away all the softness and lightmindedness of women, and inured their womanish spirit to masculine ruthlessness. They sought, moreover, so zealously to be skilled in warfare, that they might have been thought to have unsexed themselves. Those especially, who had either force of character or tall and comely persons, used to enter on this kind of life. These women, therefore (just as if they had forgotten their natural estate, and preferred sternness to soft words), offered war rather than kisses, and would rather taste blood than busses, and went about the business of arms more than that of amours. They devoted those hands to the lance which they should rather have applied to the loom. They assailed men with their spears whom they could have melted with their looks, they thought of death and not of dalliance.

Steamer route up the Norwegian coast

One of the tough seafaring warriors in Saxo is Sela, a Norwegian queen who fought her brother Koll for dominion of the kingdom. Other Viking women Saxo mentions are Hetha, Wisna, and Webiorg:

On these captains, who had the bodies of women, nature bestowed the souls of men. Webiorg was also inspired with the same spirit, and was attended by Bo Bramason and Brat the Jute, thirsting for war. . . . Wisna, a woman, filled with sternness, and a skilled warrior, was guarded by a band of Sclavs. . . .

Rusla (or Rusila), according to Saxo, was another highborn Norwegian chieftain who fought with her brother, Thrond, for control of their country. She also resisted the Danish king Omund's attempted rule over the Norwegians and “declared war against all the subjects of the Dane.” When Omund tried to
suppress the rising, Rusla not only conquered them but also, “waxing haughty on her triumph,” decided to tackle the sovereignty of Denmark. In this she failed, leaving the battlefield with “only” thirty of her ships. Obviously vexed, she met Thrond on her retreat and stripped him of his army. King Omund continued to pursue her, however, and eventually sent a great fleet to drive her from her kingdom in Norway.

The king pursued her hotly, caught up with her fleet on the sea, and utterly destroyed it, the enemy suffered mightily, and he won a bloodless victory and splendid spoils. But Rusla escaped with a very few ships, and rowed ploughing the waves furiously; but, while she was avoiding the Danes, she met her brother and was killed.

The tale of Rusla and her many battles, as well as the even more compelling story of Alfhild was on my mind as I stood at the railing of the
Lofoten,
watching the turf-covered granite slopes behind Svolvær turn from dull olive to blazing emerald and back again, as the sun flashed in and out through clouds. For this was Viking country—
vik
means “bay” in Norwegian and is one of the possible origins of the name for the warriors who came out of the North to pillage, rape, and destroy, as well as to trade and colonize. Everyone knows that the Vikings terrorized the hapless Irish and Anglo-Saxons, but in fact there was also tremendous conflict among the different Nordic groups for dominance of the Baltic, North Sea, and Norwegian coastline. Most battles took place in the disputed passages of the Baltic and the fjords around southern Norway and Denmark, but there had been Vikings as far north as the Lofoten Islands. On the other side of Svolvær's peaks at Borg
was an archaeological site and reconstruction of a Viking chieftain's longhouse.

I tried to imagine a fleet of a hundred Viking longships with dragon prows, massing for battle here in the Lofotens, with a tall, keen-eyed woman in command. She would be wearing a woven tunic, dyed blue, and a fur cloak around her shoulders. Her hair would be pulled into a braid, her strong-jawed face streaked with salt and sweat. Around her neck a torque of gold; coiling up her muscular bare arms bronze bracelets in the shape of snakes, and armbands wide as shackles. Nothing can give a better sense of the robustness and splendor of Viking women than to see (behind glass in museum cases) their heavy, barbaric jewelry. Nothing, perhaps, except the size of their ships. For the ships that Rusla and Sela and Alfhild would have commanded were not the cargo-heavy
knarrs
that Aud the Deep-Minded or Freydís Eiríksdóttir had sailed when they crossed the Atlantic from the Faroes to Iceland or from Greenland to Vínland, but sleek and deadly longships. These were to the
knarr
as the Concorde is to the Conestoga wagon.

