The Vikings (41 page)

 

These encounters between Allah and Odin on the Iberian peninsula and along the coast of the Mediterranean left few lasting traces. Slavers routinely took the precaution of transporting their captives overseas to discourage escape attempts and slaves taken by
al-madjus
in the region were not offered for sale locally and did not lead to the development of local trade relations. The only known diplomatic contact to have arisen out of the raids is a mission, said to have taken place in about 845, to the court of the
al-madjus
king who had led the attack on Seville the year before, with the aim of establishing friendly ties with him. The Arab emissary was a renowned poet and ladies’ man known as al-Ghazal, or the Gazelle, a name given to him in his youth in tribute to his good looks. The wealth of detail in the account by the twelfth-century Spanish scholar Ibn Dihya includes a description of the land of this king of the
al-madjus
:

They came next to the royal residence. It was a large island in the ocean, with running water and gardens. Between it and the mainland is a journey of three days. Innumerable of the al-Magus live on this island. Close to it are many other islands, large and small. All the inhabitants are Magus. And the closest mainland also belongs to them, several days’ journey away. They were formerly Magus, but now follow the Christian religion, since they have abandoned the worship of fire and the religion they followed previously, and converted to Christianity, excepting the inhabitants of some of the islands belonging to them which are further out at sea. These continue to observe the old religion with the worship of fire, marriage with mother and sister and other abominations .
²⁶

This sounds like Denmark, with the king’s hegemony over ‘the closest mainland’ a reference to Vik in south-eastern Norway and Skåne in southern Sweden, in which case al-Ghazal’s host would have been King Horik, who was baptized by Anskar and encouraged Christianity in Denmark, though without making it compulsory.
²⁷
Most of Ibn Dihya’s account is a literary entertainment describing the king’s wife’s infatuation for her Arabic visitor. Al-Ghazal visited her frequently and she showered him with gifts. He became her lover, and satisfied her curiosity about his people and their customs. He made verse in praise of her: ‘I am enchanted by a Magus woman, who will not let the sunlight of beauty dim, who lives in the most remote of Allah’s lands, where the traveller finds no tracks.’
²⁸
His companions warned him to stop seeing her and accepting the gifts and al-Ghazal cut his visits down to one every second day. When the queen, who in al-Ghazal’s verse bears the non-Scandinavian name ‘Nud’, was told the reason for the change in his routine she laughingly reassured him that

Our ways are not like that, and there is no jealousy among us. Our women stay with their men of their own free will; a woman stays with her man as long as it pleases her, and leaves him when she wearies of their life together.
²⁹

The independence of women from the Heathen north generally was a source of great surprise to Arab travellers. One noted that ‘among them women have the right to divorce. A woman can herself initiate divorce whenever she pleases.’
³⁰
Ibn Dihya adds that, until the coming of Christianity, no woman was forbidden to any man, the exception being when a high-born woman chose a man of lower standing. This was held to shame her, and her family kept the lover away from her. Al-Ghazal, reassured by Queen Nud’s words, resumed his daily visits until his departure. The impression of a Danish society free from sexual jealousy is countered by Adam of Bremen, who states plainly that women who were unfaithful to their men were immediately sold.
³¹

No authoritative Arab historian of the time mentions this mission, nor do any of the biographers of al-Ghazal, and the great French arabist, Évariste Lévi-Provencal, judged the whole story to be a fictional improvisation based on a journey to Constantinople known to have been made by al-Ghazal in the winter of 839/840.
³²
This was the year in which the Rus turned up at the court of Louis the Pious in Ingelheim on their way back from Constantinople. Lévi-Provencal speculates that al-Ghazal may have met these Rus or heard talk of their land and their customs, with his report from this encounter forming the basis of Ibn Dihya’s later improvisation.

