The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (20 page)

The no-account husband called up his men and
went down to the brothers’ longhouse while they were still asleep. His men bound
the brothers and their crew and took them outside. Freydis gave the orders now: she
ordered death. The brothers’ women stood among the bodies and none of her
husband’s crew would kill them. ‘Hand me an axe,’ Freydis said. She
told her own men that if they were lucky enough to get back to Greenland, they should
say the brothers’ crew had all decided to stay behind. She said if they told a
different story, she would make sure they were killed.
⁴⁵

The stories can’t be mashed together
to make history, but they may help explain what happened in Vinland. For a start, there
must have been some talk of settlement – of ‘staying behind’ in Vinland – or
else Freydis could never have made the men tell such a lie. The sagas produce a dramatic
explanation for why it did not happen. The simple fact that the Norsemen were unnerved
by the local people would not do because heroes are never unnerved; but they were
certainly disturbed to meet peoples they didn’t understand and couldn’t
predict, so different they didn’t know how to classify them. They rescued two
local boys from a rock at one point, and
thought they might be ‘trolls’. They taught them to talk, or so they
thought, after which they never lacked for fish; so the locals might count as animals
with no language. They also had very strong magic: after Freydis came back from scaring
off the natives, the men came to think that the whole hostile army Freydis scattered was
an illusion. They found it very difficult to live with magic and illusion, the sense of
being out of their own world.

The camp evidently broke into factions, ship
by ship, crew by crew; this was not an expedition sure of what it wanted and what it
ought to do. The fact that the sagas show the factions trying to work together means
they started by feeling truly separate, little nations inside a small community; and in
the end they failed to get together. The Norse, alarmed by an incomprehensible enemy
outside, managed to find even more enemies inside.

The oddity is that a woman takes the blame
for all this. It is odd because it is taken for granted at first that Freydis has the
right background to commission ships and plan an expedition and even organize the use of
a camp already built in Vinland. Other women had done that sort of thing before;
Erik the Red’s Saga
mentions Aud the Deep-Minded, widow of a king of
Dublin, who secretly built a ship in the forests of Caithness and sailed out by way of
the Orkneys to Iceland with twenty free-born men and many bondsmen who had been taken
prisoner by the Vikings. Aud owned the ship, organized the crew, and led her free men
even into Christianity; she stands as mother and a godmother to Iceland. The saga
writers respected what a woman could do.

Freydis might be wicked, she might have
magic to see off the natives’ magic, but more than anything she stands for the
other great anxiety: the disruptive power of sex. Some women came to Vinland, as she
did, with their husbands, but most men travelled without wives, and they were away three
years. A woman like Freydis, men feared, could stir up her husband’s jealousy and
get men killed, could play off the married faction against the single men; that alone
gave her a disconcerting power. Even if she turned out to be an axe murderer, and she
did, the situation would always make her desirable and essential; and even without a
strong woman like Freydis, the facts of
the
situation were disruptive. The saga says flatly: ‘Many quarrels arose, as the men
who had no wives sought to take those of the married men.’
⁴⁶

Disagreements, ill-feeling, living together
closely for three long years without a break and without the comfort of going home – all
kept the camp edgy. There were times of hunger when a man might go almost mad, as
Thorhall did: found on the edge of a cliff, mumbling and staring and scratching and
pinching himself, trying to make sure he had found the right way to pray to a god who
would send them something to eat. Men asked him what he was doing. He said it made no
difference and that he’d got along without their advice for most of his life. The
Norse were used to organized shipping in the Greenland summers, to sizeable stores, and
above all to a settled pattern of loyalty and duty that kept a person fed, warmed and
more or less safe. They had never before met weird peoples who talked like beasts but
could kill, who blocked their way to what the Norse really wanted from Vinland.

They began to think they might have gone too
far.

