A Brief History of the Vikings (9 page)

Regardless of whether they moved by oars or sail, in a sleek longship or a rounded
knorr
, another mystery of the Viking expansion lies in their means of navigation. The Vikings did not have compasses, and no evidence has been found to
confirm stories of a
sólarsteinn
, a crystal that somehow enabled Vikings to work out the position of the sun on cloudy days. Others have suggested that a broken wooden disc, found in Greenland in the twentieth century, might be the only extant example of the Vikings’ secret weapon – a form of sundial that enabled them to compute compass points based on the shadow cast by a central spindle.
¹³
Such solar compasses were in use in Arab Aleppo in the fourteenth century, but that does not explain how one would end up in Greenland. The use of the solar compass is certainly a possibility, but why are there not significantly more examples? Or was this another of the secrets of Odin?

Towards the close of the Viking Age, civilized by contact with the Christian West, many descendants of the Vikings would attempt to reform their old ways, but the front line of the Viking expansion was undeniably brutal. Even in later medieval Iceland, when the Viking spirit was supposedly somewhat tamed, there were still vestiges of a code based on bravado and at the most basic level, one’s willingness to defend one’s actions in trial by combat. As Hromund the Lame puts it: ‘It’s the way of Vikings to make their gains by robbery and extortion, but it’s the way of thieves to conceal it afterwards.’
¹⁴
Among the belligerent Vikings any argument could be settled by a fight, and as long as no blood was drawn, it was supposed to be forgotten in the morning.
¹⁵

The Vikings often seemed more afraid of slander than they were of violence. Perhaps this is a subjective viewpoint, introduced by enterprising skalds wishing to emphasize the importance of leaving a good saga behind after one’s death, but nonetheless, the available sagas are riddled with anecdotes of playful insults that get out of hand. But they are also full of nicknames that somehow stuck, perhaps because their owners rather enjoyed the implications, or admitted that the sobriquets
had some element of truth. Names such as Erik the Victorious and Bodvar the Wise recall great deeds; Eyjolf the Lame and Eyvind the Plagiarist are less impressive; others like Halli the Sarcastic and Ivar Horse-Cock beggar belief.

Masculinity seems to have been a particularly sore point with the Vikings – cross-dressing by either sex was grounds for immediate divorce, and the greatest insult one could deliver to a Viking was to accuse him of behaving in an effeminate manner.
¹⁶
Homosexuality was not unknown, but talk of it seems to have been repressed. One Viking in a saga is heard to accuse an enemy of submitting to anal sex, while foreign observers occasionally implied that the rituals of Viking sorcery may have involved some form of blurring of gender boundaries. It is still a mystery as to why the grave of one Swedish wizard was found to contain the body of an elderly man from Lapland, clad in women’s clothes.
¹⁷

Women were to weave, tend to domestic animals, grind corn, cook and warm the beds. Their objectification in saga poetry reaches remarkable heights – it seems complimentary for a Viking poet to describe a woman as a display unit for jewellery. Viking females are described as ‘sleighs for necklaces’, as ‘guardians of gold’, or as ‘ring-wearers’. Insult a woman, of course, and you would also insult her man, a permanent threat that led to an uneasy form of etiquette, misogyny held barely in check. The most powerful women are still mainly defined by their male relatives – most women in the sagas have patronymics instead of nicknames, although there are self-explanatory exceptions like Thorkatla Bosom and Hallgerd Long-legs. The most notorious Viking women held power through their children: such as the legendary queens Sigrid the Haughty and Gunnhild Kingsmother. Such women could command indirect respect, through the power inherent in their dowries and marriages. They had the right of
inheritance and control over the home, and for the marks of the respect that some might command in the afterlife, we need only turn to contents of some of their graves.

There is no historical evidence for the existence of the legendary Viking chieftain Halfdan the Black, or indeed his mother, Queen Asa, although it has been suggested that this Norwegian lady may have been the occupant of a ship-burial found at Oseberg in 1903.
¹⁸
The mound was over 120 feet long and just below 20 feet high, earth shovelled over a ship facing to the south, her prow pointing at the sea. Inside, archaeologists found two skeletons – a young woman whose corpse had been partly tugged away from its resting place by later robbers, and an accompanying older woman. One of them was a luckless slave, accompanying her mistress into the afterlife.

