The Vikings (57 page)

18

Heathendom’s last bastion

Harald Hardrada has a claim to be regarded as the last great leader of the age whose mode of living warrants the description ‘Viking’. His adventures took him from the icy wastes of the Barents Sea to the sweltering heat of the Mediterranean. After the battle at Stiklestad and his sojourn at Prince Jaroslav’s court he left Russia in 1034 and travelled to Constantinople at the head of a band of 500 men to join the emperor’s Varangian Guard. For most of the following six years he fought against the Saracens, latterly on the island of Sicily. He was also in action against the Normans in southern Italy. In 1041 he helped the Emperor Michael IV against the Bulgars. Having amassed a personal fortune he returned in the following year to Kiev, where his machinations to gain a share of Norway began. Up until this point his ‘Viking credentials’ are impeccable. It is when these machinations prove successful and he emerges, first as joint ruler of Norway with Magnus the Good in 1046, and then as sole ruler on Magnus’s death the year after, that he sheds his Viking skin to become a king, following the classic career trajectory outlined by so many of the subjects of Snorri Sturluson’s
History of the Kings of Norway
. So it was as a king, about a king’s business of trying to press his claim to a crown he genuinely believed he had a right to, that he died in battle at Stamford Bridge in 1066. A better candidate for the title of ‘the last Viking’ might be the Swedish adventurer Ingvar, known as the Far-Travelled, who led an expedition in about 1036 across the Baltic and all the way down through Russia to the Black Sea. On the way back disaster struck the group and only one man returned to tell their story. The surviving documentation of this ill-fated expedition is one of the most dramatic and remarkable monuments of the whole Viking Age. Twenty-six rune-stones record the deaths of twenty named members of the expedition. Twenty-three are still standing, most of them in the Lake Mälaren region of Uppland in Sweden.
¹
The most renowned of the ‘Ingvar stones’ is probably the Gripsholm stone, found by a Swedish runologist in 1827 in the basement of the castle at Gripsholm where, covered in tar, it was being used as a threshold.
²
The stone was cleaned and, in 1930, moved to stand by the driveway to the castle. Framed within the outlines of a coiled snake, the inscription gives a succinct picture of the standards of manhood associated with the Viking Age, and a proof of the persistence of these values:

(Tola had this stone raised in memory of her son Harald, Ingvar’s brother).
³

Ingvar himself died on this expedition, so it seems Tola either used the term ‘brother’ in the sense in which it often occurs on such memorials, as a ‘brother-in-arms’ or sworn companion in a joint enterprise; or else that Ingvar had the same father as Harald, but someone other than Tola as his mother. The six lines that follow the plain statement of names are in the verse form known as
fornyrdislag
, with recurring alliterations that bind the lines together. The adjective
drængila
is intimately connected with the Viking Age’s ideal of a manly way of being. The reference to providing food for the eagle conveys Harald’s valour by referring to the men he killed in the east as dead bodies upon which the eagle might feast. ‘Serkland’ was the name the Vikings gave to the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian, home of the Saracens, whose robes seemed to them like long, flowing shirts.

On an inscribed rune-stone at the church at Svinnegarn, in Uppland, the proud parents of a Viking named Banki remembered their lost son:
⁴

ialfi ok Holmlaug letu ræisa stæina essa alla at Banka, sun sinn. Es atti æinn seR skip ok austr styr
ð
i i Ingvars li
ð
. Gu
ð
hialpi and Banka/Bagga. Æskell ræist

 

(jalfi and Holmlaug had all these stones raised in memory of Banki, their son. He owned his own ship and sailed east with Ingvar’s force. May God help Banki’s spirt. Æskell carved.)

While no rune-stones commemorate peaceful journeys and trading expeditions, the self-consciously heroic tone of the Gripsholm memorial is absent from the brief Svinnegarn inscription. Only the word
li
ð conveys the fact that this was a military expedition. Some of the ‘Ingvar stones’, like the one at Gredby, are classically concise: ‘
GunnulfR ræisti stæin
þ
annsi at Ulf, fa
ð
ur sinn. Hann vaR i faru me
ð
Ingvari
’. (‘Gunnulv raised this stone in memory of Ulv, his father. He travelled with Ingvar’.)
⁵
With just a change of names, the inscription on the Balsta stone is practically identical.
⁶

Beyond telling us that it was in search of profit (gold), none of the inscriptions goes into detail about the purpose of the expedition, or the cause of death of its members. In a remarkable act of collaboration across the ages, an Icelandic saga, copied towards the end of the thirteenth century from a lost earlier manuscript, joins up the dots of these scattered stones to tell a coherent story which, despite the occasional presence of obviously fictional elements such as the appearance of a dragon and a giant, probably preserves a core of truth from an oral history of this ill-fated adventure until it could be written down.
⁷
According to his saga, Ingvar was a precocious child who left home at the age of nine to broker a peace between Øymund his father, and Øymund’s old rival Olof Sköttkonung, king of the Swedes. He spent a few years in the
hird
of the Swedish king and distinguished himself in an action to restore Olof’s tributary rights over a tribe in Latvia. At the age of twenty he travelled away in search of a kingdom of his own. With thirty ships he crossed the Baltic and made his way to the Kievan court of Prince Jaroslav. Three years later he was on the move again, leading his men on a journey south in which he hoped to trace three unnamed rivers to their sources. This is a rare instance in saga literature of sheer curiosity being given as the motive for an adventure, and it sounds a faint echo of the Norwegian Ottar and the hazardous voyage he made around the northern tip of his country which was likewise motivated by curiosity alone. Along one of the rivers, Ingvar and his men came to a city of white marble over which a beautiful queen, named Silkisiv, ruled. She was a Heathen, like all the other women in the city, and Ingvar forbade his men to have anything to do with any of them. A few who disobeyed him were killed to re-establish his authority. Queen Silkisiv fell in love with Ingvar and offered him her kingdom and herself. No doubt promising himself he would see to her conversion first, he accepted her offer but postponed the marriage until he had first found the source of the river.

With the passing of winter he sailed on. A Greek king provided him with further information about the sources of the rivers, and about a year later his ships finally reached their goal, at a place called Lindibelti. The expeditionaries were attacked by local pirates who showered them with ‘Greek fire’. The saga tells us that Ingvar took up his bow and shot back at them, using some kind of consecrated fire-arrows which successfully drove off the attackers. On their way back up the river, Ingvar’s men were visited by a group of women. In defiance of Ingvar’s warnings, eighteen of them lay with the women and in the morning were found dead in their beds. What remained of the party travelled on. Plague broke out among them and more died. Ingvar himself died. By now there were only twelve of the original fleet of thirty ships left. With the loss of their leader, disagreement broke out among the survivors about which direction to take for home. They split up but only one man, the Icelander Ketil, made it back to Gardarike. ‘We don’t know which way the others sailed,’ says the storyteller, ‘because most people think the ships sank.’ Ketil eventually made his way home to Iceland, where he told his story and where, in due course, it came to be written down. The saga says that Ingvar was twenty-five years old when he died in 1041, and that this was eleven winters after the fall of Olav Haraldson at the battle of Stiklestad.

In the
Gesta Hamaburgensis
, Adam of Bremen tells a brief tale that has clear connections with the fate of Ingvar and his men. Citing as his source Bishop Adalward of Sigtuna, known as ‘the Younger’, in the same Lake Mälaren region as the main concentration of Ingvar stones, Adam writes of a military expedition sent by the Swedish king across the Baltic in search of territorial gain. The ships reached a territory Adam calls ‘the land of women’, where the leader and all his following were wiped out when the women poisoned the source of their drinking water.
⁸

From the information given in the saga concerning Ingvar’s time at the court of Jaroslav the Wise, he may well have been among the Varangians who helped Jaroslav drive away a huge army of Pechenegs that was laying siege to Kiev in 1036.
⁹
The saga also mentions the group’s participation in a war in the more distant east, where they helped a king put down a rebellion led by his brother. This has been related to an entry in the old Georgian chronicle,
Kartlis tsovreba
, which describes the arrival, in the early 1040s, of a Varangian army at a place called Bashi, on the river Rioni, in Georgia. Seven hundred soldiers of the army joined a Georgian king, Bagrat, on his advance further into the country with the aim of putting down a rebellion led by his brother. There was a battle in the forest at Sasirethi, a few miles west of Tbilisi, now the Georgian capital, at which Bagrat’s forces were defeated. The Varangians came to an agreement with the victors, set off westwards and disappeared from the record.
¹⁰
Though the river-journey as described does not correspond particularly well with the Volga, another possibility is that Ingvar and his men were Varangians sponsored by Prince Jaroslav to re-open trade routes along the lower reaches of the river which had become too dangerous to use because of the threat of nomadic tribesmen in the region.

In the final analysis all we know for certain is that twenty named men, from the Lake Mälaren region of eastern Sweden, died while on a journey through Russia under the leadership of a certain Ingvar. A cautious use of his saga as a source might allow us to add that Ingvar and his men left Sweden for Kiev and travelled on to the Black Sea. From there they probably sailed the Transcaucasian rivers until they reached the Caspian Sea. On their way home again the survivors of the journey fell victim to disease and poisoning, whether deliberate or accidental, and died. In its ambition, its obscurity and its ultimate failure, Ingvar’s expedition is an appropriate symbol of the end of the large-scale, private-enterprise military activity that was perhaps the most significant defining characteristic of the Viking Age. In the words of the Gripsholm stone, ‘they travelled far for gold’.

 

Of the three Scandinavian peoples in the Viking Age, it is the Swedes who most successfully remain hidden behind the swirl and chaos of history. Among the Svear and Gautar the art of skaldic poetry was not cultivated to anything like the extent it was among Norwegians and Icelanders; and in the centuries following the Viking Age no Swedish Snorri Sturluson or Saxo Grammaticus took it upon himself to write their early history. What the Swedes did have, by way of compensation, was a culture of raising rune-stones to commemorate the dead, and sometimes the living, to a degree that far exceeds anything in Norway or Denmark. The little we know of Viking Age Swedes derives largely from the histories and poems composed by other Scandinavians in which their kings and leaders play a part, from Rimbert’s ‘Life’ of the ninth-century missionary Anskar, and from what can be gleaned from the inscriptions on these rune-stones. The dramatic flourishing of the fashion, from the middle of the tenth century to its decline around the beginning of the twelfth century, has been attributed to the renown of King Harald Bluetooth’s Jelling stone, in Jutland in Denmark; but it was among the Swedes that the art reached its apotheosis. About 2,500 examples from the period have survived in Sweden, compared with some 220 in Denmark, a mere handful in Norway and none at all in Iceland.

Where the Ingvar stones are most evocative of our conventional ideas about the Viking Age is in their terseness and monumentality; the carving of an eagle’s head on one stone intensifies its aura of Heathen exoticism. But it stands guard alone, heavily outnumbered by the references on at least eleven other stones to the Christian God, as well as the Christian crosses carved on several of them. The saga’s depiction of Ingvar as an exceptionally pious Christian is an obvious exaggeration, but there is no reason to doubt that he and the majority of his party were baptized men. And yet, to a much greater degree than among either the Danes or the Norwegians, both of whom were by this time irrevocably members of the community of Christian peoples in Europe, Christianity among the Swedes was still struggling to establish the exclusive dominance which its dogma required. Perhaps it was that the territory was more remote; or that the spiritual centre of the whole cult of the Aesir was located at the temple in Gamla Uppsala (Old Uppsala) in Sweden.

The rapidity and scale of the conversions carried out under Harald Bluetooth in Denmark, and Olaf Tryggvason and Olav Haraldson in Norway, owed everything to the fact that they were native kings. Adam of Bremen quotes Sven Estridson, who succeeded Magnus the Good as king of Denmark in 1047, as advising the Hamburg-Bremen Bishop Adalbert against carrying out a plan to undertake a great missionary journey through the Scandinavian lands, on the grounds that ‘the Heathens are more willing to be converted by someone who speaks their own language and who observes the same customs as themselves, than by foreigners who object to their way of life’.
¹¹
By the middle of the eleventh century, no such determined, native, missionary king had yet risen among the Swedes, though there had been kings, like the Emund mentioned by Adam of Bremen, who were favourably disposed towards Christianity;
¹²
and Erik Segersäll, or ‘the Victorious’, whose victory in 988 over Styrbjørn Starke, in a battle near Uppsala, is referred to on rune-stones. Ingvar’s saga makes the credible claim that Erik was the great-grandfather of Ingvar the Far-Travelled.