A Brief History of the Vikings (10 page)

In 840, Louis died, resulting in a struggle for the succession between his sons Lothar, Charles the Bald and Louis the German. The northern coast of Europe, formerly a risky target for Scandinavian raiders, was left undefended as the Franks warred among themselves. The Danes lost little time in taking advantage of the weakness of their former adversary, pushing south with a fleet of ships to attack and destroy Hamburg. Anskar escaped with his life, and undertook another mission in 849. By now the Franks were, again, no longer an ally to trifle with, and the Danish king Horik, an aging man with strife in his own family, accepted a new mission from the Christians. He may have hoped, or indeed been promised, that openness to missionaries would bring political advantages. When he died, his sons killed each other in a series of bloody conflicts, until a single survivor, Horik the Younger, ascended the throne in 853. Despite pressure from a heathen faction within his kingdom, Horik the Younger not only continued his father’s permissive attitude towards the Christians, but even allowed the rebuilt Hedeby
church to have a bell, the sound of which was an alien and unwelcome thing to the local heathens.

Each time Christians were in Denmark for any lengthy period, we gain a glimpse of the heathen population from the missionaries’ writings. From notes made by Anskar and his successor Rimbert, and from reports made by other Christians, we know that Denmark by the late ninth century was not the monolithic single kingdom implied by earlier dealings with the Franks. In fact, we are not even sure if Godfred was the ruler of all Denmark at the start of the epoch, although
someone
in the region had certainly been powerful enough to organize the construction of the Danevirke. After the death of Horik the Elder, it is far more likely that there were a number of ‘kings’ not of Denmark but
in
Denmark, and is even possible that Horik the Younger’s brothers were not eliminated as other accounts imply.

According to the chronicler Adam of Bremen, Denmark had at least two ‘kings’ in 873, and they too were supposedly brothers, Sigfred and Halfdan.
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Wherever they may have reigned, they were at constant odds with other rulers, most likely dotted among the Danish islands, since the prime activity of the rival ‘kings’ was said to be piracy. In other words, we see Denmark assuming the characteristics for which it was associated throughout the Viking Age: a series of domains ruled by rival chiefs, occasionally giving allegiance to the most powerful overlords, but generally in conflict with each other.

By the 890s, the answer to exactly who was in charge of Denmark eluded the kings themselves. No less an authority than Svein Estridsen, who claimed descent from the kings of the period and in his own time became ruler of Denmark himself late in the eleventh century, was reportedly unable to say for sure which of his ancestors had ruled when when questioned on the matter by the chronicler Adam of Bremen.
There are confused references to a peaceful king called Helgi, soon supplanted by Olaf, a Swede who ousted this rightful ruler. Olaf’s two sons split the realm between them, although Sweden seemed to be in other hands by then. Before long, the usurper Hardegon took all Denmark for himself.

Whatever the truth of it, by 900 the Swedes were in a position to take control of certain Danish areas for themselves. They were less interested in the island enclaves and Jutland farms than they were in Hedeby, a centre of trade that many of them would have visited with merchant ships from Gotland and points east. For a while, the area was under Swedish control, but in 935, when we enter a better documented period with some relief, Denmark was back in Danish hands.

When the internecine struggles were finally over and missionaries were able to visit and report once more on Denmark, the land was resolutely pagan, thanks chiefly to its leader Gorm the Old. Gorm had no time for the new-fangled Christians; instead he had purged Denmark of many petty kings and warlords, until, it appears, just one remained, an earl in northern Jutland. Gorm married the earl’s daughter Thyri, and their son inherited the lands of them both. Thyri’s tombstone at the ancient burial site of Jelling refers to her, or perhaps her husband, as the ‘Glory’ or ‘Improvement’ of Denmark, the first time that a Danish source had referred to the region by that name – earlier references had all been in the work of foreign authors.

But while Gorm was a pagan, his son Harald Bluetooth would accept Christianity into his kingdom and his life. By now, the political advantages were impossible to ignore. Christianity was gaining sway all over Europe, and sentiments of Christian brotherhood were much more useful to the beleaguered ruler than yet another round of squabbles. Acceptance of Christianity, even in name only, effectively shut off
a number of political conflicts along Harald’s southern borders.

