The Vikings (2 page)

Some linguists believe the word derives from the Latin
vícus
, meaning a ‘town’ or ‘camp’ or ‘dwelling-place’. Others suggest that the noun comes from an Old Norse verb
víkja
, meaning ‘to travel from place to place’. A simple and persuasive theory is that it originally denoted people from the Vik, the name for the bay area of south-eastern Norway around the Oslo fjord that also denoted the inland coastal region, and possibly included the coast of Bohuslän in present-day Sweden. There is support for the suggestion in the frequency with which the waters of the Vik appear in saga literature, suggesting it was the most heavily trafficked maritime area in the region at the time.
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To some extent the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish historians who constructed the Viking Age in Scandinavia did so for ideological reasons. Each nation was, for differing reasons, in need of a lost golden age of greatness. Denmark needed to reassure itself after being overpowered by Prussia in 1864 and forced to give up control of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. The peace settlement meant that she also lost the right to carry out further excavations at Nydam, a bog site that offered a wealth of well-preserved sacrificial materials from the third to the fifth centuries. It was in response to this sort of reverse that the nineteenth-century Danish historian Johannes Steenstrup urged the specifically Danish elements in the ‘European’ colonizations carried out by the Vikings in England and Normandy, asserting that Normandy’s founder Ganger Rolf (‘Rolf the Walker’) was a Dane and not, as the Norwegians claimed, a native of Møre og Romsdal on the west coast of Norway. To bolster a separate Norwegian cultural identity as part of the drive towards the independence from Sweden that came in 1905, the Norwegian Gustav Storm vigorously promoted the fact that it was essentially his countrymen who had colonized Iceland, Greenland, and established the short-lived settlement in North America in 1000. The Swedes too looked for the compensations of nationalist nostalgia to make up for the painful loss of Finland to Russia early in the nineteenth century.

Historians from all three communities adapted the evolutionary theory of the English biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, originator of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, to their own studies to discover an ‘evolution’ of peoples and cultures over historical time that led to technological and moral progress. It enabled them to place their Viking forefathers somewhere in the chain of their own development as ‘noble savages’, living out a violent period of their destiny as they moved inexorably towards the higher stage of development represented by the Christianity to which they all, eventually, subscribed. So while there were obligatory words of censure for the ferocity of the conversion campaigns of both Olaf Tryggvason and Olav Haraldson at the turn of the tenth century in Norway, there was never any doubt in Victorian eyes but that these excesses were committed for the best of reasons.

The cultural relativity of our own times makes this kind of assertion problematic. No longer able to view the violence characteristic of the Vikings as a sort of brisk adolescent workout before the onset of maturity, we prefer instead to describe and analyse their achievements as traders, travellers, explorers and founders of towns, and to extol the beauties of their poetry and jewellery. But, while all of these are entirely valid perspectives, the pendulum may have swung too far: as one modern historian puts it, the revisionist view has come close to giving us an image of the Vikings as a group of ‘long-haired tourists who roughed up the locals a bit’.
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Among the aims of this book is to restore the violence to the Viking Age, and to try to show why our understanding is incomplete without it.

 

Uncertainty about the proper dimensions of the Viking Age is reflected in a very conditional acceptance of the literary sources that once formed the bedrock of what historians thought they knew about the period. The main objection to the use of the histories and sagas is that they were written in most cases some 300 years after the events they describe. It is absolutely possible to show under close analysis that the objectivity of the central literary source for the settlement of Iceland at the end of the ninth century,
Islendingabok
or
The Book of the Icelanders
by Ari Thorgilsson, known as ‘the Learned’, completed by about 1130, is prejudiced by the author’s inclination to exaggerate the importance of members of his own family in the commission of important deeds. Much of what we think we know about the beliefs and doings of Viking Age Scandinavians derives from
Heimskringla or The Lives of the Norse Kings
by the thirteenth-century Icelandic poet, historian, novelist and politician Snorri Sturluson. Snorri’s distinction as a sort of cultural Noah who provided for the preservation of pre-Christian beliefs, ideas and events in prehistoric and early historical Scandinavia is beyond dispute; but it is not an ideal dependence, for in an era in which claims to political power were intimately bound up with family and genealogical background, Snorri was, like Ari, concerned to promote the claims to significance of his own ancestors in the shaping of Norwegian and Icelandic history. Earlier than either Ari or Snorri is Adam of Bremen’s
Gesta Hammaburgensis
or
Deeds of the Archbishops of the Church of Hamburg
, completed by about 1070 and the major source of our knowledge of events in northern Europe and Scandinavia from the end of the eighth to the thirteenth century. Writing at a time when relations between the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen and the papacy were in crisis, Adam is prone to simplifying the conversion of the peoples of the north to Christianity by attributing it almost exclusively to the efforts of his own church and ignoring the role played by English missionaries in the process.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, originating in Wessex, may well have overplayed the role of Wessex in organizing resistance to the Viking armies. The French monk Dudo of St Quentin wrote a history,
De moribus et actis primorum normanniae ducum
, or ‘On the manners and deeds of the first Norman dukes’. Completed by about 1015, it is a hugely entertaining work that is compromised as history by Dudo’s desire to flatter the ancestors of the ducal patrons who had commissioned him to write it.

But beyond a certain point conditionality defeats its own ends. Writing in 1912, at a time when modern source criticism first entered the field of Viking studies, the Danish historian Ebbe Hertzberg entered some pertinent observations against too much deconstructive rigour, warning that it would lead to a state of affairs in which the clear and connected sense of history offered by the sagas would be replaced by hypotheses on events and their causes that were at best less than convincing and at worst lacked all context and cohesion.
¹⁰
Archaeology and the sophisticated research techniques of numismatic analysis, dendrochronology which permits highly accurate dating of wooden objects by tree-ring analysis, archaeozoology, palaeobotany, DNA analysis, ice crystallography and climate analysis have compensated considerably for the losses sustained to modern source criticism; but even here there are cautionary tales to be told. In 1222 Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish cleric and historian, author of the
Gesta Danorum
or
History of the Danes
, recorded his belief that a long series of enigmatic markings on the Runamo rock in Blekinge contained a runic account of the deeds of the pre-historical King Harald Hildetand. A later king, Waldemar the Great, exercised himself in the attempt to decipher the message, and in the seventeenth century the priest and runologist Jon Skonvig succeeded in deciphering the name of the Swedish town ‘Lund’ among the inscriptions, at that time part of Denmark. The rock was cleaned, several more runes emerged and an attempt at a full transliteration was made in the 1830s by the Icelander Finn Magnusen. A study in 1844 then revealed conclusively that the whole ‘inscription’ was a phenomenon of nature, a wonder in its own way certainly, but historically irrelevant.
¹¹
Runes on a stone found at Byfield, Massachusetts, were likewise once ‘translated’ to give the exciting message
Overland route, Øn set the stone
. If confirmed, it would have opened a whole new chapter in the history of the Vikings in America. Alas, on closer examination these too turned out to be glacial striations.

It is inappropriate to call these observations on the nature of Viking Age sources ‘problems’. They are simply the conditions of the study. They make the pattern of Viking Age history hard to trace, and I am only too well aware that in trying to trace it anyway I may have produced in this book my own share of such phantoms, and along the way made any number of what Michael Oakeshott once called ‘concessions to the idiom of legend’. But my aim has been to provide the intelligent general reader who has an interest in the Viking Age with a study that might satisfy his or her interest without burdening it with an account of the innumerable controversies that cover every field of study of the period. I have accordingly tried to limit the number of ‘perhaps’s and ‘possibly’s which would otherwise overwhelm almost every paragraph. I hope the reader who desires them will supply these unconsciously. I am, of course, profoundly indebted to the work of innumerable expert archaeologists, translators, linguists, geneticists, runologists, topographical analysts and earth scientists whose work I hope I have not travestied too much in trying to give what is in most cases an all too brief summary.

