The Vikings (33 page)

We may reasonably doubt the sincerity of Rollo’s conversion to Christianity as part of the price paid for his land in Normandy, and we may point to political reasons why Harald Bluetooth may have found it advisable to embrace Christianity, not least Otto and the revived presence of a superpower on his southern borders. But this act of
translation
, if such it was, in all its filial piety, seems to show a genuine commitment to a new and Christian set of beliefs on the nature of the afterlife.
³³
Gorm the Old had the possibly unique distinction of being buried for a third time on 30 August 2000, beneath the latest version of the Jelling church. Among those present at the re-interment of his remains was the Danish queen, Margrethe II, herself a member of the Jelling dynasty, honouring the memory of the founder of the line twenty-nine generations earlier.
³⁴

 

If the complex of monuments at Jelling tell us something of Harald Bluetooth’s inner life, then other monuments that survive from his reign reveal more of his political concerns. The series of five ring-forts known as
trelleborgs
, from the first of them to be identified, and the wooden bridge at Ravning Enge appear to be intimately connected with the claim Harald made on the Jelling stone, that he had ‘won for himself all of Denmark and Norway’. They may also shed light on the obscure nature of the relationship between Denmark and Germany during the rule of Otto the Great, and on the tensions focused on the borders in southern Jutland.

In the
Short History of the Kings of Denmark
Sven Aggesen tells us that Harald inherited the kingdom from his father Gorm the Old.
³⁵
Under the circumstances it might make the claim on the Jelling stone that Harald ‘won for himself all of Denmark’ redundant or even hollow. Denmark was favoured among the Scandinavian countries on a number of counts. The land was more fertile than land in either Norway or Sweden, and the cluster of islands to the east of the Jutland peninsula gave it control over trade relations between the Baltic countries in the east and mainland Europe. Naval power enabled it to maintain control over this trade route, and through naval power it was able to maintain its hegemony over the west coast of Sweden and the province of Skåne as well as the region around the Oslo fjord.
³⁶
This regional prominence was a fact of Scandinavian political life by the beginning of the ninth century, and probably for some time before that. Harald Finehair’s primitive unification of Norway was achieved during the final decades of the ninth century, and it was undoubtedly facilitated by the dynastic instability among the Danes that lasted from the death of Horik the Younger until the advent of Gorm the Old, whose rule ended in about 935. We shall shortly examine in more detail developments in this newly unified Norway following the death of Harald Finehair in about 940. Here it is enough to say that, as was the case with Charlemagne and the Carolingian inheritance, Harald’s many sons turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing. As Norway’s fortunes declined so did Denmark’s ascend. We have no record of any military activity launched by Harald Bluetooth across the waters of the Vik; yet some such activity seems a logical explanation for the claim on the Jelling stone that he had ‘won Norway’, if we interpret this to mean that he won back the tributary status of the people living in the south and east of Norway that had been lost under Harald Finehair. Significantly the stone stops short of claiming that Harald also made the Norwegians Christian.

The unification or reunification of Denmark, and the restoration of Denmark’s regional power around the waters of the Vik and the Kattegat, were probably both served by the creation of the
trelleborgs
. In 1934 a motor-cycle sports club in Slagelse, in Zealand, were looking for a new arena in which to practise. They applied for permission to use the interior of a nearby large, circular earthen structure, to which no one had previously paid any particular attention. The National Museum of Denmark withheld permission until they had satisfied themselves that it was of no great antiquity, and the finds from the preliminary excavations turned out to be so unexpected and extraordinary that the club never did receive permission. For the next fifty years the site became the focus of intense archaeological activity.
³⁷
The Trelleborg was the first of several similarly enigmatic structures to be identified as Viking Age forts in subsequent years, and its name was used as a generic for these at Fyrkat in Hobro; Nonnebakken in Odense; and at Aggersborg on the northern side of the Limfjord in northern Jutland.
³⁸
The Slagelse Trelleborg was 136 metres in diameter, the fort at Aggersborg even larger at 240 metres. Two other forts, at Borgeby and at a second site, also known as Trelleborg, have been found in Skåne. Each of these earthen forts, moated around the sloping outside walls, was built to a pattern, perfectly circular and with gates at each of the cardinal points of the compass connected by two perfectly intersecting roads. Inside the Slagelse fort each of the four quarter-circles formed by the bisecting roads contained four identical square buildings, 30 metres long and with the bowed walls characteristic of the long-house of the period. In a perimeter beyond the walls that was protected by a second earthen wall and a moat, the remains of another fifteen similar buildings were found. A cemetery was located here. Though they varied in size and in individual points of detail, each of the other
trelleborgs
conformed to this basic pattern and there can be little doubt that they were the product of the same engineering vision. The Slagelse fort was built in the winter of 980-81. Tree-ring dating of the other forts confirms that they were built at about the same time, in the later years of the reign of Harald Bluetooth.

