The Vikings (50 page)

Among the many grave-mounds and fields excavated in Viking Age Scandinavia, only a handful of children’s graves have been identified. In the ten, large-scale Viking Age graveyards that have been completely excavated on Gotland, only three children had their own graves. Two small graves from the Mulde parish of Fröjel, dated to the eighth century, contained the remains of infants who had been cremated and laid to rest with beads, bracelets and animal-shaped bronze brooches. The grave-goods were proportionately smaller than normal size. Another grave at Vallstena, dated to the middle of the tenth century, was that of a girl of about five or six years of age. Her assortment of grave-goods included, among the beads and brooches, a brooch with a key, a pair of tweezers, a comb, and a knife on a chain. Unlike the Fröjel grave-goods, these were full-size. In Viking Age societies the key that was worn pinned at the breast was the symbol of a woman’s authority in the family, and the presence and significance of such a key-brooch in this particular little girl’s grave remains an enigma.

At the Ire grave-field in the parish of Hellvi, on the north of the island, the body of a boy aged about twelve was found, buried with a horse and a dog. Weapons, including a large sword, two spearheads, a penanular ring pin, a knife, and items pertaining to horses including a horse-comb, bridle and rings were found with him. A second boy of about the same age was also buried with horse and dog and a selection of grave-goods associated with the grave of an adult. The boys may have been from families of high standing; or the burial may only confirm the theory that, in a society in which infant mortality was common, perhaps as high as 50 per cent, children became adults and were treated as such beyond the age of twelve.
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Thorgeir’s second important exemption was that old laws should stand as regards the eating of horse-flesh. We noted in earlier chapters the central importance of the preparation and consumption of horse-meat in the rituals of Heathen culture. Christians saw this as a blasphemous equivalent of the bread and wine taken at Holy Communion, and in the long and slow process of the conversion of the north generated a taboo against it that grew so powerful that even today horse is hardly eaten in the Scandinavian countries. Under the circumstances, this was a remarkable concession Thorgeir was offering. Even so, according to Ari, the dispensation was withdrawn a few years after the adoption of Christianity. This must have occasioned at the very least a change of diet, for at the time of the conversion the main form of subsistence in Iceland was livestock farming that included the management of herds of half-wild horses for food.
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Once the critical early decades of cultural transition had been successfully negotiated, however, the use of horses as food seems to have resumed.
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The third of Thorgeir’s dispensations was that men might continue to sacrifice if they wished, but only in private; if witnesses to the act could be brought it was punishable by the Lesser Outlawry, entailing a fine and banishment for three years. Literary use of the dangers of secret sacrifice is made in a passing reference in the early thirteenth-century
Saga of Hallfred the Troublesome Skald
, probably the work of a monk at the Thingeyrar monastery in Iceland, in which a mischief-making Norwegian enemy of the Icelandic skald tries to make trouble for him with their leader, Olaf Tryggvason:

Once the king asked where Hallfred was, and Kalf replied, ‘Likely he is up to his old habit of offering sacrifice in secret. He carries about with him an image of Thor made of tusk. He’s deceiving you, king, and you have not tested him.’

The king sent for Hallfred so that he could speak for himself.

‘Is it true,’ said the king, ‘that you carry an image of Thor about with you and offer sacrifice to it, as is said of you?’