The women were buried with rich accoutrements – beds, pillows and blankets, chests full of supplies, looms and even ‘elf-tremblers’, rattles designed to scare off evil spirits. The ship was large enough to hold a carved carriage, four sledges and kitchen utensils. Whoever the occupant of the grave was, she was of a family powerful enough to attract fine artisans, in a culture that could support such fripperies above and beyond the harsh demands of subsistence. The Oseberg ship was not built for raiding. It would have lacked the speed, and its oar-ports were devoid of any means of holding back waves from heavy seas. It was designed for luxury alone, a rich woman’s transport, presumably around a peaceful territory.

Our information about Asa and her son Halfdan the Black is dubious, coming in the early chapters of Snorri’s
Heimskringla
. For Snorri, however, the story of Halfdan the Black is where his tales of gods and supernatural deeds begin to dovetail with the historical world. Though Halfdan’s existence may be difficult to prove, that of his son and grandsons is not.
Somewhere between here and the end of this chapter, the legends begin to fade and we find ourselves discussing people who really existed. Exactly where is still debatable.

According to Snorri, a small chiefdom on the coast of the Vik expanded during the days of one ruler, Halfdan the Stingy, and again under the management of his heir, Guthroth the Generous. Guthroth was able to push his borders up to the site of modern Oslo, by marrying Alfhild, daughter of the king of Alfheim – these ‘elves’ being one more local people subsumed into the growing territory. Alfhild gave Guthroth a son, Olaf Geirstatha-Alf, but then died, leading Guthroth to marry Asa, beautiful daughter of the neighbouring kinglet Harald Red-Beard. Red-Beard had refused permission, and paid with his life, when Guthroth took the country, and the young Asa, by force.

Asa gave Guthroth a son, Halfdan the Black, but arranged her husband’s assassination when the boy was still barely a year old. Official sources claimed that the king had drowned after a drunken banquet, but Asa made no secret of the truth – she had asked for someone to spear him and throw him into the sea. Asa then returned to her homeland, where she ruled in the name of her infant son. Guthroth’s eldest, Olaf Geirstatha-Alf, ruled Guthroth’s old territory until Halfdan the Black reached the age of maturity. The boys then shared the rulership of the land between them, until Olaf Geirstatha-Alf died in his fifties, leaving the entire area to Halfdan. Reference in
Heimskringla
to a leg disease, and signs of crippling arthritis in the knee-joint of the Gokstad body both point to Olaf as a likely candidate for the man in that ship-grave.
¹⁹

Halfdan’s domain increased by traditional means. He fought a brief war with the neighbouring region of Heithmork, and won the land for himself. Before long, his borders had extended all the way to Sogn on the coast of the sea, which he
secured for his descendants by marrying Ragnhild, the daughter of Sogn’s ruler Harald Goldenbeard. He died barely into his forties, drowning when he fell through the thawing ice on a lake, leaving a ten-year-old heir, Harald Fairhair. Immediately, other neighbouring states sensed their chance to move in, and Fairhair’s regents were threatened with a series of attacks. Such was life in southern Norway around
AD
860, a petty series of strikes and counter-strikes by war-bands jostling for supremacy.

Things were slightly different just to the south, over the swirling waters of the Skagerrak strait that divides Norway from continental Europe. The feuds and skirmishes of southern Norway were the last remanants of a barbaric tradition dating back through the many tribal conflicts of the Dark Ages. In Europe proper, rulers were thinking on a much larger scale. There was more infrastructure, tax revenues made larger public works possible, and the petty local feuds of olden times had now grown into much larger feuds, albeit just as petty.

While the Norwegians had dealings with isolated islands and forest peoples, it was the Danes who had to deal with the outside world. Denmark was situated on a vital trade route, the only way from civilized Europe into Scandinavia and the Baltic. For two thousand years, Denmark had been the conduit for delivering goods between those two worlds. And Denmark’s Jutland peninsula was connected directly to the European mainland, hence witness to the thirty years of war that engulfed Germany at the end of the eighth century. In the distant land of the Franks, peace had broken out, and along with it enough political unity to create a region that fancied itself as an inheritor of Rome. Its king, Charles the Great,
Carolus Magnus
or more commonly, Charlemagne, desired to do what his Roman predecessors could not, and secure the north-eastern border of his empire by conquest.

