A Brief History of the Vikings (3 page)

The term ‘Viking’ is thought to originate with the Scandinavians themselves, in the Old Norse nouns
víking
(a pirate raid) and
víkingr
(a pirate). But how those terms came to mean what they did remains a mystery – scholars still disagree over whether they have their origin in the verb
víkja
(to move swiftly), or the noun
vík
(an inlet or bay). In the latter case it may refer specifically to one bay in particular, the Vik, that
leads to the site of modern Oslo. Or, the word may have a different root, leading back through the Anglo-Saxon
wic
to the Latin
vicus
, a place of trade.

Whatever its origins, the term itself was unknown in English until the nineteenth century – the
Oxford English Dictionary
does not record an appearance until 1807 – and remained little used for several decades thereafter.
¹¹
However, by the latter half of the Victorian era, we see a veritable explosion of Viking-related books resting heavily for their inspiration on translations of the sagas of Iceland, particularly Samuel Laing’s landmark
Heimskringla
, an account of the early kings of Norway, published in 1844, and reprinted with substantially greater success in 1889.

These Viking tales were publishing gold to the Victorians – lurid and violent, yet also somehow worthy and educational, they rode the waves of the emergent mass publishing industry, finding enthusiastic readers and rewriters in fields ranging from science fiction to music – it is a paper found inside a copy of
Heimskringla
that inspires Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(1864), and
Heimskringla
itself that informs Edward Elgar’s
Scenes from the Life of King Olaf
(1896).

However,
Heimskringla
was not as accurate as Laing first purported it to be. Tellingly, his first edition was called the
Chronicle
of the Kings of Norway
, while the 1889 reprint preferred the title
Sagas
of the Norse Kings
– a shift in emphasis from the historically sound to overtones of the largely fictional. It was not Laing’s translation that was at fault, but his source material, that often revealed more about the thoughts and beliefs of thirteenth-century Icelanders than the ancestors they claimed to be discussing.

The century since this late Victorian Viking-mania has seen a slow but steady erosion of its vision, using evidence more
compelling than tall tales from an Icelandic fireside. In recent decades, Viking studies have been characterized by the growth of archaeological evidence, and the steady dismissal of numerous accounts once taken as gospel. We now recognize that sagas are not necessarily true, and not all chroniclers are even-handed – that written documents need to be weighed against the evidence of archaeology, numismatics and, in more recent times, the findings from new disciplines such as dendrochronology.

What, then, was a Viking? As a schoolboy, I was led to believe that these fierce marauders had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, landing like flying saucers on the coast of England after perilous journeys across the North Sea – the shock-and-awe of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
, imparted to a new generation. In fact, the earliest Vikings were very similar to their Saxon precursors, clinging to the coastlines of northern Europe, so that the only time spent significantly far from land was during the relatively short crossing of the English Channel, or from Norway to the Shetlands. And they did not magically appear, but were brought there by other forces.

The most significant contributions to the arrival of the Vikings had less to do with the rich pickings of undefended English monasteries, and more to do with the strengthening of sea defences elsewhere, and with earlier contacts formed through trade. When the Vikings attacked their victims, it seems that it was rare that they stumbled across a target by accident – they knew what they were looking for because they had been there before. They knew whom they were robbing, because perhaps only months earlier, they or their associates had been trading with them.

Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, around 200,000 people left Scandinavia to settle elsewhere.
¹²
These voyagers were primarily men with nothing to lose. The water-ways
of the Baltic and the inlets of Norway turned them into fishermen and merchants, and the first of their ventures were undoubtedly trading ones.

In some parts of the world, this is how they stayed – their behaviour towards foreigners largely dictated by comparative strengths. Where a land was mainly deserted, such as Iceland or the Faeroes, the new arrivals simply settled and stayed. The dispossessed sons of Scandinavia found some land, bought some wives and slaves and, more often than not, fell back into the farming routine from which they had sprung. Such conditions prevented them, at least, from turning into
bona fide
‘Vikings’, although there was no guarantee their descendants might not go in search of plunder elsewhere – even the relatively peaceful Icelanders occasionally exported their criminal element back to Europe.

Where voyagers encountered local inhabitants, their behaviour depended on what they could get away with. While Viking marauders feature in the local histories of England, Ireland and France, such tales are not so well known elsewhere. Encounters with the unquenchable menace of Greek fire, for example, put paid to most Viking attacks on the Byzantine world. In Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire enjoyed generally positive relations with the men from the northern lands, and relied heavily on them as mercenaries. The Islamic community’s dealings with the Norsemen were also largely peaceful after a major conflict in the late tenth century. Viking ships were treated to a lesson they would never forget when they ran into a Muslim navy on the Caspian Sea in 943, while no less than 25 rune stones in eastern Sweden commemorate an ill-fated expedition to the Caucasus by one Ingvar the Widefarer, that ended very badly for many of its participants in 1041.
¹³

Suitably cowed, the Vikings left the Muslim world alone,
preferring instead to serve as mercenaries in its armies, or trade with it in valuable commodities such as slaves – they may have been raiders at the European end of the trade route, but at the Middle Eastern end they were merchants. Indeed, many of the spoils of Viking predations in Europe, including slaves, ended up traded to the Arab world, while the treasure hoards of many a Viking leader are rich in silver from Baghdad, obtained not on raids, but on trading missions.
¹⁴
Similarly, the kidnap victims of the Vikings, peasants snatched from British or Baltic coasts, often ended their days in foreign climes they could never have imagined. When black slaves fell out of fashion in the Arab world in the late ninth century, traders increasingly turned north for alternatives, and the Vikings eagerly met the new demand for white slaves – Viking consignments were less troublesome for the Muslims to obtain than captives from wars with Byzantium on the caliphate’s frontier. One Eastern European girl, known only by her Muslim name of Mukhâriq, was plucked from her homeland by Viking raiders, found herself in an Abbasid harem and eventually became the mother of a caliph.
¹⁵
The Muslim diarist Ibn Battúta, while staying in the remote Chinese port of Fuzhou after the Viking Age, reported that a friend of his was doing well for himself, with a household that boasted ‘fifty white slaves and as many slave-girls.’ Such was the eventual fate of many of the Vikings’ victims and their descendants.
¹⁶

The Vikings, in their explorations and conquests, undoubtedly achieved much. However it must be admitted that the leading edge of their expansion chiefly comprised thugs, brigands and outlaws. Latter-day apologists have attempted to soften the image but, by definition, the word Viking refers to pirates. A Viking is categorically
not
a flaxen-haired maiden making attractive jewellery by the side of a picturesque fjord, no matter what some museum curators may imply. The
Vikings were the rejects of Scandinavian society – forced to travel further afield to make their fortune. Some, of course, returned to claim their homeland as their own, applying their experience of foreign wars to internecine struggles.

It was a Viking who kept his retarded son chained like a beast outside his house, a Viking who attempted to skin a horse alive, a Viking who hacked off a live pig’s snout to prove a point.
¹⁷
But equally, numerous claims made about Viking ‘atrocities’ need to be regarded in context. Almost
everyone
was atrocious back then – it was a Christian, Saxon king who ordered the ethnic cleansing of all the Danes in England. The Angles, Saxons, Irish and Scots were just as bloodthirsty with each other, and with their Scandinavian foes.

The Vikings were often defined by what they were not. They were, to the contemporary chroniclers that hated and feared them,
not
civilized,
not
local, and most importantly
not
Christian. The so-called Viking Age petered out when these negative traits were annulled. Scandinavia was eventually Christianized, ironically in part through the experiences of its sons abroad, forcing the Vikings to rethink who constituted friend and foe. By the twelfth century, when Scandinavian crusaders converted Estonia to Christianity at the point of a sword, they were now not only raiding somewhere sufficiently out of the way of Western European consciousness, but doing so in the name of the Lord.

