by Holland, Tom
And now the stones of a church lay smoking in the heart of England, greasy with human ashes, a veritable charnel-house. If truly a sign, then it was a threatening one indeed.
Ragnarok
Strange tales were told of Olav Trygvasson’s return to Norway. One day, it was claimed, after he had successfully toppled the local strongman and driven him to a squalid end in a pigsty, decapitated by his own thrall, the new king was in a fit mood to be entertained. At his side there suddenly appeared an old man, cloaked and white- haired, with only a single eye. Entering into conversation with the stranger, Trygvasson found that there was nothing the old man did not seem to know, nor any question to which he could not give an answer. All evening the two of them talked; and even though the king was eventually persuaded to retire to bed by a twitchy English bishop who had grown suspicious of the one-eyed stranger, Trygvasson could still not bear to end the conversation, continuing it even as he lay on his furs, late into the night. At last, the old man left him, and the king fell asleep; but his dreams were strange and feverish. Waking up abruptly, he cried out for the stranger again. Even though his servants searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found; and Trygvasson, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape. When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out. A godly and responsible act: for clearly, it was out of the question for him, as a follower of Christ, to feast on meat supplied by Odin.
Quite what his own followers thought of their king’s scruples as they watched their supper turn fly-blown out on the dungheap, we are not told. Some, no doubt, would have felt roundly puzzled. A lord with any instinct for self-preservation denied nothing to his retinue. The supply of good things to the men who fought for him, whether beef, or golden armlets, or red cloaks, or coats of mail, was the only sure duty that a leader of Northmen had. Fail in that, and his doom would be swift. Trygvasson, who had never travelled anywhere but wolves and ravens attended on him, who had become the hero of myriad gore-bespattered songs, who had made all the West bleed so that he could bestow its treasures upon his warriors, was certainly not the man to have forgotten this basic truth. The beef he had been obliged to throw out would surely have been replaced with meat stolen or extorted from some other source. His tables would never have been permitted to stand empty. That same evening, no doubt, as his followers feasted in his hall, Trygvasson, the peerless ring-giver, would have scattered gold among them, or else ornamented helmets, or perhaps sword-belts clad in silver, wondrous treasures set to glitter by the blazing fire.
No wonder that the king of the ancient gods had paid him a call. The scene of a great lord sharing plunder with his followers was one well known to delight Odin; and perhaps, as the story ofTrygvasson’s late-night conversation implies, it did indeed require an effort of will for any Northman, even a baptised one, to send the ‘All-father’ on his way. Yet Trygvasson himself, whose entire career had been an exercise in worshipping force, had ultimately not hesitated in his loyalty to Christ — and for much the same reason that his own retinue continued to follow him. Far from cramping his style as a warlord, the Christian God appeared to offer him and all his predatory appetites, all his lust for power and gold, all his relish for combat, devastation and scenes of bloodshed, gratification on a truly awesome scale. As befitted a man so ambidextrous that he could hurl a spear simultaneously from both hands, Trygvasson certainly felt no call to choose between his new religion and his career as a marauder – for the one served to fuel the other. With the same buccaneering enthusiasm that he had previously brought to pillaging the English, he now swaggered up and down the North Way, smashing idols, menacing local pagan leaders and forcing conversions at the point of his sword. No matter the resentful mutterings he left behind him in his wake, Trygvasson was not the man for qualms: everything that he did was calculated to redound to his own glory. He had seen enough of Christendom, and of the dignity, the splendour and the wealth of her kings, to know that heathendom offered nothing to compare. Just as Christ reigned supreme over other gods, so would he, as the image of Christ, reign supreme over his countrymen.