The sole Viking Age artefact to have emerged in Spain is a small cylindrical vessel made of deer horn, with a pattern of holes around it and a handle at one end. It is a rarity among such artefacts in that it was not found accidentally by the digging of archaeologists but had been in use in the Church of San Isidoro, in León, for several centuries until it was finally identified and installed as an exhibit in the town museum. All three of the dominant Borre, Jelling and Mammen styles of the second half of the tenth century have left identifiable traces on the design on the vessel, a gripping beast motif made up of as many as eight smaller beasts. The mingling of styles suggests a transitional phase between the Jelling and Mammen eras, and a tentative dating to the end of the tenth or beginnning of the eleventh century. The provenance of the vessel is obscure, but it may have been part of a large donation made to the church in León by King Fernando I (1037- 1065) and his Queen Doña Sancha in 1063. How it came to be in their possession and what its original function may have been are unknown.
³³
Other traces of the Viking presence are slight. Generally speaking, it was too sporadic to leave a significant impact on the local language and place-names. In the province of León there is a village called Lordemanos, which may indicate a local settlement of Vikings, and near Coimbra, in Portugal, a village named Lordemão invites similar speculation, as do villages named Nordoman and Nortman. In Vascony, Vikings who settled in Bayonne may have taught the Basques how to hunt the whales that arrived in the Bay of Biscay every autumn. Predictably, the handful of loan-words from Old Norse into Basque, Spanish and French are connected with maritime and fishing activity. The fishermen of Bermeo, the most important fishing-port in the Basque country, use ‘
estribor
’, compounded of ‘
styr
’ and ‘
bord
’, to designate ‘starboard’, and ‘
babor
’, from ‘
bak
’ and ‘
bord
’, to mean ‘port’.
³⁴
Among place-names in the region with otherwise unknown origins, Mundaka, on the mouth of the river Oka, may derive from Old Norse ‘
munnr
’, meaning ‘mouth’.
³⁵

The wave of raids between 966 and 971 marked the climax of the Viking Age in Galicia. Briefly, there was a danger that the province might turn into a Spanish Normandy.
³⁶
But it did not, and the raids on the Iberian peninsula and beyond had no lasting political or cultural significance. They were episodic and piratical, long and daring journeys undertaken in search of riches and adventure, and as such perhaps more authentically ‘Viking’ in spirit than the colonizations. There are no conversion stories here, no discourse with local aristocrats, no attempts on the part of the adventurers to establish large-scale settlements and farm the land. Yet we know enough by now to realize that there is no such thing as a typical Viking, and an enigmatic and unusually charming recollection of their presence is a tale told by one Arab chronicler of a certain group of
al-madjus
who got lost or separated from their companions in al-Andalus, somehow evaded execution, converted to Islam, and married local girls. They started a farm at Isla Menor, on the Mediterranean coast between Alicante and Cartagena, where they presently established a reputation as producers of what was reputed to be the best cheese in the region.
³⁷

13

A piece of horse’s liver

The great leaders of the Viking Age were wary of making claims that could not be substantiated. As we saw in Chapter 10, Harald Bluetooth’s boast on the Jelling stone, that he had ‘won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian’, meticulously avoids any suggestion that he had also made the Norwegians Christian. In
Heimskringla
, Snorri says that Harald did indeed send two of his earls to Norway to try to impose Christianity, and that the mission was successful in the Vik, ‘where King Harald’s might prevailed’.
¹
By Harald’s standards it was obviously not successful enough. As had been the case in Denmark, and as would later be the case in Sweden, the conversion of Norway came about largely through the efforts of native kings.

At about the time of the Jelling boast, the ruler in Norway was Håkon, later known as ‘the Good’ that son whom Harald Finehair had sent to England to be fostered by King Athelstan at the court of Wessex. Harald would have known that his son would be raised in the Christian faith and must have been content at the prospect. With Athelstan’s assistance, in about 936 Håkon had driven out his brother Erik Bloodaxe and taken over the throne of Norway. On the assumption that where kings led, their subjects would follow, the English may have hoped that his accession would signal an end to any further west Scandinavian threats against them.

From the
Ágrip
, however, we learn of the great difficulties Athelstan’s foster-son faced in trying to introduce Christianity to the Norwegian earls during the early years of his rule:

In his time many people were converted through his popularity, and some gave up Heathen worship though they did not take baptism. He built some churches in Norway and appointed men of learning to them. But the people burned the churches and killed the priests, so that he could not continue because of their depredations.
²

