The Vikings (7 page)

As a mount in battle the horse was less favoured. The bridle-bits found in Viking Age graves are of the type known as snaffle-bits, with a jointed central mouthpiece and rings on either side, which made them unsuitable for use in battle. Riders on the Gotland picture-stones are depicted without stirrups, which again would have made fighting from horseback difficult. The horse might be used as a means of transport to reach the field of battle, but once there the warriors would dismount and engage with the enemy on foot. The Oseberg tapestries that originally probably hung on the walls of the burial chamber featured multiple depictions of horses, and horses’ heads were carved into the bedposts and on the ends of the burial-chamber crosspieces. A literary reflection of this degree of devotion is found in the late thirteenth-century masterpiece
Hrafnkels Saga
, which describes the special relationship between the farmer-chieftain Hrafnkel and his stallion, Freyfaxi. Hrafnkel declares Freyfaxi sacred to Frey and forbids any man to ride him. Though we learn no further details of the arrangement it binds Hrafnkel sufficiently to kill a shepherd boy who one day disobeys the ruling.

The taboo exercised by Christian writers on matters relating to the cult of the horse will have obscured a great deal of material on the subject, but strewn across the literature are stray reminiscences of the status of the horse as an image of potency and fertility. The short story known as the
Völsa tháttr
describes how the Norwegian King Olav Haraldson and two of his men arrived at a remote farm while out travelling.
³⁸
As they sat to dine with their hosts the farmer’s wife took a stallion’s penis from the linen wrapping in which she stored it, using an onion as a preservative. This object, which she called Volsi, was passed from hand to hand among the guests to the accompaniment of a repetitive chanting. When the king’s turn came he brought proceedings to an abrupt halt by throwing Volsi to the family dog, which promptly ate it. Some form of phallic horse-worship also appears to be referred to in a poem of the purposefully offensive type known as
nid
, in which the poet, the Norwegian King Magnus the Good, mockingly accused his Heathen opponent, Sigurd syr, of having built ‘a ring of stakes around a horse’s penis’.
³⁹

One of the most remarkable testaments to the importance of the horse in Heathen culture is found in a passage in
The Topography of Ireland
. Here the Welsh historian Giraldus Cambrensis describes a king-making ceremony among the Heathens of Kenel Cunill, in a remote part of northern Ulster.
⁴⁰
At a gathering of the tribe a white mare is brought into the ring of people and an act of bestiality involving the king and the mare takes place at which the king becomes, by association, a stallion. The mare is then killed and dismembered and a broth made of her blood and flesh. After the king has bathed in it, he and the other members of the tribe eat the flesh and drink the broth. The account derives from the extreme end of the spectrum of what Christians might believe about Heathens; but if it represents only an isolated case it might yet be enough to explain the degree of horror felt by Christians at the practice of eating horse-meat. As we shall see, on two occasions in particular the part played in the hallowing of the Heathen assemblies by the ritual preparation and consumption of horse-flesh marked a dramatic highlight in the religious tensions between followers of the old faith and adherents to the new, the first involving an early attempt by King Håkon the Good to impose the Christian faith on his fellow-Norwegians, and the second as part of the dramatic series of events surrounding the acceptance by Icelanders of Christianity as their official religion in the year 999.

So great is our debt to Snorri Sturluson for the insight he gives us into how Viking Age Heathens explained the facts of life and death to themselves that there is a danger of our assuming that he has, in fact, told us all there is to know on these subjects. He gives us something approaching a coherent narrative, and that fact alone ought to make us a little wary. Grave-mounds are commonplace to him, but there is nothing in either
Heimskringla
or the
Prose Edda
to suggest that he was aware that the dead inside them may have been buried in ships. None of his landscapes of Heathen death involves a place that must be reached by water, and in terms of understanding the thought that lay behind them, what he tells us sheds little light on the specific cases of the Oseberg and Gokstad burials. The great wealth of these two burials might be in conformity with one of the laws Snorri attributes to the euhemeristic Odin, that those who joined him in Valhalla should enjoy there what they had buried in the earth with them; but both burials are then in defiance of an injunction in the same set of laws to cremate the dead and their possessions.
⁴¹
The choice of inhumation rather than cremation may have been a sign that the dead person had been a particularly successful leader. So successful was the reign of King Frey, the founder of the Yngling dynasty, who ruled in Uppsala shortly after the death of Odin, that when he died his closest followers kept the death a secret, buried his body in a mound and told people that he was still alive and looking after them.
⁴²
Ultimately the lack of consistency only comfirms the futility of expecting it. As Anthony Faulkes, the translator and editor of Snorri’s
Prose Edda
puts it, the Heathen religion was probably never understood systematically even by those who practised it. From the
Saga of the Jomsvikings
we know that people cultivated supernatural personal helpers whose powers they placed above those of any of the Aesir. In a desperate attempt to change the course of the crucial sea-battle at Hjórungavág in about 986, Håkon the Bad, a Norwegian Earl of Lade, sacrificed his nine-year-old son Erling to a personal goddess, Thorgerdr Holgabrudr, who rewarded him with a hailstorm that turned the tide of battle in his favour.
⁴³
The tenth-century Icelandic priest-chieftain, Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi, practised an informal worship of the sun, and when he felt death approaching asked to be carried out into its light. There were probably other forms of worship, other objects of devotion of which we know nothing.