His countrymen, not surprisingly, responded with varying degrees of resentment and alarm to this. The arrogance of braggart warlords was nothing new in Scandinavia. Loot pilfered from Christendom had long served to strengthen the mighty, great chiefs as well as kings, at the expense of lesser men. Here, perhaps, rather than in the consequences of excessive rutting, as Christian moralists liked to claim, lay the true reason for the waves of emigration that had sent so many Northmen over the years sailing for Normandy, Britain and Ireland. Some, indeed, had sailed even further west. Beyond the setting of the sun, dotted across ‘the northern region of the earth from where all waters pass down’, adventurers from Scandinavia had discovered a succession of darksome islands, sundered realms formed of glaciers, and mountains, and the occasional expanse of grass. ‘Iceland’, the first- found of these had been named - fittingly enough, it appeared, if the claims of travellers were to be believed, for it was reported that any Icelander who ventured out into the open during wintertime, and then so far forgot himself as to wipe his nose, would find it snapping off, ‘frozen mucus and all’, and be obliged to discard it in the snow. Other inconveniences persisted all the year round, even into the nightless summers: from the troublemaking spirits who had lived in
The world of the Northmen
Iceland since the beginning of time, and would lure the distracted to their ruin amid lava fields or into pools of hissing mud, to the island’s notoriously indigestible food, its seaweed, suet and buttered porridge, which played such hell with the settlers’ stomachs that the glaciers were said to echo to the thundering of their farts.
Such drawbacks notwithstanding, however, Iceland had filled up rapidly in the decades that followed the arrival of the first colonisers, back in the 870s – so much so that by the 930s all the prime farmland had been taken. Men had duly begun to scan around for fresh horizons. In 986, during a time of terrible famine in Iceland, an expedition of some twenty-five ships had set sail for a vast and empty land that lay even further west: ‘Greenland’ as it had been named by an early prospector, somewhat disingenuously, for all its eastern flank stood barricaded by colossal walls of gleaming ice. On the western coast, however, along the margins of jagged fjords, there were indeed patches of grass, and even meadows, to be found; and it was on these, at an unimaginable distance from the fjords of their ancestral homeland, that the settlers from Iceland, some 450 of them in all, had sought to put down their roots.
‘A house of your own, however mean, is good.’ Nothing better illustrated the passionate intensity with which the Northmen clung to this conviction than their scattered presence, by the side of the bleak immensity of the western ocean, on the windswept shores of Greenland. Their new home may have been teeming with wildlife, but it was in almost all other ways barren of resources; and so it was not surprising that some of the colonists, in their quest for timber, above all, should have continued to strike out west. Over the succeeding years, such expeditions would bring back reports of yet further islands, including one, named ‘Vinland’ by those who claimed to have discovered it, on which grapes were said to grow wild, ‘producing excellent wine’: a fabulous story. Perhaps, as the tall tales told by the Greenlanders suggested, there did indeed lie strange lands along the westernmost limits of the world; but if so, then they might just as well not have existed at all, for it was clearly out of the question to settle such fearsomely distant isles. Some few of the more lunatic among the explorers, it would subsequently be claimed, had made the attempt— but their enterprises had failed. Vinland – if it truly existed – was a stepping stone too far, that much was evident. The settlers’ lines of communication, drawn out as they had been over many thousands of miles, across savage and storm-swept seas, a whole world away from Scandinavia, had been stretched to breaking point.
For even the Icelanders, clinging to the habitable margins bf their harsh and smouldering isle, were dependent for their ultimate survival on links with the lands they had left behind. Like the Greenlanders, they had to look abroad for timber, let alone the gold and silver that were the essential marks of status for any self-respecting chieftain. As a result, captains from Iceland were regular visitors to the harbours of the North Way – where their presence did not go unnoted by Olaf Trygvasson. Neither – a standing provocation to the self-appointed warrior of Christ – did the fact that many of them remained ruggedly, even defiantly pagan. Trygvasson, who was hardly the man to find his fingers around a windpipe and not apply a little squeeze, duly announced his kingdom closed to all heathen traders. Those already present in the North Way were arrested and taken as hostages. The news, brought back to Iceland, caused its inhabitants predictable dismay and consternation. Even at a distance of 750 miles, it appeared, the shadow of a warlord such as Trygvasson could reach out across the ocean to menace them. Perhaps there really was no escaping kings.
