The Vikings (32 page)

The use of metal and stone as a medium gave runic messages a greater durability than vellum or parchment, but limited the length of message it was possible to write. If this was regarded as a problem, then it was partially solved by a rationalization among Scandinavian runemasters in about the middle of the eighth century that reduced the original twenty-four letters to the sixteen of the so-called ‘younger
futhark
’, in which a single rune represented several of the more common sound values. As with homonyms, the sense emerged from the context. In a later development, diacritics were added to change the sound values of certain runes.

Runes could be used to identify the possessor of an object, or sometimes its maker, and finds from the quayside in Bergen include wooden pins that had either been stuck into or tied on to piles of goods as markers by merchants. Some used them to claim the simple immortality of graffiti: ‘Halfdan was here’, carved a wandering tenth-century Scandinavian on the balustrade in the gallery of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in what is now Istanbul. As the runes from the Oseberg find appear to show, graffiti could also take the form of a moment’s existential meditation. Some runic inscriptions are more enigmatic than others. The Rök stone in Östergötland, carved in the ninth century by Varin in memory of his dead son Vämod, has 760 well-preserved runes covering its five sides; after the father’s simple tribute comes a long passage which includes a poem with apparent allusions to long-lost heroic lays and legends, and passages using displacement and clandestine runes to further obscure the meaning of the message and, perhaps, intensify its occult power. Poems are also found on the Turinge
¹⁴
and Gripsholm stones,
¹⁵
and the Karlevi stone dated to about 1000, from the island of Öland in Sweden, which preserves a complete stanza of skaldic verse.
¹⁶

The north had a long tradition of raising unmarked stones or
bautas
as a way of memorializing the dead. In Denmark in the tenth century this practice developed to include the inscribing of such stones. The Jelling stone is a rare example of the rune-stone as record of a specific and momentous affair of state. More frequently, runic inscriptions followed a simple, conventional formula:
X put up this stone in memory of Y, his brother/father/son/mother/comrade-at-arms/travelling companion
. This might be supplemented with a short comment praising the bravery of the dead man. The Tirsted stone, from the Danish island of Lolland, exemplifies this tradition. A suggested interpretation of the script is: ‘Ástráðor and Hildungr raised this stone in memory of Fraði, their kinsman. And he was then the terror of men. And he died in Sweden and was first in Friggir’s retinue of all vikings.’
¹⁷
For its time it is remarkable only in a rare contemporary use of the word ‘viking’.

The magical power that was believed to reside in the runes was sometimes used by a runemaster to try to protect a grave from the attentions of robbers with the threat of a curse: the inscription on the Stentoft stone in Blekinge warned any potential robber that his reward would be a state of ceaseless wandering and an ostracism which even the dead would observe after his or her death. Besides protecting the dead, curse-runes were also carved to bind the occupant to the grave and prevent him or her from wandering and causing trouble among the living.
¹⁸
Memorial stones raised by Heathens might occasionally include an allusion to religious beliefs. One such is the Læborgsstenen in North Jutland, from the later years of the tenth century, which tells us that ‘Ravnunge-Tove carved these runes for Torvi her queen.’
¹⁹
The inscription is decorated above and below with Thor’s symbol, the hammer, to much the same protective end as Christians would decorate gravestones with a cross. The names indicate that both the carver and the memorialized woman were devotees of Thor.
²⁰

In recent years runic scholars have also recognized that another function of the commemorative rune-stone may have been as a ‘declar ation of inheritance’.
²¹
Incidentally a potted biography of a woman named Gerlög who survived the deaths of her two husbands and numerous children, the 300 runes on the Hillersjöhällen stone in Uppland in Sweden are also a thorough documentation of the legitimacy of her claim to be the inheritor of their properties.
²²