Even with all these uncertainties, however, one thing is abundantly clear: whatever else it was, northern Heathendom was not the absence of a culture. Viking Age Scandinavians had their own cosmology, their own astronomy, their own gods, their own social structure, their own form of government and their own notions of how best to live and die. By the middle of the eighth century, regional power centres had grown up on the south-west and south-east coasts of Norway, around the kings and chieftains of Avaldsnes on the island of Karmøy, near Haugesund in Rogaland, and those kings of Vestfold in the Tønsberg area who claimed descent from the Yngling dynasty.
⁴⁴
Confirmation that there was high-level communication between these regions came in 2009 with dendrochronological analysis which showed that the timber used to build the Oseberg ship in 820 came from the same south-west coastal region as that used for the three ships found at the end of the nineteenth century in the Storhaug and Grønnhaug mounds at Karmøy. Tree-ring dating also indicates that the ship in the Grønnhaug mound was built in 720, and both large and small ships in the Storhaug mound in 771.
⁴⁵
All three were propelled exclusively by oars. The Storhaug ship was interred in late 779 and is the youngest large, man-powered rowing-ship we know of. The Oseberg ship remains the oldest known example of the classic, sail-powered Viking longship. The conclusion is that at some point in the forty years that separate the building of the two, a remarkable technological breakthrough occurred in the construction and use of sail, which greatly increased the speed longships were capable of reaching and removed much of the physical burden of rowing from their crews. The breakthrough would have a dramatic effect on the development of European history over the next three centuries.

3

The causes of the Viking Age

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports that extraordinary weather conditions preceded the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, high winds and lightning flashes that were afterwards understood to have been portents - ‘and a little after that in the same year on 8 January the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter’.
¹
Experiments with modern reconstructions have shown that in good visibility a Viking longship at sea could be seen some 18 nautical miles away. With a favourable wind, that distance could be covered in about an hour, so that is perhaps all the time the monks had to prepare themselves for the attack.
²
It is unlikely they did anything at all, for the written records of the raid present it as completely unexpected:

We and our fathers have now lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such a voyage was not thought possible. The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans - a place more sacred than any in Britain.
³

The extract is from a letter, written in the wake of the attack, to King Ethelred of Northumbria by Alcuin, one of the leading Christian figures of the age. Born in Northumbria, Alcuin had been a monk in York before accepting an invitation in 781 to join Charlemagne at his court in Aachen, where he soon played a prominent role in the revival of learning known as the Carolingian renaissance. He knew both the monastery at Lindisfarne and many of its leading figures well.

A third account of the atrocity by Simeon of Durham, the early twelfth-century English chronicler, adds detail that may come from a lost Northumbrian annals:

In the same year the pagans from the northern regions came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets and spread on all sides like fearful wolves, robbed, tore and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen, but even priests and deacons, and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to the church at Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasure of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea . . .
⁴

A fourth document, of unknown date but possibly near-contemporary, is the Lindisfarne stone. This shows seven marching men in profile. Perhaps in response to the constraints of the semi-circular stone, those at the front and the rear of the column are unarmed. Of the central five the first two are carrying axes, the three behind them swords. The axes are distinct from one another in shape and are held about halfway up the handle. The men wear tunics that reach to about midway down the thigh and seem to have some kind of padding or reinforcement around the midriff. They wear tight-fitting leggings and heavy shoes that appear to be ankle-high. They march with stiff necks and chests out, their weapons raised one-handed above their heads as though about to sweep down. The stylization is strikingly similar to the image of warring men depicted on a panel of the Gotland Hammars picture-stone. The Hammars stone is the more accomplished work of art, but there is a telegrammatic crudeness about the Lindisfarne stone that seems to convey more directly and urgently the brutality of face-to-face violence. Unlike the men on the Hammars stone, the Lindisfarne warriors are not carrying shields. It is as though they were not expecting to encounter resistance.

‘Such a voyage was not thought possible,’ Alcuin wrote. And in a long poem on
The Destruction of Lindisfarne
he once again conveyed the impression that the attackers were an unknown quantity. His lute groans sadly, he writes, at the appearance of this ‘pagan warband arrived from the ends of the earth’. And yet, in that same letter, he rebuked Ethelred and his people in terms that wholly contradict the impression that the raid came as a surprise: ‘Consider the luxurious dress, hair and behaviour of leaders and people,’ he urged the king. ‘See how you have wanted to copy the pagan way of cutting hair and beards. Are not these the people whose terror threatens us, yet you want to copy their hair?’
⁵
The sentiments are similar to those expressed in a letter, fragmentary and incomplete, from an unknown sender to an unknown recipient or recipients, criticized for

loving the practices of Heathen men who begrudge you life, and in so doing show by such evil habits that you despise your race and your ancestors, since in insult to them you dress in Danish fashion with bared necks and blinded eyes. I will say no more about that shameful mode of dress except what books tell us, that he will be accursed who follows Heathen practices in his life and in so doing dishonours his own race.
⁶

Much as the sixth-century British monk Gildas, some 300 years before him, had interpreted the invasion of Alcuin’s own Anglo-Saxon and Heathen forebears as God’s punishment on Britons for their lax observance of the Christian way of life, so did Alcuin discover in the Vikings God’s scourge on a lax and degenerate Northumbrian clergy and court. In several letters written after the attack he painted a dismaying picture of contemporary monastic life, inveighing against drunkenness and the practice of inviting ‘actors and voluptuaries’ to dine at the monastery tables instead of the poor, and condemning the practice of entertainment at mealtimes. In place of the sounds of the harp, accompanying ‘the songs of the heathens’, he suggested readings from the Bible and the Church fathers. ‘For what has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ he added, incidentally condemning the popularity in monasteries of
Beowulf
, a cultural betrayal which must have struck him as even more dismaying than the fashion at King Ethelred’s court for Heathen hairstyles.
⁷
The unavoidable conclusion of all this is that at the time of the Lindisfarne raid Alcuin and the people of Northumbria were already quite familiar with their Scandinavian visitors. What was new was the violence.