The name
trelleborg
may derive from
trel
(pl.
trelle
), meaning the wooden staves that lined the earthen walls of the fort both inside and out. Or it may indicate that they were built by slave-labour. A treaty of 1269 between Novgorod and the Hanseatic towns referred to a settlement of pilots on the Volkhov as
Kholopij gorodok
, a name that translates literally as
the town of slaves
. In the Latin version of the treaty of 1270 the name was rendered as
Drelleborch
.
³⁹

A greater mystery concerns their purpose. Recent excavations in the extended vicinity of the fort at Slagelse have shown that some kind of service community grew up around it. Weights, silver coins from the east and pieces of hack silver and jewellery are all evidence of trading activities, and the find of a so-called casting-cone of bronze shows that handicrafts were practised on the site.
⁴⁰
The remains of nails at the fort and between the fort and the nearby river might indicate that ships were repaired there. And yet, by contrast with buildings in other Viking Age settlements that have been excavated in recent years, the
trelleborg
forts and their houses show no signs of having been either repaired or maintained. The finding has proved difficult to reconcile with what was, for a long time, a popular theory that the forts were built as training camps and garrisons for Viking youths involved in raiding in the west and in the Baltic.
⁴¹

The same enigmas attach to another of Harald’s extraordinary feats of engineering, the bridge at Ravning Enge that crossed the swampy valley of the river Vejle, 10 kilometres south of Jelling. It was built at the same time as the
trelleborgs
and its construction showed the same mastery of precision and symmetry. Five and a half metres wide and capable of bearing loads up to five tons, Ravning Enge remained, at 760 metres, the longest bridge ever constructed in Denmark until the erection of the Lillebæltsbro about 1,000 years later in 1935. Ropes stretched between hazelwood poles guided the builders in their work with such accuracy that across the full length of the bridge the deviation from a perfect straight line was never greater than 5 cm. In all, 1,120 piles were lowered into the water until they hit solid ground or a load-bearing obstruction and then levelled off to the same height to take the transverse planking. Yet for all the obsessive care lavished on this magnificent construction it too, like the
trelleborgs
, shows no signs of ever having been repaired. Archaeologists have estimated its functional life as at most five years.
⁴²

As extraordinary as it might appear, the
trelleborgs
and the Ravning Enge bridge seem to have been nonce constructions. The pious inscriptions on a number of rune-stones in Sweden make it clear that in post-conversion Scandinavia the building of a bridge was considered a peculiarly Christian sort of good deed. Ravning Enge, however, was almost certainly not for the benefit of the local community. As an essential element of Harald’s unification strategies it made it possible for his soldiers to cross the Vejle marshes in all seasons and to connect with the Army or Ox Road. For the duration of the Viking Age and after, this was the overland ‘motorway’ between the north and continental Europe, stretching from Viborg in the north of Denmark to the trading centre of Hedeby in the south. Along with the L-shaped disposition of the
trelleborgs
across Danish territory, from Jutland in the north to Skåne in the east via Nonnebakken, it may bear physical witness to Harald’s claims on the Jelling stone to have won for himself all of Denmark, with the enormous and overawing Aggersborg in the north facing directly across Skaggerak and the Vik to Norway.