The longship was a flexible marvel of engineering, whose axe-hewn, thin oaken planks overlapped clinker-fashion and were riveted with iron. It could carry from sixty to as many as one hundred oarsmen. With a stylized dragon or serpent lunging high up the prow, round painted shields turned outward along the sides, and a massive square sail, often striped or dyed bright colors, this was the fleet's war machine whose dreadful shadow on the horizon caused Alcuin of York to write, after the Vikings had attacked the holy island of Lindisfarne in 793, “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.”

The struggles between Koll and Sela and between Thrond and Rusla were family affairs to begin with, and seem to show that women of that time felt they had as much right to power as their brothers. Then there were women like Alfhild, who took to pirating and war, not from a desire to claim or extend territory, but purely, it seems, for the adventure of it.

According to Saxo, Alfhild, the daughter of a lesser Danish king, Siward, was guarded jealously since birth in order that she could be awarded to a hero worthy of her—that is, someone who best suited a political alliance. In this case it was Alf, the son of Sigar, the ruler of most of mid-ninth-century Denmark. Alf stood up to the viper and snake that Alfhild's father had placed in his daughter's chambers to deter prospective suitors, but he was no match for Alfhild's indifference.

Instead of falling happily into the prince's arms, Alfhild showed a strange desire to dress as a male warrior and go off to enjoy for herself the pleasures and financial rewards of looting and battle. As Olaus Magnus writes: “Her determination to stay chaste was so steadfast that she began to reject all men and firmly resolved with herself never to have intercourse with any, but from then on to equal, or even to surpass, male courage in the practice of piracy.” She must not have been the only maiden to have chafed at the restrictions of a woman's lot and to have “preferred a life of valour to one of ease,” for she “enrolled in her fighting company many young women of the same inclination.”

Both Saxo and Olaus Magnus give her a ship and a crew by accident. “She happened to arrive at a place where a band of sea-robbers were lamenting the death of their leader, who had been lost in war,” writes Olaus Magnus. “Because of her beauty and spirit she was elected as pirate chief by these fellows and performed feats beyond a normal woman's courage.”

What exactly these feats were, or whether she confined herself to plundering innocent trading vessels in the Baltic or, with her oarsmen and women, raided the monasteries and towns of England like other Danish Vikings, we'll never know. Alfhild seems to have kept the attention, however, of the Danish king and his son Alf, who “undertook many voyages in her pursuit.” Like Lord Deputy Henry Sidney and Lord Justice Drury, whose dispatches from Ireland to Elizabeth's court plainly illustrate their mingled irritation with and admiration for Grace O'Malley, both Saxo and Olaus Magnus seem conflicted, praising the valor of Alfhild and her female crew as well as other pirate maidens, while retelling the stories in ways that emphasize their eventual defeat by death or subjugation.

Unlike Sela and Rusla, whose punishment was death, Alfhild had a different fate. She and her followers were pursued into a harbor, up the narrow fjord of Hangö in Finland, by the determined Alf. It's not clear whether either Alf or Alfhild knew their opponent's identity. Seeing unfamiliar vessels making for the harbor, however, Alfhild didn't wait to be attacked, but ordered her longships (for by now she had a fleet) out to meet the enemy head-on.

Olaus Magnus describes the battle thus:

They began the sea-fight and sustained it on either side with high regard for their fame and courage. Then came the lucky moment the young man had been waiting for when he leapt onto Alvild's bows and, surrounded by soldiers who were fresher and more numerous, forced his way right up to the stern, slaughtering all who withstood him. Borkar, his companion, struck off Alvild's helmet and, as soon as he saw the delicacy of her countenance, realized that they should be going to work with kisses, not with weapons; they should lay aside their hard spears and handle their foe with more persuasive attentions. Alf was overjoyed when, beyond all hope, he had presented to him the girl he had sought indefatigably over land and sea despite so many perilous obstacles. He seized her passionately and straight away had her adorned with the most elegant and feminine clothing. Following the praiseworthy custom of his forbears, he married her and afterwards had by her a daughter, Gurith.

Alfhild battles Prince Alf

From Olaus Magnus's point of view, this is a very successful conclusion. For those of us thirsting for tales of women's valor on the water, for stories of sea fights sustained with “high regard for fame and courage,” the ending is disappointing. What happened to Alfhild? What happened to Webiorg and her supporter, Brat the Jute? Were such women, who thought of “death instead of dalliance,” so easily trounced?