A Brief History of the Vikings (22 page)

The Skraelings were soon back in greater numbers, and openly hostile. The Vikings killed many of them in the ensuing battle, and witnessed a Skraeling chief hurling a captured Viking axe into the lake – purportedly in fear of its magical properties. The saga reports no further trouble from the Skraelings, but Karlsefni was clearly not prepared to take any more chances. Like Thorvald before him, he had successfully
queered his pitch with the locals, and was unwilling to stay in Vinland waiting for the Skraelings to return with reinforcements. The following spring, the Vinland expedition broke camp and sailed back to Greenland, with a cargo of pelts and lumber, but still with no permanent settlement established.

Greenlander Saga
recalls one further attempt by the descendants of Erik the Red to establish a colony in Vinland, this time by his illegitimate daughter Freydis, who may have been one of the women on the Karlsefni expedition. The year after Karlsefni’s return, Freydis convinced two brothers newly arrived from Iceland to join her and her husband on a trip back to Leif’s camp. The Freydis mission, however, went swiftly wrong in what was either a series of highly unfortunate misunderstandings, or the resurgence of the belligerent genes of Erik the Red. Freydis implied that the brothers would be allowed to stay at Leif’s camp in Vinland, but refused to allow them in on arrival, claiming that Leif was renting the base to her crew alone. Although the brothers grudgingly moved to a different camp, an attempt at reconciliation at a sports meeting went similarly sour and ended in a brawl. A final attempt at reconciliation led to a pitched battle between the separate crews; a self-contradictory account in
Greenlander Saga
suggests that Freydis either falsely accused the brothers, or was assaulted by them in the midst of negotiations. Whatever the truth of the matter, Freydis was able to goad her husband and crew into killing their rivals. When only five women remained as witnesses, Freydis dispatched them herself with an axe. The Freydis expedition returned to Greenland the following summer, its survivors clinging to a carefully constructed alibi that the missing Vikings had remained as colonists. Word eventually got out, but Freydis remained unpunished – the aging Leif limiting his retribution to a curse on her descendants.

The disastrous Freydis mission is the last reported attempt at colonizing the area known as Vinland, a land whose historical significance was not truly appreciated until recent times, when its relation to the New World that Christopher Columbus reached in 1492 became apparent. To the people of the eleventh century, Vinland was merely one more place where they could find furs and wood, but simply too dangerous and remote to justify increased attention. In the time it took to reach Leif’s fabled Vinland, a Greenlander vessel could make it all the way to Europe, where Vikings could expect to find a much better price for their pelts and wares. To a trader, it also made sounder economic sense – a merchant could return from Europe with a cargo of even greater value: books, new devices and technology, news itself and fine cloths. A journey to Vinland merely meant an arduous trip to a land populated by potentially limitless numbers of hostile people. Even if the Vikings found someone with whom they could trade, they would only be buying more of the same things they could acquire elsewhere. The discoveries of Leif and his family faded from consciousness. Vinland was still referred to in Icelandic sagas, but it seemed to interest the Icelanders little. Leif, let us not forget, was regarded as headstrong and lucky by the Vikings themselves; we know that he was setting out in an antique ship. As later generations of Greenlanders clung to their increasingly precarious colony, they became more cautious. With ships in dwindling supply, and the children of the original sailors and explorers becoming increasingly land-bound, the Greenlanders developed other priorities.

As the Viking Age gave way to the High Middle Ages, the north Atlantic population was periodically thinned by plague, and the need for new colonies to relieve population pressure never became as great as it had been during the first settlement
of Iceland and Greenland. Later Greenland records of America do not refer to Vinland at all, but merely to Markland, to which occasional trips across the Davis Strait were made to obtain timber, as late as 1347.

We know that King Svein Forkbeard had secured alliances that gave him Denmark, Sweden and allies in Trondheim and what is now Poland. We know that Olaf Crowbone had other ideas, and that the forces of the two warlords were destined, inevitably, to clash. Snorri’s
Heimskringla
, however, chooses to frame their confrontation as a monstrous family feud, beginning with the image of a weeping Danish bride, dragged to a pagan ceremony in a foreign land, perhaps allowing latter-day notions of chivalry and romantic love to influence his account.