The fighting began in 772, four years after Charlemagne ascended his throne. His war was fought on military and spiritual fronts, with the Saxons spared retribution if only they would submit to the rule of Christ, and his earthly representative, Charlemagne. He had no truck with paganism; one of the first acts of his soldiers was the destruction of Irminsul, the sacred column that the Saxons believed held up the sky. The impact of the Frankish war on the Saxons was felt in Denmark in the form of refugees, particularly in 777 when the Saxon leader Widukind sought sanctuary with the Danes. By 800, when Charlemagne was proclaiming himself to be the new emperor of the west, his actions had provoked the Danes on to the offensive. The Danish king Godfred led a campaign south of the Baltic against some pagan allies of Charlemagne, destroying the ancient trading post of Reric and, inadvertently it would seem, making the Danish port of Hedeby the centre of the Baltic trading world by default. Hedeby sat inland a way down the Danish peninsula, at the end of a long inlet that cut halfway into the land from the east.

Hedeby was perilously close to the new realms of Charlemagne, behind a remarkable rampart that established a border with the south. In time it was augmented, so that it reached from a river estuary on the North Sea side, all the way to Hedeby’s Baltic coast, a construct of earth and wooden palisade known as the
Danevirke
. It also permitted swift access to the Baltic to the Danes and their allies. It was now possible to sail from the North Sea up the Eider estuary and its Trene tributary, unload cargo and carry it a mere eight miles in relative safety, before reaching Hedeby and its access to the Baltic.
²⁰
It was long believed to have been constructed to defend Denmark from Charlemagne, but dendrochronological analysis of the tree-rings of the wood from the palisade reveals that parts of the Danevirke were built considerably earlier than
that, around 737, long before the perceived threat of the Franks.
²¹

Denmark was a strong enough kingdom by the beginning of the ninth century to have a sense of its own borders and the organization required to define them. It also had a strong enough sense of hegemony to feel threatened by the further encroachment of the Franks. The Danevirke may have established a southern border, but Denmark had interests that lay even further to the south, fanning out from Frisia on the North Sea coast, through Saxony and Germany directly to the south, and to the Baltic tribes to the south-east. As the Romans found, the region presented enough problems to encourage a solution by treaty instead of conquest. With enemies pressing at other points on his vast borders, Charlemagne wanted trouble to go away, and by raiding Frisia in ships, Godfred made it clear that he could make a lot more if he wanted.

The Frankish offensive continued in the spiritual realm. Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious dispatched missionaries to his frontiers, and, it is said, the first Viking converts were made sometime around 825. In 826, Louis sent a 25-year-old missionary called Anskar, who enjoyed a short-lived period as a Christian preacher in Hedeby, before he was forced to leave by enemies of his patron. Anskar next tried his luck in Sweden in 829. Attacked by pirates, he and his companion lost all their possessions and eventually limped into Birka with nothing but the clothes on their backs. It is no coincidence that these early missionaries concentrated their energies on trading posts, where Christian travellers might be found in greater quantities, and where homesick itinerant traders might be more amenable to tales of a new religion. The backward hinterland could wait until after the missionaries had achieved some success in the more cosmopolitan towns.

Anskar and others like him endured an uneasy relationship
with the pagan Vikings. They were regarded less as messengers of Christianity than as flunkies of the empire to the south, and their presence was often barely tolerated. Nevertheless, the Vikings were not above being impressed by military might, and the claims of the imperial messengers to represent a stronger, more enduring faith than that of the old gods eventually began to influence their hosts, albeit not without a few missionaries martyred at the hands of irate pagans. As far as the empire was concerned, all of Scandinavia was thereafter the responsibility of Anskar, now made the archbishop of the new fort of Hammaborg (Hamburg). As far as Scandinavia was concerned, the Christian missionaries with their messages of humility and an Almighty God were a minor irritation best left unscratched until it was safe to do so.