Yet rather than admit this, and submit to all they had sought to escape, the Icelanders were prepared to countenance any expedient; even to embrace the faith of Christ, if that was what it would take. Not on Trygvasson’s terms, however. Rather, they would do it as free men, gathered together from all across the island, meeting in the Thingvellir, the rough-grassed plain that was the site of their assembly, and the cockpit of their self-governance. Ever since 985, the task of presiding there as the Icelanders’ ‘law-speaker’, the arbitrator of all their disputes, had belonged to a chieftain famed for his powers of foresight by the name of Thorgeir Thorkelsson: a pagan, to be sure, but respected even by those who had already begun to worship Christ. All the Icelanders assembled on the Thingvellir, Christian as well as pagan, duly agreed to accept his judgement on what the faith of Iceland should be; and Thorgeir accepted the fateful charge. ‘He lay down and spread his cloak over himself, and lay all that day and the next night, nor did he speak a word.’ Then abruptly, on the following morning, he sat up and ordered the Icelanders to accompany him to the great Law Rock – and from there he delivered them his verdict. Some customs, Thorgeir pronounced, were to continue unchanged. Men were still to be permitted to eat horseflesh; to expose unwanted children; to offer sacrifices, provided that it was done in private. In every other respect, however, they were to submit themselves to the laws of the new religion. Whether in cold water or warm, all were to be baptised. The inhabitants of Iceland were to become a Christian people.
Such a judgement, for Thorgeir himself, must have been a painful one to deliver. What had he glimpsed, lying curled up beneath his cloak, not eating or drinking or stirring, that had led him to arrive at it? We can never know for certain; but it is evident enough, Iceland being what it was, a haunted and uncanny land, where mortals tended to regard themselves as mere interlopers, that Thorgeir’s aim had been to pass into the dimensions of the otherworldly and to look for guidance there. Not all the spirits that populated the island were malign. If Thorgeir’s own visions remain unknown to us, then there are hints, nevertheless, in an eerie story told of a black-hearted king and of his fiendish attempt to subdue the free men of Iceland, of what the law- speaker might conceivably have seen during his dreams. This tyrant, it was reported, had commissioned a necromancer to swim ahead of his fleet in the form of a whale; but the spirits of Iceland, adopting various forms, whether of dragons, or of bulls, or of venomous toads, had stood sentry over the fjords, until at last a huge cliff-giant armed with an iron flail had chased away the whale. ‘And the king, brought the news, had turned his fleet around, and sailed back for home.’ Evidently, the dread of overambitious warlords might serve to chill even the realm of the supernatural.
And who might have been the tyrant capable of inspiring such fantastical tales? Not OlafTrygvasson, but rather an earlier Christian king, one who had become, among the Northmen, an even blacker and more flame-lit legend, a rumour of wrath and terror. Beyond the southern reaches of the North Way, across the icy and reef-strewn waters known as the Jotlandshaf, lay the heath-clad flatlands of Jutland, seat of the kings of Denmark. The realm was an ancient one: indeed, back in the time of Charlemagne, the Danes had treated with the Franks as their equals, and although, over the following century, the ruling dynasty had torn itself quite spectacularly to shreds, their erstwhile subjects had never wholly lost a sense of shared identity. By the middle of the tenth century, a new line of kings had risen to power in Denmark: one with sufficient ruthlessness and resolve not to let slip its hold upon the kingdom. Show-place of the dynasty’s power was Jelling, a stronghold in the heart of Jutland, a place of ancient graves, and rows of monoliths, and gold-ringed warriors set on guard outside mighty-gabled halls. Two huge mounds of earth dominated the scene: the work of Gorm, the dynasty’s first great ruler, and of Thyri, his queen, pagans both. Yet between the two barrows, the traveller to Jelling would have found, not a temple, not a shrine to Odin or Thor, but a church; and beside the church, a great block of granite carved with a crucified, serpent-entangled Christ. ‘King Harald had this memorial made,’ it was inscribed on the stone, ‘for Gorm his father and Thyri his mother: that same Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway, and made the Danes to be Christian.’