As Snorri tells it, the girl in question was Forkbeard’s sister Thyri, promised to Boleslav of Wendland (Poland) as part of a dynastic alliance. But Snorri, unable to resist a good story, claims that Thyri was a devout Christian, who celebrated her unwelcome betrothal to a pagan with a seven-day hunger strike, before fleeing with her Danish retinue in search of
sanctuary. Supposedly, she chose to run to Crowbone, who not only welcomed her as a Christian bride, but resolved to regain the tracts of Poland that had gone to Boleslav as part of her abortive dowry. This is highly unlikely as a motive, and may have been manufactured in later centuries by writers intent on buttressing Crowbone’s good Christian values. Certainly Adam of Bremen and Thietmar of Merseburg seem never to have believed in Crowbone’s conversion, and see no romance or heroism, merely another skirmish over wealth and power.
¹

After sailing his 60 ships through Danish waters with miraculous lack of incident, Crowbone concluded a treaty with Boleslav for the handing over of Thyri’s lands. Boleslav may have known than any deal he made was unlikely to last all that long, or perhaps the deal was genuine, but Boleslav changed his story in the light of later events. Crowbone still had to sail home between the coasts of Sweden and Denmark, and the combined fleets of Forkbeard, his stepson Olof Skötkonung, and the dispossessed earls of Trondheim, were laying in wait.

The preamble to the battle and the battle itself, fought near the unknown island of Svold, occupy the sagas for some time – Snorri, in particular, steals several highly doubtful stories from other times and other wars, all designed to build a sense of the crushing finality of the great naval battle. There were representatives from every part of Scandinavia: independent Trondheimers, heathen Swedes, Christian Danes, the religiously mixed Norwegians, and warriors from other races. Men of Wendland fought on Crowbone’s side, while Snorri reports the presence of a Finnish archer with the Trondheimers, whose lucky shot shattered the bow of one Einar Paunch-shaker. At the time, Einar had been aiming at Earl Erik of Trondheim, whose life was thereby saved.

The battle went on so long, claims Snorri, that the combatants ran out of arrows and spears, and even their swords were too blunt to do much damage, so that Crowbone was forced to hand out fresh weapons to his men. But even though Crowbone’s fleet wrought significant damage on the Swedes and Danes, it was the men of Trondheim who fought most fiercely. In the closing moments of the conflict, the last battle for the right to rule Scandinavia was fought chiefly by Norwegians against Norwegians – the exiled Trondheimers against the man who had usurped their land. Crowbone was wounded in the shoulder, and kept fighting, but his giant warship, the
Long Serpent
, was completely surrounded by enemy vessels. Crowbone was last seen leaping, not falling, over the side of the
Long Serpent
, and disappearing beneath the waves.

There were rumours that he somehow survived, slipping off his mail shirt and swimming for his life, or perhaps escaping on a Wendish vessel that chose that moment to flee the battle. Snorri’s
Heimskringla
, perhaps unwilling to accept an unchristian suicide, cannot resist reporting a folktale that the 32-year-old Crowbone headed south to Byzantium, hoping to reclaim his fortune, but died anonymously in an unknown battle. Whether Crowbone died at the battle of Svold or somehow survived to live a new life under a new identity, he was never seen again by the Vikings. The battle of Svold marked a victory for Forkbeard, and the division of the spoils along familiar lines.

Olof, the son of Erik the Victorious, took Sweden, including the southernmost districts that had previously owed allegiance to Norway. Earl Erik of Trondheim received his father’s lands, while his brother Svein ruled the area to the south – Norway now belonged to Trondheimers. Among the allies of the new rulers was Einar Paunch-shaker – it is a sign of the flexibility
and transience of Viking alliances that the bowman who had supposedly tried to shoot Earl Erik at Svold would soon become his brother-in-law.