 

Only a year or two after his conversion, political anxieties aroused by threats from Otto in the south in 968 led Harald to develop the venerable Danevirke in the area around Hedeby into a single, coherent fortress settlement. These precautions were seemingly enough to forestall any intended attack, and with Otto’s death in 973 it was Harald who attempted to exploit the situation by invading the land south of the Eider. The Germans repelled his attack to such good effect that by the following year they were in possession of all of southern Jutland, including Hedeby and the Danevirke. By the end of the decade, with the
trelleborgs
and the Ravning Enge bridge in place and assuring his rapid logistical access to the south, Harald was able in 983 to launch a successful counter-attack and recover the lost territory. Border tensions evaporated, and with them the need to maintain the great garrison forts and the Ravning Edge bridge.

Harald was a remarkable king indeed, industrial, restless and forward-thinking. Inevitably, his decision to embrace and promote Christianity proved controversial and his unification campaign unpopular with the powerful. It is possible that, in the last years of his life, disaffected conservative forces looked to his son Sven to depose him, in the hope that Sven would revoke Harald’s reforms. Sven is said to have risen against his father and driven him out of the country. Weakened by an arrow-wound Harald made his way with his
hird
to Jumne, at the mouth of the river Oder, and died there in 987. In the
Short History of the Kings of Denmark
Sven Aggesen mentions, almost in passing, that Harald renounced his faith at the end of his life.
⁴³
The fact that he was not canonized despite his work for the Christian Church might indicate the truth in the claim. For Adam of Bremen, however, Harald remained a model Christian king until the day of his death. He hailed him as ‘the first to order the Danes to become Christians, the one who filled all of the north with priests and churches, innocently wounded as he was, exiled from his own land for the sake of Christ, and it is my certain hope that he will one day bear the triumphant crown of martyrdom’.
⁴⁴

 

Jumne is believed to have been on the site of Wolin in present-day Poland, and has been identified as the location of the fortress Jomsborg, home to the Jomsvikings, heroes of the thirteenth-century
Saga of the Jomsvkinga
and among the most potent literary legends of the Viking Age. If the story of Harald’s being driven into exile is true, then the origins of the tales concerning this dedicated band of warrior-heroes may lie in the further fate of the now leaderless remnants of the
hird
who survived him, and for whom return to Danish soil was not a practical alternative. If the
trelleborgs
did, indeed, house garrison communities of some sort, the codes of conduct operating within them may have provided a historical basis for the laws of membership and conduct that are noted in the saga as being those of the Jomsvikings:
⁴⁵
that membership of such military brotherhoods was restricted to men between the ages of eighteen and fifty; that family connection were to count for nothing in deciding whether or not to admit new members; that a member might not flee from an opponent as brave and as well-armed as himself; that the expression of fear was forbidden no matter how hopeless the predicament; that members were to avenge each other as they would their own brothers; that all booty taken on an expedition, regardless of value, was to be put into the common store; that it was forbidden to start a quarrel inside the fort; that women were forbidden to enter the fort; and that absence from the fort for more than three days was not permitted.
⁴⁶

Dudo gave us the story of Rollo’s man who stood up to kiss the foot of King Charles the Simple and sent him tumbling on to his back. The
Saga of the Jomsvikings
gives us another emblematic tale of Viking fearlessness. Following their defeat at Hjórungarág by a fleet under the command of Norwegian earls, the Jomsvikings are captured and called to their execution, one after another. Some go haughtily, some insolently. All go bravely. One is a seventeen-year-old ‘whose hair was long and golden-yellow like silk’. Asked how he views the prospect of death the youth replies, with a splendid mixture of stoicism and vanity, that he has lived the best part of his life and has no desire to survive his companions. Pride and reputation, however, continue to concern him and he makes a special request of his executioner: