The Vikings (6 page)

These greater and smaller feasts were important social and religious institutions that bound communities together under their chieftain-priests in symbolic acts of feasting, eating and worshipping. They were also occasions on which the important matter of the law was dealt with. The Old Norse gods were not ethical beings. Ethics were the province of man and the law. The word ‘
synd
’ (sin) does not appear in any Viking Age literary source until as late as about 1030, when the poet Torarin Lovtunge in his ‘Glælognskvida’ described the Norwegian saint-king Olav Haraldson as having died a ‘sinless death’.
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Viking Age ethics were based on the opposition of shame and honour. Openness was the keynote of the oldest surviving codes, and though these were written down in post-Heathen times there is no reason to doubt that they convey the spirit of the ages that preceded them.
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Whether it be a business deal or a divorce, the requirement of the law for a large number of witnesses was always present, underscoring the role of shame in discouraging anyone inclined to go back on an agreement entered into so publicly. The distinction drawn between crimes committed openly and in secret marks an even clearer example of the use of shame to maintain social order. That bad actions are not always the work of bad people was recognized by the requirement that manslaughter be declared in front of witnesses within a specific time after the killing. The law obliged the killer to report the deed to the first person he or she met afterwards, although they could, if they wished, avail themselves of an exemption that allowed them to pass by two houses - but not a third - if they suspected that relatives of the dead person lived there, before making their confession. If the proper procedures were followed, the killing could be atoned for by compensation.
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Murder, on the other hand, was a dishonourable act, committed in secret, unacknowledged and liable to set in train a cycle of revenge killings. An Old Norse proverb delivered the legal distinction poetically:
náttvíg eru mor
ð
víg
(‘killing by night is murder’). Unannounced killings were, by definition, murder.

Communal responsibility was further promoted by laws that made personal involvement mandatory in certain circumstances: any persons who witnessed an accidental death and failed to report it to the family and heirs of the deceased were likely to find themselves facing an accusation of murder. One section of the law of the west-Norwegian Gulathing, whose writ ran from Stad in the north to Egersund in the south, dealt with a killing done in an ale-house. Whether it happened by daylight or by firelight, all those present were obliged to join in apprehending the culprit. Failure to do so entrained a compensation payment to the relatives of the victim, making it in the financial interests of all present to ensure the killer was caught. A thief surprised in the act of stealing might legally be killed, but not a robber, whose crime was committed face-to-face. The rationale, in this culture of self-reliance, was that the victim of a robbery had in principle at least a fair chance of preventing it. Under the laws of both the Gulathing and the Frostathing, at which the people of the Trøndelag region gathered to do business, the punishment of criminals was likewise a communal responsibility. A thief convicted of a petty offence had to run a gauntlet of stones and turf. The thirteenth-century Bjarkøyretten that regulated local affairs in Trondheim even stipulated the fine to be paid by anyone who failed to throw something at the thief.

The practice of oath-taking in courts of law likewise showed the strong natural inclination towards the involvement of the whole community. Depending on the seriousness of his or her crime, an accused person might be asked to give one of four grades of oaths requiring the support of, respectively, one, two, five or eleven compurgators or supporters, with a twelve-fold oath being used in the extreme case of murder. They were not necessarily swearing to anything that had a bearing on the facts of the case in hand. Essentially they were character witnesses, affirming their belief in the honesty of the person giving the oath. Strict rules governed the process of oath-taking, and any breach of them made the oath invalid.