Harald Bluetooth also ensured that his rule was strictly enforced. His reign saw the construction of five gigantic circular forts, two in Jutland, one in southern Sweden, one on Fyn, and the last at Trelleborg in Zealand. The design of these ‘Trelleborg’ forts seemed inspired by similar constructions in the realm of the Franks, massive defensive works, protecting an inner area that formed a military base and place of trade.
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Most importantly, the Trelleborg forts were an impressive symbol of kingly power, and are thought to have functioned as places to collect the king’s tax. Harald Bluetooth had moved away from the old wandering collection of plunder that characterized his ancestors, and instead made a decisive step towards Denmark as a centralized kingdom.

The Christian rulers to the south became his spiritual brothers, everyone was friends, trade flowed and everything was peaceful again, except that is for the dispossessed heathens, who carried out a series of raids on the rest of Europe; Harald could wash his hands of responsibility for them, since they were outlaws and his loyal subjects were Christians. Harald Bluetooth’s acceptance of Christianity brought Denmark into the Christian realm; it effectively moved the border of conversion several hundred miles north. The Danes had a new excuse to prey upon the heathens of Norway.

If claims in
The Saga of the People of Laxardal
are anything to go by, the Norwegians had long been raiding the coasts of the Scottish isles.
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DNA evidence from the Orkneys and Shetlands presents an even clearer indication: these have not only many Scandinavian place names, but also the highest concentration of Norwegian DNA outside Scandinavia. A debate still rages, however, about the nature of the Viking settlement there. Local sheep have interbred with Norse sheep to create a unique strain, but for Norwegian sheep to be on the islands in the first place, they would have to be brought there by ship. Many of the Vikings on the Shetlands and Orkneys not only raided, but also stayed.

The Orkney Islands have given up several ship burials. In 1991, on the north-eastern island of Sanday, excavation commenced on what turned out to be a family ship burial – a man, woman and child. The man was buried with the
accoutrements of a warring life, the woman with tools and materials for housekeeping and weaving. Her brooch was a Scandinavian design, dating to the middle of the ninth century, precisely the time when Viking raiders would have had a whole generation to reconnoitre their targets, and perhaps decide to settle in one of them. The Orkneys would have been an especially tempting prospect for a Viking. They were sufficiently distant from the upheavals in Scandinavia, but still within sailing distance should the need arise. They are also islands, and no Viking willingly settled in a location that didn’t guarantee him some sense of defensive security.

Much of the scattered signs of Viking habitation in the Orkneys are relatively recent – runic graffiti in a burial mound, for example, whose carvers boast they are on their way to Jerusalem, presumably at the time of the Crusades.
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Orkneyinga Saga
, an account of life in the islands until the twelfth century, only recounts bizarre legends for the early period. For the time the first pioneers were building their crofts and appeasing or fighting with the islands’ Pictish natives, their later skalds could only discuss a strange creation myth that places the families’ origins in the lands of the Finns and the Kainu. By the time the
Orkneyinga Saga
begins in earnest in the ninth century, the Vikings have already been in the region for a generation or so. Runic and circumstantial evidence suggests that they overwhelmed the local population, but not necessarily in an openly belligerent way. Pictish words persisted in the local language, implying that at least part of the next generation was reared by local girls. Unlike many other Viking settlements, however, some of the men in the Orkneys do appear to have arrived with their Scandinavian wives. Orkney and Shetland were colonization attempts, and successful ones, that would eventually form the bridge to points even further east. As time went on, the Vikings would also infest the
northern extremities of Scotland – Caithness, Sutherland and, in the west, the Hebrides. From there it was but a short trip to another Viking stronghold the Isle of Man, and then Ireland.

