The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Neolithic Orkney, with its rich archaeological sites, lay towards the end of the ‘Atlantic arc’ that stretched all the way down to the coast of Portugal. In the early Middle Ages, the importance of Orkney lay not in its position at the end of a line, but its position in the middle of a line; this line linked Norway, Scotland, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and lands even beyond that. The islands offered plenty of pasture, and sheep-rearing rather than fishing or agriculture was probably the main activity. Still, as one can see from the career of Svein Asleifarson (mentioned earlier), Vikings living in the Orkneys took care to sow grain and to reap the harvest, in his case between his spring and autumn Viking raids: ‘he stayed till the cornfields had been reaped and the grain was safely in. After that he would go raiding again.’2 With the extension of rule from the Orkneys and Shetland to parts of the Scottish mainland, the supply of food must have been adequate, while heavy cloth could be produced from the wool of local sheep. In Orkney and Shetland, the production of oats increased significantly when the Norse colonists arrived, reflecting its use both as food for humans and as fodder for animals; it is a hardy grain, well suited to a northerly environment. Shellfish were sought out as food, and cod became ever more popular, to judge from finds of fish bones. Linen too was hardy enough to flourish this far north, as archaeological evidence from Quoygrew in the Orkney Islands has revealed.3 The great virtue of the islands was their strategic position, both from the perspective of naval power and from that of commercial networks – under Norse rule trade links developed towards Ireland and Iceland, Norway and York.4

  The early history of the Orkney Islands was recorded, with a good amount of elaboration, in the Orkneyinga Saga, one of the liveliest of all the Icelandic sagas. There, of course, is the problem, for it was written a long way from Orkney around 1200, which means that its coverage of events in the twelfth century, such as the pilgrimage of Earl Rognvald, is based on exact knowledge; but its account of the ancestors of the first earls of Orkney conjures up fantasies of a half-remembered pagan world in the far north inhabited by Finns and Lapps as well as by Norsemen. Yet the story of how the kings of Norway gained overlordship in the Scottish isles is plausible. In the ninth century King Harald Fairhair became irritated by Viking raiders who set out from Orkney and Shetland, their winter base, and reached as far as Norway itself. Determined to teach these raiders a lesson, the king seized control of lands much further to the west than any of his predecessors, right down to the Isle of Man. He agreed to install a certain Sigurð, whose nephew Rolf later became the first Norse ruler of Normandy, as earl of Orkney and Shetland, and Sigurð then pressed ahead with his own local empire-building; the result was that the shores of Scotland to the south of Orkney, Caithness, fell under Norse rule.5 Over time, the earls of Orkney would acknowledge the king of the Scots as their overlord in Caithness, while continuing to accept the king of Norway as their overlord in the islands; and this was easier to do as the Scots and the Norwegians sealed their own relationship in marriage alliances – the real problem was not so much rivalry between those two kings, though that did break out, as the internal strife within Scotland whose ripples sometimes reached as far as the Orcadian realm. The word ‘realm’ is appropriate, since the authority of the Norwegian king was exercised through what has been called ‘indirect lordship’, leaving Sigurð’s descendants largely free to conduct their own affairs so long as they acknowledged Norwegian supremacy. This continued until 1195, when the king took the islands under direct control. The title jarl, or earl, can be translated as ‘chieftain’ or even ‘prince’, and a jarl was not very different in status from a king. The earls of Orkney, like the kings of Norway, waged gruesome struggles against rivals to gain and hold on to power, and being burned to death in one’s house was an occupational hazard, as in other parts of the Norse world.6

  Sigurð’s mainland conquests generated tension with Mælbrigte, earl of the Scots (as the Orkney Saga calls him), and the dispute could only be resolved by battle. Sigurð, victorious, decapitated Mælbrigte and attached his head to the saddle of his own horse. While he was riding around with this ghastly trophy, his leg was grazed by Mælbrigte’s tooth, and sepsis set in. Sigurð was soon dead, and although the succession was sorted out, Orkney fell prey to groups of marauding Danes and Norwegians with nicknames such as Tree-Beard and Scurvy who would take up residence on the islands and launch their Viking raids from there.7 Once order was restored, the Norsemen in Orkney established their own reputation as raiders: ‘Earl Havard had a nephew called Einar Buttered-Bread, a respected chieftain with a good following. He used to go plundering in the summer.’8 At the end of the tenth century the earl of Orkney became involved in bigger issues than control of northern Scotland, as the warlord Olaf Tryggvason went on the rampage in the British Isles, partly on his own account and partly in support of Svein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, who eventually overwhelmed the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and handed it on to his more famous son Cnut.

