The Vikings: A Very Short Introduction (4 page)

Sweden takes its name from the Svear people of central Sweden. Its modern boundaries incorporate a varied landscape with wide variations in soil, climate, and relief. To the north of Skåne, the low
Early Sc

plateau of Småland was sparsely populated, and in the Viking Age
an

provided a natural border with Denmark. Beyond, the central
dina

lowlands were divided into two well-forested and fertile regions:
vian kin

the Svear, centred on Uppland, and the Gotar, to the east of Vanar.

Further to the north, Norrland comprised forest and bare rock and
gdoms

was again sparsely populated. In the Baltic, the islands of Gotland and Öland had good farming land and were of particular strategic importance in the Viking Age. Southern Sweden had a coastal climate; the north had very cold winters with much ice and snow.

Coniferous forest still covers 57 per cent of the landmass; it provided opportunities for hunting and fishing in the Viking Age.

International trade was developed in the Baltic, with links south to Byzantium. Swedish Vikings tended to look eastwards, although several joined expeditions to the west, to England and Normandy.

Throughout the 9th century several kings are mentioned in Birka, but the extent of their control is unknown. Sweden was only unified in the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, as a result of a lengthy power struggle between Östergötland and Västergötland.

In northern Sweden and Norway, Norse societies came into contact 17

with the Saami peoples, although they have been excluded from most histories of the Viking Age. In the 19th century, whereas the study of Vikings emerged as an historical discipline, tracing the roots and lineage of a people through their folklore, myths, and national history, the Saami were given an ethnography, and studied as foreign and primitive hunter-gatherers. From the late 1970s, however, Saami academics and intellectuals began to reclaim their culture, and a younger generation of Scandinavian historians and archaeologists also began to observe symbiotic interaction between Norse and Saami culture. Burial data has been used to extend the mobile range of the Saami far to the south of their modern boundaries during the Viking Age; birch bark burials in the pre-Viking cemeteries at Vendel and Valsgärde in Uppland have been taken as evidence for a Saami presence, and dietary evidence has suggested a reliance on reindeer far south of their natural habitat.

Immigration of ‘non-Western peoples’ is a big political issue in
s

modern Scandinavia and archaeological evidence has been used to
g

kin

demonstrate that during the Viking Age large areas of Scandinavia
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supported two ethnically distinct population groups who lived side
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by side.

To an extent, therefore, Scandinavia has always been on the fringes of Europe, not just geographically, but culturally as well. Despite regional differences, the Scandinavian peoples were united by proximity to the sea, and this has helped foster a sense of transnational identity. This emerged for the first time during the Viking Age. In the next chapters we will explore the ways in which a Viking cultural identity has been defined.

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Chapter 3

Pagans and Christians

The Viking stereotype rests upon aggressive paganism. Viking raiders who attacked undefended monasteries have been accused of doing so not just because these sites represented easy sources of wealth, but explicitly because they were Christian. ‘Paganism’ is itself often used as a pejorative term and is generally avoided in this book. Recent approaches have examined the nature of pre-Christian belief systems and their borrowings from other religions.

Conversion is no longer seen as a one-off act of enlightenment, although contemporary Scandinavian kings liked to portray it as such. Instead it is understood as a gradual process in which Christianity coexisted alongside older beliefs in an early medieval multi-faith society.

Aspects of Viking ideology may also be found in art. In 21st-century Western society we generally distinguish between applied art and pure art, and artistic endeavour is separated off from the everyday world. In modern terms all Viking art was applied art, and has sometimes been regarded as the decoration of functional objects.

However, was Viking Age decoration purely functional or did it have an ideological component? How valid is this distinction between pure and applied in other cultures?

The evolution of Scandinavian-style animal ornament has often been treated as a typological device which can help in the dating of 19

objects, and in mapping the spread of Viking society and culture. It has been taken as evidence of civilization, and an indication that despite all that rape and pillage the Vikings had good taste. More recently some archaeologists such as Bjorn Myhre have begun to see art styles in terms of ethnic symbols and identities that were used in a deliberate expression of Vikingness. Others have focused on the possible ideological meaning of the motifs. Animal ornament may represent part of a totemic belief system, for example. It is important not to forget, however, that our knowledge of Viking art is generally dependent upon durable objects of metal and stone; wood and textiles are rarely preserved; human skin, which may have been elaborately tattooed, has never survived.

Pre-Christian belief systems

To us ‘religion’ conjures up a set of beliefs and rules of behaviour
s

that embody concepts of worship, with holy men or women to
g

kin

interpret them. In Scandinavia before Christianity, however, no one
e Vi

would have understood this. It is probably more appropriate to talk
Th

about a ‘belief system’, a way of looking at the world. Religion was just another aspect of life and the act of worship as required by the Norse pantheon was not adoration or even uncritical approval, and therefore it was utterly unlike the Christian relationship with the divine. According to Norse mythology, everything ended at Ragnarok, when all humans and gods were killed and burnt.

According to this philosophy the outcome of our actions is predetermined, and we cannot change our fate; what is important is our conduct as we go to meet it.