The Vikings were a group created by circumstance, not blood – they were not a ‘race’, nor did they have any patriotism, any sense of ‘Viking-ness’. Although they were predominantly men from the areas now known as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, there are mentions in the sagas of Finns, Sámi and Estonians among them. A Welshman supposedly sailed with the Jomsvikings; Scottish scouts accompanied Leif the Lucky in his explorations, and the man who discovered
the ‘vines’ of Vinland was German. When the Vikings prospered abroad, they were swift to throw off their ties to their homeland. Perhaps because of the settlers’ reliance on finding local brides, they were notoriously quick to adopt the language and customs of their new lands, so that the legendary Viking vigour was not so much reduced as rebranded.
¹⁸
In only a couple of generations, the conquerors of Kiev had taken local wives, and bestowed Slavic names upon their children. Now calling themselves Russians, they would jockey for a thousand years with their Swedish cousins over who ruled the area now known as Finland. Similarly the Norsemen who occupied north France were transformed in mere decades into the ‘Normans’ who claimed it as their natural home. Meanwhile, hundreds of square miles of the England that the Normans conquered had already been settled by Danes.

Why, then, do the Vikings continue to exert such fascination for us? During the the Viking Age, Western Europe was a backwater. The most powerful and cultured civilizations on Earth were China, Byzantium and Islam. As Christianity struggled amidst the ruins of the Roman Empire, yet another group of rough barbarians stole and murdered on the margins. Why do we still care?

For some, the tale of Viking expansion is one of incredible bravery and dynamism as, after centuries of timidly hugging the coastline, men in fragile wooden ships sail into a watery void, eventually discovering a New World. Then again, almost three
million
Scandinavians emigrated between 1815 and 1939.
¹⁹
Such settlers are why Minnesota’s football team is called the Vikings, and why the Viking Age continues to interest a large proportion of the American populace – not all white Protestants are Anglo-Saxon. But although the Vikings’ landings in America are no longer disputed, the extent of their sailing skills still is. Were the Vikings pioneers of maritime
navigation, or is it fairer to describe them as foolhardy blunderers, who made the majority of their ‘discoveries’ by getting lost and crashing into previously unknown coastlines?

For others, the Viking Age is a tale of supreme victory, not for the Vikings, but for the Christian world they sought to plunder. Within a few generations, the savage marauders were brought into the fold of Christianity, turned into respectable Europeans, vanquished in the war of the soul, even as they bragged of their physical conquests. Modern scholarship finds much to debate here, since the nature of famous conversions is still open to question. Were the Vikings savage beasts tamed by the love of God, or opportunists who paid lip-service to convenient local customs, while still keeping several concubines, owning slaves and killing their enemies?

As supposed rule-breakers, explorers and anarchists, they have injected a barbaric frisson on the cultures of the Europe their attacks helped create. Their martial prowess has become legendary, although their most humiliating defeats were at the hand of Finnish archers and Inuit fishermen. The Vikings have become symbols of all that is dangerous and exciting in the European soul – an attitude that gains even more credence in modern times as DNA tests establish exactly where they went. In many cases and many countries, our enemies did not go away. They stayed, and prospered, and eventually became part of us.

The Vikings appear in the accounts of their enemies as fearsome invaders, devoid of culture or conscience, prepared to commit the outrageous sin of killing Christian monks. They were the savage heathens that Christianity sought to convert, symbols of the Other and the Devil. Such accounts may present a realistic vision of the terror the Vikings could instil, but reveal little about them personally. Of the Vikings’ own literature, we have a rich inheritance of saga narratives, but most date from the later Middle Ages, when the distant descendants of the original Vikings huddled around a fireplace in an Icelandic winter, and told and retold tales of the glory days.