It may have been an incomplete report of Håkon’s missionary efforts that led Harald Bluetooth to presume that the formal conversion of the Norwegians had already taken place. There is potential support for this theory in one interpretation of the inscription on the Kuli stone, found under the floor of a barn in 1913 on the island of Kuløy in Nordmøre, just north of Romsdal. In a reversal of the more familiar scenario in which a scholar sees runes where there are only glacial striations, this stone, with a cross inscribed on one side, spent fifty years in the museum at Trondheim before the Norwegian historian Aslak Liestøl noticed that it had two lines of runic script cut along one of its edges. The interpretation of the inscription is still debated by runologists, but the majority settle for something like this:
Tore and Hallvard raised this stone after Ulvljot
,
Christendom had been twelve winters in the realm
. This is significant for a number of reasons, not least because it is the first known use of the word ‘Christendom’ in Norway. It has not, however, acquired a status, comparable to the Danish Jelling stone, as Norway’s ‘birth certificate’. Harald Bluetooth’s importance as a Danish king makes it possible to give a fairly accurate estimate of the date at which the Jelling stone was raised; but of Tore, Hallvard and Ulvljot we know nothing. The dating of Ulvljot’s death is pre-Christian in its relativity. It is not plotted along an unbroken time-line that begins with the birth of Christ and moves forward to the present moment, but instead relates to the adoption of Christianity as a significant but local event. The result is that the Kuli stone cannot be dated with any certainty at all.
³
The ‘twelve winters’ may be counting back to the
thing
meeting at Moster in 1024, at which Christian thinking began to influence the law in Norway. Or it may relate to the conversion campaigns of Olaf Tryggvason and the Drageid
thing
meeting of 996. A third possibility is that the twelve years referred to on the stone may have been counted from Håkon the Good’s first serious attempt to introduce Christianity to Norway, which would date the inscription to some time in the late 940s, not long before the erection of the Jelling stone. If Håkon’s efforts were initially successful, as the
Ágrip
suggests they were, this may have inclined Harald to instruct his rune-master to omit any claim to have converted an already converted people.

Even if there is substance to this latter hypothesis, the inscription on the Kuli stone would hardly have met with general assent in Norway, for the essence of Håkon’s story as told by Snorri in the
Saga of Håkon the Good
is the same as that sketched in the
Ágrip
, of the resistance he met from powerful local chieftains to his attempted innovations. The poignancy of it lies in his attempts to compromise with these powerful, conservative forces. To the
Ágrip
’s description of what happened when he tried to introduce the Church as an institution, Snorri adds details of Håkon’s personal faith, telling us that the king observed Sundays and the Friday fasts, and that he tried to introduce a Christian version of the midwinter festival. In doing this he was striking at the heart of institutionalized Heathen culture in Norway. Little is known of how time was measured before the introduction of the Christian calendar, but it is believed that the Heathens observed a so-called ‘bound’ lunar year, which followed a lunisolar calendar of the type described by the Venerable Bede in the
De temporum ratione
.
⁴
The twelve months of this year, each lasting from one full moon to the next, had no connection with the twelve, thirty-day months of the Christian calendar. Linguists believe that two of the names of the months used in Iceland after the introduction of the Christian calendar,
thorri
and
gói
, are probably survivals from the Heathen lunisolar calendar.
⁵
The year was divided into winter and summer half-years of six months each, and into quarters by four great communal feasts. An autumn sacrifice started the year, and this was followed by the midwinter feast of
Jól
.
Jul
remains the standard term for Christmas in all three Scandinavian languages, and
yule
enjoys a perilous survival in modern English. The etymology of the word is unknown, but the feast’s connection with Odin is apparent in that one of his names was Jólnir; and its antiquity is attested by its occurrence in the ‘Haraldskvæthi’, composed for Harald Finehair by Torbjørn Hornklovi in about 900, where the poet says that the king ‘
Úti vill jól drekka
’ (‘will drink in Yule’), and adds the obscure reference ‘
ok Freys leik heyja
’ (‘and play Frey’s game’).
⁶
Snorri says that the ritual brewing and drinking of ale took place, and that horses and cattle were sacrificed and the blood collected in what he calls
hlaut
-vessels, from which toasts were drunk.
⁷
Odin, Frey, the obscure Njord and possibly Thor were hailed in this fashion.
⁸
The mixture of blood and alcohol may explain the name Jólnir, denoting Odin’s manifestation of himself as god of the intoxication that encourages fellowship, and of the ecstasy that facilitates supernatural communication between men and gods. The toast was drunk ‘
til árs oc til frithar
’. The first element was a prayer for good catches at sea and good harvests on land; the second prayed for peace, and for good luck in breeding, for livestock and people alike. It may suggest that ‘Frey’s game’ in Torbjørn’s poem was a euphemism for the sexual act.