Being a Viking was a failing trade. In
twelfth-century Orkney, Svein Asleifarson
⁴⁷
had family estates and eighty
followers spending the winter in his huge hall; he was ‘the greatest man the
western world has ever seen in ancient or modern times’, the
Orkneyinga
Saga
says, ‘apart from those of higher rank than himself’. Such
greatness cost a great deal to maintain; followers want meat, drink and money. So when
he had carefully supervised the springtime sowing, he went off plundering in the
Hebrides or in Ireland, which he called his ‘spring trip’. He came back just
before mid-summer and stayed until the fields had been reaped and the grain was safely
stored, and then he went off on his ‘autumn trip’ and stayed away as a
marauder until the first month of winter was ended. He had his seasons as a farmer, his
seasons as a Viking.

He took five big ships on a good trip, ships
fitted out for rowing to make them reliable and manoeuvrable. They tackled the Hebrides
first, but the trouble with being a seasonal raider is that people know in which season
they ought to bury everything valuable. The islanders
did just that, and the Isle of Man was not much better.
Svein evidently did not worry that he was raiding the settlements of men like him: from
Norway, generations back.

His luck turned on the open sea when he
challenged two English freighters carrying loads of lavish broadcloth. He boarded both
ships and left the crews with only food and the clothes they wore, and then he sailed
for the Hebrides to share out the loot with his crew and boast to everyone else about
his robbing. He also made awnings for his ships from the broadcloth so everyone could
appreciate his haul. If he could be farmer and Viking, they could be both victims one
moment and admirers the next: nothing need be settled. For the voyage home, he had the
cloth stitched to the front of the sails so that his ships came into harbour under the
power of their loot.

His return home was the excuse for a
grandiose feast, but there was one man who did not praise Svein: the Earl Harald.
Instead, he asked him to stop his raiding. He said it was better to be safe back home,
that ‘Most troublemakers are doomed to be killed unless they stop of their own
free will.’ Svein acknowledged he was getting older and less suited to the
hardships of war. He said he wanted one more trip and then he would give up raiding.
‘Hard to tell which comes first, old fellow,’ the earl said. ‘Death or
glory.’

The raider went out one last time. Again, he
had bad luck in the Hebrides, where everyone was ready for him, but he sailed on to
Ireland, looting everywhere he could. He came to Dublin, to the town that was founded by
Vikings like him, walked through the walls almost without resistance; the settled
people, the traders busy with business, were not ready for him. He owned the city that
day. He put in his own men to run it, named his price for leaving the city in peace,
left the townspeople to choose hostages and went back to his ships in triumph.

But the fact of settlement was very strong,
and the Dubliners were not prepared to give up what they’d built. They’d had
enough of this old anachronism and his kind, even if only a few centuries back his kind
had been the necessary condition of their way of life.

They thought of Svein and his men as
dangerous, disruptive
animals, and hunted
them the same way: digging pits in the ground, disguising them with straw and waiting to
see if the Orkney men would fall into the trap.

They did. They say Svein was the last of
them to die.
⁴⁸

The night was dry and the fire blazed out in
one of the long wooden warehouses on the waterfront at Bergen. This is 1248 on the coast
of Norway. The king was in the town with his bodyguard, the town was full, but despite
all the people fighting the fire they ‘could get no hold on it’. The steeple
of the great church of St Mary went up in flames, and ‘the force of the fire was
so great that it was tossed up into the castle and that began to blaze. Many men were
burned inside before they could get out.’
¹

‘The force of the sin-avenging
flames,’ the English chronicler Matthew Paris wrote with the great moral certainty
of a man who was safely offshore, ‘flew like a fire-breathing dragon, dragging its
tail after it.’ He diagnosed ‘the severity of divine vengeance’.
²

The king went out in a boat to the barges
lying offshore, and ‘got there great kettles. They were filled with sea-water, and
so hauled up onto the wharves, after that the sea-water was poured onto the fire and so
it was quenched.’
³
But his stone castle was ‘for
the most part reduced to ashes’, Paris wrote, and all that remained of eleven
parishes was four religious houses and the ‘palace, chapel and lodgings of the
lord King’.
⁴

A few days later, Paris was celebrating Mass
when lightning tore off the thatched roof of the loft that sheltered the king’s
son and then struck Matthew Paris’s ship and ‘dashed the mast asunder into
such small chips that they could scarcely be seen anywhere. One bit of the mast did hurt
to a man who had got on board the ship from the town to buy finery.’
⁵

We’re three days after a fire that ruined a town, in
the middle of a storm that is tearing off roofs, and someone is busy buying
‘finery’: clothes, and fine, fashionable clothes at that. Fashion must have
a longer, stranger history than we thought.