The story behind the inscription on the stone raised by Harald’s father Gorm to honour Thyrwi, his wife and Harald’s mother, remains enigmatic:
Gormr konungr ger
ð
i kuml essi ept yrvé, konu sína, tanmarkar bót
(King Gorm made this monument in memory of yrvé, his wife, Denmark’s salvation). Sven Aggesen says that she foiled an attempt by Otto the Great to compel her to marry him so that he might incorporate Denmark into his empire,
²³
while the
Saga of the Jomsvikings
records a tradition that it was Thyrwi’s foresight that saved the Danes from famine.
²⁴
She had the rare distinction of being honoured twice on separate rune-stones, and it is a pity we do not know more about her. Respect for the past is a fluctuating phenomenon and her stone had been moved several times before 1590 when it was found, half-buried in the ground south of the church at Jelling. It was rescued and placed beside Harald’s larger stone. Coming several decades after Ottar used the name in the account of Scandinavian territories he gave to Alfred the Great, the occurrence of
tanmarkar
on her stone is the first known use on native soil of the name Denmark.

Following a general runic convention, the lettering on Thyrwi’s stone reads vertically, from the bottom upwards, though there was no real consistency in the layout and direction of inscriptions. Often the shape and size of the stone would dictate whether they be written left to right or right to left, with the orientation of the runes making it clear which way to read. For lengthier inscriptions, alternating lines might be written in opposite directions, going left and then snaking to the right for the next line. Sometimes the lines bent around at the end, so that one line reads left to right and the next right to left and upside down. By contrast, the inscription on Harald’s stone adds to its syncretic intensity by following strictly the conventions of Christian Latin tradition to read from left to right. The peculiarity suggests that the designs may have been copied and adapted from a Latin manuscript.

But perhaps the most vivid expression of Harald’s determination to marry the new Christian teachings to familiar and traditional Scandinavian forms lies in the work he did to transform the complex of monuments at Jelling into one single great monument. Now only a small tourist and farming community, in Harald’s time and for centuries before that Jelling was a power centre for Danish chieftains, and the site of an enormous ship-setting that may have been Gorm’s monument to Thyrwi. Measuring 170 metres from stem to stern it is the largest such monument known in the world. Examples from other, smaller settings in Denmark suggest that Thyrwi’s stone may originally have stood at the prow of the setting. Harald set about the task of obscuring the imagery of this Heathen monument in the spirit of his new faith. He raised large mounds about 70 metres in diameter and some 11 metres high at each end of the ship, obliterating without entirely dismantling it. A number of the
bautas
were uncovered during excavations of the south mound in 1941-2.
²⁵

During a drought in the summer of 1820, the well at the top of the older, north mound ran dry. Attempting to dig deeper, the Jelling villagers were astounded to discover that the mound was hollow. The sheriff was summoned and a descent made into what turned out to be an oak-lined burial chamber. A half-metre-high deposit of earth, disturbed by the digging, covered the floor. A small silver cup was found, along with sundry metal fittings and the carved wooden figure of a man, about 15 cm high. Traces of paint show that his coat had been coloured blue and his hair and beard red. Of the original occupant of the chamber there was no sign.

Viking Age literature is rich in descriptions of
haugbrott
, the act of breaking open and entering a mound containing the remains of the dead. Very often the grave was entered as an act of exceptional daring with the aim of retrieving some object, often a sword, of symbolic military and political power. Perhaps the most compelling example in saga literature describes the descent of Grettir the Strong into the mound of Kar the Old, a site of hauntings and mysterious night-time fires. After a desperate struggle with Kar, Grettir succeeds in cutting off his head and putting an end to his revenancing. Among the wealth of grave-goods he then hoists up to the waiting Thorfin is a sword of outstanding beauty. Grettir covets it but Kar’s son Thorfin recognizes it as a family heirloom and will not let Grettir have it.
²⁶

Sven Aggesen and Saxo in their ‘Histories’ both describe how King Uffi’s father led his son to the hiding place of a sword of special powers that he had buried in a mound. The
Book of the Settlements
relates how the Icelandic pioneer Leif went raiding in Ireland just prior to the first great voyage of emigration with Ingolf. In his travels there he came across ‘a big underground house, which he entered. All was dark till light shone from a sword which a man was holding. Leif killed this man, and took the sword from him and great riches too, and from there on was known as Hjorleif, Sword-Leif.’
²⁷

Literature was here reflecting a familiar aspect of Viking Age life. The nineteenth-century excavators of the Gokstad ship-mound found evidence that they were not the first to have disturbed the grave. Nikolay Nikolaysen shared an assumption, common at the time, that the motive for such an act can have been nothing more profound than robbery, and in his published account of the excavation he paid little attention to it. The Oseberg mound likewise had been entered, although here aspects of the break-in gave Gabriel Gustafson food for thought. With a precision that suggested forehand knowledge, the shaft had been dug directly into the burial chamber where the bodies of the dead women lay, and their remains dragged out into the shaft and left there in a disordered state. The beds in which the bodies had reposed had been not merely broken but comprehensively destroyed. It looked as though ritual disordering, rather than the search for treasure, had been the purpose of the entry, and the urgent need to make the grave uninhabitable for the dead.

From the size of the shafts it was obvious they could not have been the work of a couple of local thieves emboldened by an evening’s drinking. Entry must have been a prominent and public act that took many days and many hands to complete.
²⁸
Most of the mounds in the burial grounds at Borre, not far from the Oseberg site, show identical signs of having been broken open at some point. It is possible that Viking Age grave-mounds were raised as symbols of political power in the landscape, and that a ritual attack on them was also an attack on a specific political power. As we noted earlier, this may account for the partial destruction of the Borre mounds of the Danish kings Klak-Harald and Hemming on their trip across the waters of the Vik back in 813 to reassert their authority over rebellious Norwegian tributaries.
²⁹

Another suggested motive for
haugbrott
is that it may have been done to retrieve the bones of especially brave or powerful men that could then be used in the forging of a weapon which would, in a literal sense, partake of the dead hero’s courage and power. To the same end of enhancing the spirit of the sword or the spear, the bones of bears or wolves were used in the firing process.
³⁰
The blacksmith’s is one of the very few trades explicitly mentioned on a rune-stone and beliefs like these might go some way towards explaining his high and sometimes almost mystical status in the Viking Age.
³¹

And yet none of these possibilities seems applicable to the empty north mound at Jelling, which bore no signs of disturbance from the outside. The excavation of the south mound carried out in 1941 revealed that it had never been used as a grave at all, and its purpose remains obscure. Perhaps Harald intended it for himself, but the circumstances of his death made burial there impractical or impossible. It may be that Poppo or some other Christian advised him against it, on the grounds that the Heathen symbolism of a mound burial would be inappropriate for a Christian king. A large post, standing at its centre and positioned on the central axis of the outlined ship-setting, shows how carefully Harald’s engineers worked to incorporate the original shape into their design. Harald positioned his great stone where it still stands today, exactly midway between the centres of the two mounds, and on the central axis of the ship-setting, and another possibility is that the south mound was raised simply to complete a symmetry and focus the whole monumental complex on the stone.

In the space between the Jelling stone and the north mound Harald built a church. It burnt down, as did the two oak churches that followed it. A stone church built around 1100 has survived to the present day. A serendipitous result of the installation of a heating system in 1976-9 provided what is in all likelihood a solution to the mystery of the body missing from the burial chamber beneath the north mound. A grave-chamber discovered below the floor of the first church contained the bones of a middle-aged man about 5 feet 8 inches (173 cm) tall, haphazardly spread about the chamber.
³²
Among the material finds were several hundred fragments of gold thread, probably the remains of a costly garment, and two strap decorations, with beautifully ornamented animal heads, in conception and execution identical to the heads depicted on the silver cup found in the north mound. These decorations were in a style so distinct from other examples of Viking Age art that art historians of the Viking Age have given it its own name, the
Jelling style
. Its significance for this story is the high degree of circumstantial evidence the cup and the strap decorations provide that the north mound was the original resting place of the bones discovered beneath the church, and the further likelihood that they were those of Harald’s father, King Gorm the Old.