Vikings had a more fluid sense of the boundaries between this world and the next, as well as between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Under Norse mythology there were many classes of supernatural beings. There were two families of gods: the Æsir, including Oðinn and Thor; and the Vanir, including Njord, Freyr and Freyja. However, there were also servants of the gods, such as the valkyries, and Oðinn’s raven, as well as giants, dwarves, elves, 20

trolls, spirits, ghosts, and so on. Sorcery, and the practice of
seiðr
, was fundamental to Viking beliefs. Neil Price has suggested that
seiðr
was the Norse counterpart of shamanism, and that comparable features can be seen amongst the Saami, from whom some of its features may have been borrowed. Specific grave-goods, such as metal and wooden staffs, silver amulets shaped like chairs and animal masks, may indicate the burials of practitioners.

A grave in the cemetery at the Danish ring fort at Fyrkat has been interpreted as the burial of a witch or sorceress. A wagon was used as a coffin for the woman’s body. She was not buried with the customary pair of brooches but was wearing two silver toe rings, and was accompanied by a Gotlandic box brooch. It has been suggested that she came from the Baltic region. Her grave-goods
P

included a bronze bowl containing fruit, two drinking horns, an
agans an

iron spit, and traces of a wooden staff. There were also several amulets, including a silver chair, a sheepskin pouch (probably
d Christians

containing henbane seeds), and a drinking glass. By her feet was a locked oak box, containing clothes, a pair of shears, a slate whetstone, a pottery spindle whorl, the lower jaw of a young pig, and a clump of owl pellets.

Two women were laid out in the burial chamber within the Oseberg ship (p. 48): one aged
c
.25, and the other aged
c
.50. The younger woman may have been a princess and the older one her slave, but other objects in the grave also indicate at least two roles: that of princess and that of high priestess, roles which may have been combined in one person. Two small tapestries depict processional scenes with imagery of Freyja and Oðinn and some of the grave-goods suggest that the tapestries depict real events rather than just myth. They included an oak chest which contained a sorcerer’s staff and two iron lamps which resemble those being carried in procession, as well as five wooden animal heads, and a cart carved with images of cats, the sacred animal of Freyja.

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There seems to have been no single pre-Christian burial rite and there was tremendous regional variation throughout Scandinavia.

Nevertheless, widespread practice was to bury the dead fully clothed with personal adornments, together with a selection of implements and utensils of everyday life, whether the rite chosen was cremation or inhumation. The intention appears to have been to equip the dead for the next world, which was imagined as being very like this. Oðinn needed slain warriors to be buried with their weaponry, and the wealthy were accompanied by their horses, dogs, and slaves. Burial with boats, wagons, or horses represented the journey into the next life, and if a whole boat was not available a stone setting in the outline of a ship might do.

In much of Norway and Eastern and Central Sweden cremation was the most common form of burial, but it was rare in Denmark, outside northern Jutland. In Sweden cremation was prevalent
s

during the preceding Vendel period and continued, with boat burial,
g

kin

into the Viking Age. Cremation graves under mounds generally
e Vi

cluster around farms. Cremated remains could be placed directly
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into a pit, put into a bag or a pottery or metal vessel, or spread
5
. Burial mounds, Birka

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upon the ground. Multiple cremations are known. In southern and central Jutland and northern Norway inhumation was prevalent from the beginning of the Viking Age. The body might be placed directly into the ground, or in a coffin, chamber, or vehicle. Contrary to popular belief the majority of burials were poorly furnished.

Ninth-century burials are the simplest and the knife was the most common simple find, in graves of both sexes. A distinctive group of rich ‘cavalry’ burials with weaponry and equestrian equipment appeared in Denmark in the 10th century. Grave-goods are sometimes included in Swedish graves up until the 12th century.

Temples and cult places

The majority of pre-Christian religious activity probably took place in open spaces and sacred groves. The so-called pagan temple
P

at Old Uppsala referred to by Adam of Bremen has been
agans an

reinterpreted as a large feasting hall in which pagan festivals may have taken place at certain times, rather than a dedicated religious
d Christians

building, although the use of the place-name element
hof
, as at Hofstaðir in Iceland, may indicate the use of a building for religious rituals.

During the 1980s a number of new structures were found which support the idea of small-scale, local, religious and votive activities carried out at special sites. Excavations on the highest point of the island of Frösön – literally Freyr’s Island – in Sweden, under the floor of a medieval church, uncovered what appear to be the remains of a sacrificial grove. Under the medieval altar were the decayed remains of a birch tree, which had been deliberately felled.

Around its roots was a large animal bone assemblage which had accumulated while the tree was standing. This included the whole bodies of five bears, the heads of six elks and two stags, as well as remains of sheep, pigs, and cows. These may have been skins or whole bodies which had been hung from the tree. Radiocarbon dates place the activity in the 10th and 11th centuries; the stone church was built towards the end of the 12th century.

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At Borg, in Östergötland in Sweden, a cult building was attached to a chieftain’s farmstead. The building came into use as early as the start of the 8th century although most of the ritual activity belonged to the 10th century. It comprised two rooms separated by a passage; along the eastern wall there was a stone platform, possibly a plinth, on which idols were set. Two rings were found in the south-west part of house, but there were no other finds. The surrounding ground surface was covered with large stone paving, and the overlying layer contained a hoard of another 98 rings, as well as 75

kg of unburnt animal bones and slag. The rings appear to have been used to carry amulets, such as hammers or axes, which are usually found singly in graves. Some were unfinished, suggesting they were being manufactured here. Three adjacent buildings with sand floors had been used for metalworking.