The Vikings found a different kind of world in Ireland – if anything, it was one into which they fitted quite well. Like Scotland, Ireland had been largely unaffected by the Romans. It was a barbarian region of independent crofts and homesteads, widely separated without intermediate places of exchange that deserved the name of town or village. Instead, local overlords afforded ‘protection’ (or rather, extorted protection money) from the nearby settlements. The political unit was the clan (
tuath
), and the symbol of local authority was a fortified island (
crannog
) or a ring-fort (
rath
). One ‘high king’ supposedly ruled over all the others, although such suzerainty was often a subject of some argument among several contenders and rival families, often with as many as five simultaneous candidates. At the time of the arrival of the Vikings, the Ui-Neill clan’s hold on power was beginning to fragment, while the rulers of the Munster region were gaining control of an increasingly larger territory.

Christianity already held sway in Ireland, but Irish monks were often as belligerent as their secular countrymen, even involving themselves in battles. In the seventh century, the Ionan monk St Adamnan felt obliged to issue a directive against monks, women and children participating in battles. Nor were the Irish strangers to the idea of plundering monasteries. Raiding parties, seeking to rob rival clans of cattle, produce or other wealth, were not merely a known, but an accepted part of the Irish year – in their attacks on their enemies, they were as seasonally predictable as the Vikings themselves. Since monasteries were affiliated to clans, and often used as repositories of wealth, primitive precursors of modern banks, it was not unknown for them to be targets.
Whereas the very idea of raiding a monastery was a terrible sin in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxons, to the Irish it was not an unthinkable idea.
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When the Vikings first arrived as isolated plundering parties on the coast, few of the local clans permitted this to distract them from their ongoing family feuds. It was only a generation later, when the raiding parties were transformed into much larger fleets, that the Irish began to take notice. By the 830s, the Vikings were arriving in greater numbers, staying for longer, and even over-wintering in Ireland ready for a second season of raiding. Ireland’s rivers and lakes permitted them to travel deep into the country. In a land that had never been conquered by the Romans, roads were all but unknown. The most reliable form of travel was by boat, so monasteries and homesteads clustered by the riverbanks all the way into the interior. The Vikings were able to sail their ships deep into Ireland and take what they wanted, although not without local resistance.

Longships in force plundered Armagh in 832. The following year, they were back in Louth, Columcille and south as far as Lismore in Waterford. By 834, they had clearly decided that pickings were rich in the south, and the
Annals of Ulster
report a series of raids in County Wicklow.

Around the same time in the twelfth century that the saga-writers of Iceland were reaching their literary peak, a similar endeavour in Ireland attempted to chronicle the history of the Irish. The result was the highly unreliable
Wars of the Irish with the Foreigners
, which told the tale of the arrival of the Vikings from the point of view of just one of the ruling dynasties, to the detriment of any role played by others like the Ui-Neill.
The Wars of the Irish
presents the Vikings as vicious raiders descending from the sea, much the same as the English chronicles. But as with the English chronicles, the later
Irish writers only gave one side of the story. The Vikings were not always unwelcome and, in fact, many of them were hired by local clans intent on defeating their rivals, and fought as mercenaries with the promise of plunder and land to settle. Intermarriage between Viking men and Irish women seems to have been commonplace at all social levels, from the lowliest warrior to the highest king. In recent times, archaeologists have been forced to rethink their earlier assumptions – it is no longer assumed that if a Viking grave is found to contain Irish wealth, then that must have been stolen. Some of the Norse killing in Ireland was done at the instigation of and with the approval of some of the Irish themselves.
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The Viking assaults increased in the 830s thanks to the arrival of a war leader that the locals call Turgeis, presumed by linguists to have been a corruption of Thorgils or perhaps Thorgest. Had he survived to bring his wealth and power back to Scandinavia, he might have gained himself some fawning skalds and a saga that cleared up such questions. We can only piece together his life from references in the literature of his enemies. Sifting through the contradictory references, comparing rival chronicles and archaeological evidence, we gather that someone with such a name arrived on Ireland’s far western shore and sailing deep inland up the River Shannon, plundered the cream of the local monasteries, the inhabitants of which must have regarded themselves as safe from pirate assault, since they were often as much as 100 miles inland.