  Olaf was baptized (in the Scilly Isles, if the Orkney Saga is to be believed) and suddenly decided to insist on the baptism of his putative subjects as well. During Olaf’s own bid for the crown of Norway, which he held until 1000, his five longships reached Orkney, where they encountered three ships that the current earl of Orkney (another Sigurð) was leading on a Viking raid. Sigurð was summoned to Olaf’s ship. ‘I want you and all your subjects to be baptized,’ Olaf demanded. ‘If you refuse, I’ll have you killed on the spot, and I swear that I’ll ravage every island with fire and steel.’ ‘After that,’ the Orkney Saga tersely relates, ‘all Orkney embraced the faith.’ This must have made it possible for Sigurð to marry the daughter of Malcolm, king of the Scots; Sigurð’s mother was an Irish Christian, and such mixed marriages between Scandinavians and Celts were common in Ireland as well – further evidence that the Viking raiders were often a mixture of Scandinavians, Celts and Celto-Scandinavians. Sigurð’s mother, described in the Orkney Saga as a ‘sorceress’, did not close her mind to magic, and bestowed a magical raven banner on her son; it would bring victory to the person in whose honour it was carried, but death to whoever carried it. Sigurð, on campaign in Ireland following his baptism, found that none of his followers would carry it; so he decided he would have to do so himself, whereupon his mother’s prophecy came true, and he was cut down.9

  Naval power enabled the lords of the isles to hold their own, and to extend the long arms of their reach as far as Man. An eleventh-century earl, Þorfinn, defended his territory in Caithness with ‘five well-manned longships’, described in the saga as ‘a considerable force’. Unfortunately the king of the Scots, Karl Hundason (possibly the king who is also known as Macbeth), came upon his fleet with eleven longships, and their navies engaged:

  Confronting the foe, Þorfinn’s

  fleet of five ships

  steered, steadfast in anger

  against Karl’s sea-goers.

  Ships grappled

  together; gore, as foes fell,

  bathed stiff iron, black

  with Scots’ blood;

  singing the bows spilt

  blood, steel bit; bright

  though the quick points quaked,

  no quenching Þorfinn.10

  This was a real sea battle, with the ships coming up close to one another and catching hold of the enemy’s ships with grappling hooks; after a tough fight, Þorfinn’s men tried to gain hold of the king’s ship and Þorfinn followed his banner on to the deck of King Karl’s longship – Karl escaped, but most of his crew were killed.

  Even allowing for some artistic flourishes in the saga’s account of this battle, the description of a fight at sea is important, because it proves that warships were not simply used for the rapid transport of warriors and their booty, but were used as platforms on which to fight bitter contests in open waters. If we take the size of the Oseberg ship as a very rough guide, we can expect that about thirty oarsmen powered each vessel, though there must have been other troops on board as
well, ready to change shift. This might leave us with a figure of about 300 warriors in Þorfinn’s company, with more than twice as many in King Karl’s fleet, so it is possible that around 1,000 troops were involved in this sea battle, and at the very least half that number. Þorfinn became one of the most successful and most powerful earls of Orkney, exercising control in the Hebrides and even in parts of northern Ireland. His career demonstrates how the Orkney islands were very well situated as bases for control of much wider spaces of ocean.

  The strategic significance of Orkney was not lost on the kings of Norway. In 1066 Harald Hardraða decided to support the claims of Tostig, who was challenging the right of his half-brother Harold Godwinsson to the throne of England. The Norwegian king took ship for Shetland and Orkney, collecting new recruits to his army there, before edging his way southwards to defeat and death at Stamford Bridge in October 1066. At that time power in Orkney was shared between two brothers; they too had accompanied Harald to Yorkshire, but they survived the invasion, only to find themselves outmanoeuvred by a later king of Norway, Magnus Barelegs (d. 1103), who decided to impose Norwegian rule over a wide swathe of territory stretching as far as Anglesey; he set out with a fleet in 1098. He deported the two earls from Orkney and installed his young son in their place, though he placed the government of the islands in the hands of regents. His reversal of earlier policy, which had left the earls responsible for the day-to-day running of Orkney and Shetland, formed part of these wider ambitions, for he needed a naval base from which he could control lands further away. Meanwhile he took with him to Wales the heirs to the earldom, one of whom, Magnus Erlendsson, proved irritatingly unco-operative:

  When the troops were getting their weapons ready for battle, Magnus Erlendsson settled down in the main cabin and refused to arm himself. The king asked him why he was sitting around and his answer was that he had no quarrel with anyone there. ‘That’s why I have no intention of fighting,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t the guts to fight,’ said the king, ‘and in my opinion this has nothing to do with your faith, get below. Don’t lie there under everybody’s feet.’ Magnus Erlendsson took out his psalter and chanted psalms throughout the battle, but refused to take cover.11