The great sagas from Iceland have
everything you expect: heroes, killings, dragons, feuds, great voyages and great
horrors. They also have something less likely: they have dandies.

Consider Kali in the
Orkneyinga
Saga
who comes back from five weeks away from Norway at a large, muddy
gathering in the port of Grimsby in northern England, where he’s been meeting men
from the Orkneys, the Hebrides and mainland Scotland. He starts a round of the taverns
back in Bergen to show off what he’s learned. ‘Kali was something of a dandy
and was stylishly dressed now that he was just back from England,’ the saga says;
he saw style abroad and brought it back. He wasn’t alone. His new mate Jon, son of
Peter Serksson, ‘was a great one for clothes’.
⁶
Bergen, the saga
says, was full of people from abroad and the men needed an audience for what they were
wearing. Kali and Jon later started a blood feud, as you might expect, and were devoted
to drunk and murderous brawling and campaigns of revenge; but they also had style.

In the
Saga of Olaf the Gentle
, the
thirteenth-century storyteller Snorri Sturlson tells how rich men started to settle in
Bergen when it was still a new town, a hundred years or so before; how clubs were
started and drinking bouts were common; and ‘at that time, new fashions in dress
made their appearance’. Men wore tight breeches, gold rings at the ankle, gowns
that trailed and were laced with ribbons and high shoes embroidered over with white silk
and gold laces: wilfully impractical for sailors, traders and warriors in a port in a
cold climate, which was the whole point. Bergen men were already wearing the long,
draped robes that would soon be the mark of the aristocracy further south. They matched
their fashions with new and pretentious manners: King Olaf had cup-bearers to pour the
drink at dinner and a candle-bearer with lit tapers beside each one of his guests.
⁷
Within a
hundred more years – in 1174, because for once the sagas give an exact year – it was
possible for a man to be damned
socially for
wearing clothes that everyone knew were out of date. The dreary statesman Erling,
according to the
Saga of the Sons of Harald
, ‘wore old-fashioned clothing
– kirtles [long overshirts] with long waists and long sleeves, and likewise shirts and
doublets with long sleeves, French cloaks and shoes coming high up on the calves’.
This was when he was a kind of regent and the saga disapproves of the way ‘he had
the king wear similar clothes when he was young’. The king grew up correctly, even
so: ‘When he became independent, he dressed with much finery.’
⁸

Remarkably, the people of Bergen were doing
much the same. The town was a port tucked into a fjord on the Norwegian coast, a mass of
wood buildings that burned down often and left behind whole tracts for archaeologists to
investigate. In the layers from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, there are
shoes – shoes for women, men and children – and a startling number of them are decorated
with embroidery in silk. Now, Lucca was beginning to produce silk in the twelfth
century, and grumpy Paris clerics had begun to denounce the wearing of
‘worm’s excrement’, but silk still seemed a luxury to Southerners,
mostly imported from the Middle East. In later illuminated manuscripts embroidered shoes
are worn by grand and powerful people to show rank and to show money. But the Bergen
evidence does not come from the parts of town with castles or riches; it is
everywhere.
⁹
There are so many shoes, even old grown-ups’ shoes cut down
for children, that it’s clear that silk yarn was being brought in quantity to the
Norwegian coast long before it was the mark of social-climbing persons in Paris, a full
century before the Queen of France, Jeanne of Navarre, became so famously angry at the
glamour of women in Bruges and in Ghent for their silks and jewels; ‘I thought I
was the only queen,’ she snapped, ‘and here I see queens by the
hundred.’
¹⁰