‘It is not true, king,’ said Hallfred. ‘Search me. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t hide anything now.’
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Nothing to support Kalf’s accusation was found on Hallfred, but the poet’s record of resistance to the new religion was well known to the king and Kalf’s accusation was a gamble that might have paid off. Hallfred Ottarson was a historical person. Some time in the middle of the tenth century his father emigrated from Norway and settled at Vatnsdal, in the north of Iceland. The short saga about him is one of a handful set in the tenth century that tell the stories of young Icelandic poets who fall in love and whose love is either unrequited or in some other way troubled. They compose erotic poetry about the objects of their desire that brings them into conflict with rivals, or with the law. Some of them, like the rivals symbolized by the two eagles in the
Saga of Gunnlaug Snaketongue
, die as a direct result of their love. The sagas are improvisations woven around the contents of the poetry these young men left behind them. Unlike the sagas themselves, their verses are probably contemporary survivals and what can be gleaned from them has a high degree of historical credibility.
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Poetry had a status close to divine in northern Heathendom. If the
go
ð
i
were responsible for maintaining the practical relationship that existed between men and gods, the skalds were the curators of the metaphysical superstructure of lore that lay behind the rituals. In both of Snorri’s variant accounts of his origins, Odin is equally the inventor of poetry. A special relationship existed between him and his poets and they will have felt the cultural threat that lay behind Christianity more keenly than most. What makes Hallfred Ottarson so fascinating as a poet is that his verses, and the short saga in which they are embedded, afford us a rare insight into a mind tormented at the personal level by the enforced change of faiths.

In Snorri’s view Hallfred was one of the greatest skalds and he uses many examples of his work to illustrate and explain the poetic art in the textbook
skáldskaparmál
section of the
Prose Edda
. Hallfred had the unique distinction of being a court-poet to the Heathen earl Håkon the Bad, for whom he composed the
Hákonardrápa
in about 990; and to Håkon’s Christian successor as ruler of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason. According to his saga, Hallfred and Olaf met for the first time shortly after Olaf came to power. Hallfred and his crew were trying to leave Norway to avoid being forced to become Christians, but were prevented from sailing by bad weather.
Kristni Saga
suggests that they were among those detained by Olaf in Trondheim after the outlawing from Iceland of Thangbrand the missionary.
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The king preached to them at his court in Lade. Despite Olaf’s proven record of force against those who opposed him, Hallfred dared to set conditions for his baptism: the king must grant him a permanent attachment as his court poet, and he must be his godfather at the baptismal ceremony. Olaf agreed, Hallfred was baptized and his religious instruction began. The saga relates that one day not long afterwards he approached the king and asked him to listen to some verses he had composed in his honour. When the king replied that he was too busy Hallfred said that was his prerogative, but that if he refused to listen, then he would abandon the new faith. He went on to express his disappointment at the quality of the lore associated with the new faith which the king had forced upon him. The king complained that he was a
vandrædaskáld
, a troublesome poet, but agreed to listen, and the nickname stuck. Hallfred’s guarded hostility towards the new faith, and the fact that it had been forced on him, came close to getting him in very serious trouble with the king. In a remarkable scene involving the two and played out before an audience of Olaf’s retainers, Hallfred composes a short series of verses that flirts perilously with his love of the old gods, driving the king to growing anger and frustration as he uses all his art to delay the revelation of the real subjects of his
kennings
or metaphorical disguises until the very end of his verses.
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It is almost as though, in this virtuoso display of his art, Hallfred is bidding a last farewell to the religious culture that had so enriched his poetry and brought him so much pleasure. Although the love-story then takes over for much of the rest of the saga, the theme of Hallfred’s troubled relationship with Christianity returns at the end. The poet, now about forty years old, is sailing back to Iceland with the intention of settling down at last. He falls ill on the voyage, and in his dying moments sees his female guardian-spirit, dressed in a coat of chain mail, striding across the waves behind the ship. He rejects her, but in his last verse remains uncertain of his fate after death.
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The Christian scribe who wrote down the story took pity on Hallfred and spared him the torments of hell: after his death the poet’s body was placed in a coffin, along with his arm-ring, his cloak and helmet and cast into the sea. It drifted ashore on Iona. Viking raiders had long since ceased to visit the island, but it seems their spirit lived on among some of the abbot’s servants, who broke open the coffin, stole the treasures and sank the body in a bog with a stone around its neck. The culprits were caught, Hallfred’s body recovered and given a proper Christian burial. A chalice was made from his arm-ring, his cloak turned into an altar cloth, and his helmet melted down to make candlesticks.