Svein Forkbeard now ruled Norway, Sweden and Denmark, either directly or through his allies and relative. The line of Greycloak, Bloodaxe and Fairhair was now all but extinguished, and Forkbeard was able to turn his attentions to the prize he had coveted for almost a decade – the largest concentration of Danes to be found outside Denmark itself. For the next 60 years, England was to become the battleground for the children of the Vikings.

Danish raiders had in fact been constantly harrassing the coasts of England throughout the 990s. In 991, agents of the Pope had tried to enforce a sense of Christian brotherhood between Aethelred Unraed and the Norman leader, Richard the Fearless. However, Richard seemed to prefer the company of his heathen cousins to his English neighbours, and continued to look the other way while Viking fleets put in to Norman ports to restock with provisions, sell their plunder and evade the ineffectual English fleets. Although Crowbone and Forkbeard had gone home to fight over their birthright, others continued to plunder Wessex and East Anglia, and Aethelred Unraed’s attempts to organize resistance were a failure. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
reported particular troubles in Devonshire, Cornwall and Wales in 997, and from a party of Vikings that sailed up the coast the following year, wintering at the Isle of Wight, before following the Kent coast in 999 to the Thames Estuary and heading up the River Medway to attack Rochester. There, the Kent army was supposedly prepared to meet them, but soon fled when faced with superior numbers. On the English side, there were operational disputes among the defenders. Aethelred Unraed had previously raised funds to pay off the Vikings. Now he wanted
to raise funds to repulse them, but the monies do not seem to have been used in the right place. The Peterborough manuscript of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
notes sourly that the Kentish army was forced to retreat because ‘they did not have the help they should have had,’
²
while the Canterbury variant, presumably written with much greater knowledge of local issues, speaks in detail of the money wasted assembling a navy, and marines who arrived late, and watched helplessly from the sea as the Vikings plundered deep inland, where the local armies were now at half-strength. In the end, wrote the chronicler: ‘the ship-army achieved nothing, except the people’s labour, and wasting money, and the emboldening of their enemies.’
³

As in the days of Guthrum’s Great Host, the new raiders benefited from longer stays in their target areas. Instead of random attacks at points of presumed worth, they were able to spend months, even years reconnoitring the best places to attack.

The opening movements of the Danish seizure of England began in intrigue, with a supposed conspiracy against the ill-advised English king, Aethelred Unraed. We do not know if Forkbeard was behind it, or if it was simply the result of increased paranoia. Athelred’s efforts to buy off Danish raids had only served to encourage further attempts at extortion by other Vikings, and at the same time the number of Danes living within England was swelling. Whatever the reason behind it, Aethelred reacted by ordering the Danes to be removed. As he put it:

A decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like weeds amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination.
⁴

The ethnic cleansing began on St Brice’s day, 13 November 1002. There is little evidence of how widespread the killings actually were – we do know that there were still Danes living in England after the massacre, although in some places entire communities of them were killed. In Oxford, some Danes sought sanctuary in the church of St Frideswide, only to have the bloodthirsty locals burn it down around them.

Another victim, presumably with the full knowledge of Aethelred, was one Gunnhild, a high-born Danish lady who had been left with the English king as a hostage. Her killing was regarded as an abrogation of the treaty, and an atrocity that required vengeance. According to legend, she was a sister of Forkbeard – another luckless (probably non-existent) sibling used as an excuse, like Thyri, for another war.
⁵

Forkbeard arrived in England at the head of a fleet of ships in 1003, determined to avenge his alleged sister’s death – the murder of a Danish princess, we can assume, would require a hefty
manngjöld
, and one that would be most usefully spent in securing Forkbeard’s newly acquired territories in the Baltic. Nowhere is the folly of Aethelred’s actions more clear, not only in the vengeance it inspired from Forkbeard, but also in what followed. For the strongest resistance to Forkbeard’s fleet came from the Danes themselves, that sector of the population Aethelred most feared. Although the Danelaw may have made Aethelred uneasy, there were still Danes who called it home, and did not take kindly to attacks by sea-raiders. After attacking places in Devon and along the coast, he made the made the mistake of attacking East Anglia.