1

The Oseberg Ship

The identification, about 180 years ago, of a ‘Viking Age’ in Scandinavia fired the creative imaginations of novelists and painters alike. The Swedish novelist Esaias Tegnér’s
Fridtjofs Saga
became a best-seller throughout Europe on its publication in 1820 and inspired a wave first of antiquarian and then of literary and historical interest in the large body of Old Norse saga literature. Artists such as Johannes Flintoe, P. N. Arbo and Anker Lund based their careers on illustrations of scenes and characters from the sagas. Their efforts gave a strong but still only tentative legitimacy to the idea of a ‘Viking Age’. For the less romantically inclined, however, something more was needed to confirm ‘the Viking Age’ as a culture or civilization so distinct as to warrant separate naming.

When confirmation came it did so dramatically in the form of a short series of archaeological discoveries made in Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first of three Viking Age longships which emerged from more than 1,000 years of obscure anchorage inside burial mounds in the rural south-east of Norway was the Tune ship, unearthed at Rolvsøy in Østfold in 1867 and dated to about 900. A rectangular grave-chamber behind the mast housed the remains of a man, along with a horse, sword, spears and the remnants of a saddle. The discovery caused much excitement and provided significant new information about the construction of the Viking longships, already familiar from saga literature and tapestries, and soon to become the defining symbol of the Viking Age. Thirteen years later another ship discovered inside a mound at Sandar in Vestfold, known as the Gokstad ship, overshadowed the Tune find. A medical examination, carried out in 2007 by Professor Per Holck of the University of Oslo’s Anatomy Department, of the remains from the ship’s grave-chamber revealed a very different picture from that presented by a study carried out shortly after the initial discovery, which had suggested a man of between fifty and seventy, so badly afflicted by rheumatism that he was probably bed-ridden and scarcely able to feed himself. Professor Holck’s results show that the occupant was an extremely powerful and muscular man in his forties. At about 181 cm in height, he would have towered some 15 cm above the average man of his time. His thigh bones alone weighed 30 per cent more than the average for men of a similar height in modern times, a development suggesting that he spent much of his time on horseback, with his thigh muscles in constant use as they pressed in against the flanks of his mount. Neurologists at the Oslo National Hospital also found that he had a pituitary adenoma, or tumour of the pituitary gland, that led to an increased production of growth hormone and probably gave him the physical characteristics associated with gigan tism. Appropriately enough, this first real Viking had died a violent death. Professor Holck suggests a sequence of events in which the Gokstad chieftain was ambushed by two or perhaps three assailants. A blow with a sword to the left leg, just below the kneecap, would have left him unable to stand. The left knee was then attacked a second time with some kind of club-hammer, and the outer part of the right ankle was sliced off in the heat of the struggle. A stab wound in the right thigh struck perilously close to the main artery, and these four wounds from three different weapons were enough to kill him.
¹
A dozen horses had been buried with him, along with six dogs and a peacock, five beds, three small boats, a bronze pot with suspension chain, a barrel, buckets, and sixty-four shields with traces of yellow and black paint on them that had been fastened to the outside of the ship’s rail. The tent-shaped grave-chamber containing the skeleton had been built using notched logs (
lafteteknikken
); it remains the only physical proof that this particular woodworking technique was known to the Vikings.

The Gokstad ship itself was overshadowed by the discovery of the even more richly furnished and exquisite Oseberg ship, at Slagen in Vestfold in 1904. Unlike other mounds in the area on the western bank of the Oslo fjord, like those at Borre and Farmannshaugen near Tønsberg, there was no tradition associating the mound on Oskar Rom’s farm with a burial site. It was known locally as ‘Revehaugen’, meaning a place where foxes were to be found. In the wake of the huge national and international interest aroused by the Gokstad find, there had been a certain amount of active looking for ship-burial sites in Norway. Rom had done some desultory digging in Revehaugen and found something he thought might be interesting, and on 8 August 1903 he travelled to Oslo (Kristiania, as it was then known) to show it to Professor Gabriel Gustafson, the curator of the University’s Museum of Antiquities.