This was a boast that veiled as much as it revealed. The truth was that ‘Bluetooth’, as Harald was known, had only ever exercised the most threadbare hegemony over the North Way; that his conversion to Christianity had been prompted, in part at least, by a panicky desire to forestall invasion by Otto the Great; and that for many years he had cringed before the Saxon emperor, paying him both homage and tribute. Nevertheless, within the limits of his own kingdom, his sway had been fierce and iron-fisted, a potent demonstration to later warlords, Olaf Trygvasson notable among them, that the Christian faith might comfortably be squared with the traditional enthusiasms of a Viking: indeed, that it might help to make the practice of robbery and intimidation even more effective. Whether it was by building massive fortresses all over Denmark, or by extorting tribute from his weaker neighbours, just as Otto had extorted tribute from him, Bluetooth had aimed to throw his weight around in the authentic manner of a Christian king. If the sponsorship of talking whales was not in truth a noted feature of his preparations, then the ability to outfit menacing amphibious expeditions, and to unleash them upon his enemies, most certainly was. The assaults launched to such devastating effect against England in the final decade of the millennium were a demonstration of just how potent a role model Bluetooth had been.
And not only to Trygvasson. Cruising alongside him in the raids of 991 and 994, and standing next to him amid the dust of Maldon, had been a Viking lord no less feared and widely sung: Sweyn, known as ‘Forkbeard’, Harald Bluetooth’s son. Chill and calculating where Trygvasson was headstrong, Forkbeard had learned much from his father – so much so that in the previous decade he had paid the example set by Bluetooth its ultimate compliment by knifing the old wolf in the back. In 982, the year of Otto II’s defeat by the Saracens at Cotrone, and the Wendish invasion of Saxony, the Danish king too, dispatching his own war bands across the frontier, had sought to scavenge pickings for himself; but it was Forkbeard who had secured all the glory of the venture, and then exploited it to topple his father. Various tales were told of Bluetooth’s end: the grisliest had him wandering off after a parley with his son, and then, ‘as he squatted down behind a bush for the purpose of emptying his bowels’, being hit square between the buttocks by an arrow. A spectacular death, if true – and one that had certainly left Forkbeard secure in his inheritance.
‘Not a ruler, but a destroyer’: such was the judgement of his near neighbour, Thietmar, the ever-sniffy Bishop of Merseburg. This, however, was to mistake Forkbeard’s talent for wreaking destruction – which was indeed prodigious—as having no goals other than itself. In truth, it was precisely by destroying that he ruled: a coldly calculating approach to the
demands of lordship that would ultimately enable him to put even Trygvasson in the shade. The two kings might once have been brothers-in-arms, but a man responsible for having his father shot in the rectum was hardly likely to feel inhibited by any sense of fraternal loyalty. Sure enough, in the years that followed the parting of their ways, and Trygvasson’s arrival right on Forkbeard’s doorstep, beyond the Jotlandshaf, the rivalry between the two had grown increasingly deadly. Coolly, patiently, and in the end to lethal effect, the Danish king had prepared his trap. In the year 1000, a great host of ships manned by allies recruited from across Scandinavia, the North Way included, joined with Forkbeard’s fleet, looking to deprive Trygvasson of what every Viking warlord needed in order to survive: command of the sea lanes. Trygvasson himself, flamboyant as ever, responded by sailing into Danish waters in the longest and most glamorous dragon-ship ever built, at the head of sixty ships only marginally less dazzling, hoping that the brilliance of the armada, and of his own fearsome reputation, would serve to put his foes to flight. But they did not: Forkbeard’s ambush was sprung, and after a day of desperate fighting even the Long Serpent, Trygvasson’s flagship, ended up riven, boarded and cleared of her men. Trygvasson himself, adorned in golden armour and a bright-red cloak, leapt from the clawing fingers of his enemies into the sea; and when they made an attempt to rescue him, ‘he threw his shield over his head, and vanished beneath the waves’. His triumph was to have died as he had lived, the very model of a Viking hero; but Forkbeard’s was to have secured for himself power beyond the dreams of all his forebears.