Olaf, tormentor, mentor and finally gift-giver, was by this time long dead. He survived the conversion of the Icelanders by no more than two or three months. The
Ágrip
relates that he had married a sister of his former Viking raiding partner Svein Forkbeard, now securely in possession of the throne of Denmark. The marriage was the subject of obscure complications involving a ruler of Poland to whom she had already been married against her will. In Olaf’s view, though seemingly not in Svein’s, this invalidated the marriage. The old rivalry for power in south and eastern coastal Norway between Danes and Norwegians revived, with Svein withholding his sister’s dowry, and Olaf gathering an army with which he intended to confront him in Denmark. Unfortunately for him, his violent imposition of the new religion had left him with few friends in his hour of need. He sailed to Wendland with eleven ships, but the army that he was expecting to follow him simply turned back once he was out of sight. Olaf sailed on, hoping to link up with friends across the Baltic who had formed part of his
hird
in his days as a Viking leader. Svein was much the more powerful and influential leader of the two, however. He persuaded the Swedish King Olaf and the Norwegian Earl Erik, a son of Håkon the Great, to join forces with him, and their vast fleet encountered Olaf Tryggvason’s flotilla in a battle at Svolder. Despite the overwhelming odds against them, Olaf’s forces are said to have acquitted themselves bravely, but in the end they were defeated. As the battle neared its close he was seen alive astern on the high-deck of his enormous longship, the
Long Serpent
. Earl Erik moved aft to confront him, ‘a light flashed before him, as though it were lightning, and when the light disappeared, the king himself was gone’.
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Olaf’s body was never found. Remarkable rumours attended upon his disappearance, including one that he had escaped with his life and wandered to the Holy Land and entered a monastery. To others it seemed obvious that he had fallen or jumped overboard. With obvious admiration for his missionary work, the
Ágrip
concludes that, however Olaf died, ‘it is likely that God has his soul’. Had Olaf Tryggvason’s body been found at the time then perhaps he, and not the next Olav to rule the Norwegians, would have become the patron saint of Norway.

If, in the longer perspective, the enrolment of the Icelanders in the gradual unification of European peoples within a single religious faith was both unavoidable and desirable, in the shorter run the benefits were perhaps harder to identify. At the individual level, as travellers and traders, the conversion may have spared them the simple embarrassment of being old-fashioned in a modern world, country bumpkins clinging to outmoded ideas at the rim of the known world. Politically it may have preserved their proud independence by averting the immediate threat of an invasion from Norway, though Olaf Tryggvason’s death preserved that even more surely. And yet one cause of the decline and eventual fall of the commonwealth was that it never managed to harmonize the two social realities that were present at its birth, the democratic and the aristocratic. To the medieval mind, the idea of a society with no formal leadership, or at best an ad hoc leadership, was astonishing to the point of being unnatural. Something of the same surprise in Adam of Bremen’s observation
Apud illos non est rex, nisi tantum lex
(‘Among them there is no king, there is only the law’) lies behind Dudo of St-Quentin’s recording of Rollo’s response to the Frankish emissary who had asked for the name of their leader. ‘We have no leader. We are equal. You will have to negotiate with all of us.’ But even Rollo, once he had become a respectable, landowning Christian leader, saw the necessity of abandoning the egalitarian model of leadership if his duchy were to survive and prosper.

From his episcopal see hundreds of miles across the sea, Adam of Bremen described the state of affairs in Iceland after the conversion:

The island is very large, and its inhabitants are many; they live entirely from cattle-farming, and wear hides. Nothing can grow there, and there is very little timber. They live in holes below the ground and are content to share what they have with their cattle. They live in a holy simplicity, desiring no more than what nature offers them, and echoing happily the apostle’s words:
And having food and raiment let us be therewith content
. Their mountains are their towns, the bubbling springs their delight. Happy, I tell you, are such people, who envy no one in their poverty.
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