The most striking deviation from this adherence to communal responsibility involved kings. The price paid by some early Yngling kings for claiming descent from the gods was to be blamed when the gods turned against their followers and blighted the crops, emptied the seas of fish or in some other way brought famine and ill-luck on the tribe. Snorri tells us that in the reign of the legendary King Domaldi in Sweden an enduring famine occurred that occasioned a hierarchy of sacrifices. It began with oxen, proceeded to men and, when none of this had any effect, culminated in the sacrifice of the king himself. Nor were substitutes acceptable:
Gautrek’s Saga
, preserved in a number of manuscripts dating from the early fifteenth century, tells the remarkable tale of an attempt to regain Odin’s favour by the mock-sacrifice of a certain King Vikar, whose name in Norwegian means ‘substitute’. The guts of a slaughtered calf were looped around his neck instead of rope, and tethered to a twig. Instead of the point of a spear, a blade of straw was jabbed against his side. The dedication was announced: ‘Now I give you to Odin.’ Instantly the straw turned into a spear that penetrated the king’s side, the tree-stub he was standing on turned into a stool that tumbled over, and the intestines became a stout rope. The twig flexed and thickened and the king was dragged high into the air. The similarities to the scene described in pictures on the Hammars stone are striking.

Domaldi’s son Domar was luckier than his father. Snorri tells us Domar

ruled for a long time, and there were good seasons and peace in his days. About him nothing else is told, but that he died in his bed in Uppsala, was borne to Fyrisvold, and burned there on the river bank where his standing-stone is.
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For a king to die peacefully in this way was the sign of a happy and prosperous reign. This explains the apparent anomaly in Snorri’s biography of the euhemeristic Odin, in which this greatest of all warriors is reported to have died in his bed.

As these stories show, Scandinavian Heathens were fatalists who nevertheless believed that the gods might be prepared to change their fates if only the gifts offered were rich enough. This belief that fate might be changed also manifested itself at the day-to-day level, where the sorcerer’s art of
seid
was much prized as a way of trying to influence the working of fate in the personal sphere.
Seid
was a form of divination closely related to shamanism that sought access to secret knowledge of hidden things, whether in the mind or in the physical world. In its ‘white’ form it could be used to heal the sick, control the weather and call up fish and game before the hunter. Its ‘black’ form had the power to raise the dead, curse an enemy and blight his land, raise up storms against him and destroy his or her luck in love and in war. In both his euhemeristic and his divine manifestations Odin was a master of the art. His skill as a shape-changer enabled him to transform himself into a fish, a bird, a beast or snake and transport himself over vast distances. It gave him knowledge of the future and the power to enter grave-mounds, bind the dead and take from them whatever treasures he wanted. He could control fire with it and order the wind to change direction.
Seid
gave him the power to strike his enemies in battle blind or deaf, blunt their weapons and freeze them in terror. He could imbue his followers with such strength and courage in battle that they turned into raging berserks, wild men able to kill with one blow, as strong as bears and as savage as wolves, disdaining the use of armour and in their ecstatic fury impervious to all harm. In Snorri’s words:

From these arts [Odin] became very celebrated. His enemies dreaded him; his friends put their faith in him and relied on his power and on himself. He taught most of his arts to his priests of the sacrifices, and they came nearest to him in sorcery. Many others, however, occupied themselves much with it; and from that time sorcery spread far and wide, and continued long.
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‘He and his temple priests were called song-smiths, for from them came that art of song into the northern countries,’ Snorri adds, and perhaps these songs were the chants that Adam of Bremen judged too shocking to repeat in his history. Their importance in Heathen ritual is reflected in the prohibition in the post-Heathen Gulathing law against
galdresang
or ‘spell-chanting’, which was punishable by banishment.

Despite the powers
seid
conferred on its user, Snorri tells us that in time it was felt to compromise masculinity so profoundly that it presently became the province of women, and possibly of homosexual men. In a disapproving reference in the
Gesta Danorum
to the ceremonies at ‘Uppsala in the period of sacrifices’, Saxo Grammaticus writes of the ‘soft tinkling of bells’ and the ‘womanish body movements’ of the participants. Like Adam he too mentions the role of chanting. In one of the Eddic poems, ‘Loki’s Quarrel’, in which Loki ritually heaps insults upon each of the Aesir, it is for his feminizing practice of
seid
that Loki attacks Odin when his turn comes:

An account in the twelfth-century
Historia Norwegie
of a shamanistic seance among the Lapps may shed some light on the sexual ambiguity of the sort of performance Loki was mocking:

Once when some Christians were among the Lapps on a trading trip, they were sitting at table when their hostess suddenly collapsed and died. The Christians were sorely grieved but the Lapps, who were not at all sorrowful, told them that she was not dead but had been snatched away by the
gandi
of rivals and that they themselves would soon retrieve her. Then a wizard spread out a cloth under which he made himself ready for unholy magic incantations and with hands extended lifted up a small vessel like a sieve, which was covered with images of whales and reindeer with harness and little skis, even a little boat with oars. The devilish
gandus
would use these means of transport over heights of snow, across slopes of mountains and through depths of lakes. After dancing there for a very long time to endow this equipment with magic power, he at last fell to the ground, as black as an Ethiopian and foaming at the mouth like a madman.
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The great power attached to being a sorcerer is one possible explanation for the sumptuous nature of the Oseberg ship-burial.
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Among the arguments advanced for identifying one of the women as a sorceress are the find of a peculiarly ornate kind of staff associated with witchcraft, and four seeds of
cannabis sativa
. Such an identification might also shed light on the hitherto unexplained function of the iron wrangle or rattle found in the grave - four iron hoops threaded on to a barred handle that might have been vigorously shaken to drive away malignant spirits. Medical tests carried out on the remains of the women in 2007 and 2008 showed that the older of the two suffered from a hormonal imbalance which probably rendered her sterile, at the same time promoting a strong growth of hair, including facial hair. At the age of about fifteen she appears to have sustained severe damage to her left knee, perhaps as the result of a bad fall, from which she emerged a semi-invalid who must have walked with a heavy limp. Professor Per Holck’s analysis has shown a striking over-development of the musculature of her upper arms consistent with the long-term use of crutches. Perhaps this set of physical abnormalities, combined with a striking personality, defined her status as a sorceress for a community that saw them as the visible signs of her rare and magical ability to inhabit the worlds of both male and female.
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As part of the ritual of worship, as transport, as beast of burden, as food and as companion, the importance of the horse in the culture of northern Heathendom can hardly be overestimated. Viking Age cosmology fancied the sun drawn across the sky by two of them, Alsvinn, ‘the Speedy’, and Arvakr, ‘the Wakeful’. Odin rode on an eight-legged grey named Sleipnir that was as quick over sea as land, and the identification of the ship as ‘the horse of the sea’ was one of the staple metaphors used by skaldic poets. Much like the modern car, the horse was a status symbol. A verse in ‘The Sayings of the High One’ made the point in negative fashion:

The Viking Age horse had a shorter back and thicker neck than the modern horse, and with an average height of just under 2 metres it was not much bigger than a large pony of today. The modern Icelandic horse is its direct and almost unchanged descendant, with its characteristic thick mane and tail and five gaits: walking, trotting, galloping, flying, and the unique fifth gait known as
tolting
, a sort of running walk with a low knee-action which enabled horse and rider to cover long distances without tiring. This was particularly useful in Iceland, where the lack of timber for ship-building meant that riding rather than sailing was the preferred method of travelling along the coast. The horse played a large part in the sporting life of these people. In the
Saga of Sigurd the Crusader and his brothers Eystein and Olaf
, Snorri describes, with his usual gusto, a series of races run for a wager between King Harald Gille of Norway on foot and his nephew Magnus Sigurdsson on horseback. The fact that Harald emerged as winner tells us that, for all its strength, good nature and endurance, the horse was small and not especially quick.
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Horse-fighting was a popular sport and the drama of one of the most frequently anthologized short stories from Iceland,
Thorstein the Staff-struck
, derives from tempers lost following an incident during a horse-fight. Horses were raced against each other too. In England the names Hesketh Grange, in Thornton Hough, and Heskeths at Irby, in the Wirral, both derive from Old Norse
hestur
, ‘horse’, and
skeid
, ‘track’, and both preserve the memory of Viking Age racetracks at these locations.
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