  This was an early sign that Magnus was destined for sainthood; in Orkney some years later, as disputes with his co-earl flared, his rival’s chief cook stove his head in, and he became a martyr for the faith, capable of working miracles. Whether or not his life was as holy as his supporters insisted, the cathedral that was built in Orkney was named in his honour, and his wrecked skull has been unearthed in the church.12 Magnus Barelegs ‘took an intense dislike to him’, even though young Magnus was his cupbearer. As the fleet moved northwards past Scotland, Magnus Erlendsson was able to sneak away at night and swam to shore. He was in his night clothes, and he scratched his bare feet badly as he stumbled through the undergrowth. That morning at breakfast the king noticed his absence and sent a man to his bunk to find him. When they discovered that he was no longer on board they sent a search party out on land, supported by bloodhounds; but young Magnus was up a tree and he scared off the one dog that had found him. He made his way to the Scottish court and to England and Wales, where he was made welcome, and awaited the news of King Magnus’ death.13

  The king was more interested, however, in gaining Anglesey, ‘which lies as far south as any region ever ruled by the former kings of Norway and comprises a third part of Wales’ – that, at least, is what the anonymous saga-writer believed.14 Magnus’ intervention in the Isle of Man formed part of a wider contest for control of this small but strategically valuable territory, with its command over access to central and southern Ireland; there was a local king, Guðroð Crovan, who reigned from 1079 to 1095, and who was of mixed Norse and Irish descent, while enough Gaelic names have been found on inscriptions from the island to indicate that either the old population or Irish settlers played a large part in the life of Man. After his death, Magnus saw an opportunity to gain control, but his plans were challenged by Irish rivals, and by 1103 Guðroð’s son was in charge, founding a line of succession that lasted until 1265.15 However, Man was only the key to a vaster space, and King Magnus of Norway had limitless ambitions. It was even alleged that the king was being urged to avenge the death of his grandfather Harald Hardraða by invading England. Later, in 1103, he was to die in battle in Ulster.16 Magnus Barelegs was one of a series of Norwegian kings who, during the eleventh century, transformed the predatory and diffuse raiding of the Vikings into a co-ordinated project: there were still plenty of opportunities for booty and glory, but control of the Norse expeditions was becoming centralized, and raids were now a means by which royal power was extended across the north Atlantic, though with questionable success: after Barelegs was killed the Orkney islands reverted to rule by local earls.

  How Norse rule affected these islands, and other British islands that came under Norwegian sovereignty such as the Hebrides, is not entirely clear. The pre-existing native population may well have been enslaved or absorbed through intermarriage. Ancient Celtic systems of land division were perpetuated. On the other hand, there is no evidence for the survival of Celtic Christianity in these islands after the Norse conquest; as with the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, paganism triumphed for a while, and the conversion of Sigurð is not likely to have brought the old cult to an end – more important in that respect was the spread of the cult of St Magnus, which gave Orkney, and the Orcadians, a distinct religious identity. That the Norse character of the Orkneys and Shetlands is not a modern affectation should be clear from the long survival of a Norse dialect, Norn, in the islands; it only died out in the mid-nineteenth century, and appears to have been spoken across the water in Caithness during the Middle Ages, in the mainland territories under Orcadian rule.17

  The distinctive mixture of Norse and Celtic culture can be seen most clearly in Ireland, whose very name was forged by the Vikings.18 Rather than chronicling the successive waves of Viking attacks on Ireland, it makes sense to look at the pattern of Norse penetration into that country. It is striking that the early raids, at the very end of the eighth century, came down from the north, as Viking ships swept down the great arc linking the fjords of Norway to Orkney, the Hebrides and then down to Ulster and as far south as the Isle of St Patrick (Inispatrick), close to the site of what would become the major seat of Norse power in Ireland, Dublin. Not surprisingly, early targets included monasteries, even though the Vikings also carried away women and children, whom they enslaved; many of these women gave birth to a new generation of Vikings who were of mixed ancestry. A major settlement lay at Duibhlinn, ‘Blackpool’, but other towns as well as Dublin, right across the island, owe their origins to the Vikings. They were thus creators as well as destroyers. Endemic warfare between the different Irish kings was complicated by the involvement of Scandinavian settlers, who were sometimes the target of Irish attacks, but who were increasingly active alongside Celtic armies. In 871 a boastful Scandinavian warlord named Ivar styled himself ‘king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain’. Yet by the middle of the tenth century the Norse in Ireland were at each other’s throats, even though Dublin flourished as a great centre of trade within the Irish Sea – some of this trade being fed, to be sure, by plunder from continuing raids deep into the island and across the sea towards Wales, for Welsh captives were in good supply in its slave market.19

  The Viking raids caused great damage to the flourishing Celtic Church on the island, even though the Scandinavians learned something from the intricate styles of decoration in the fine manuscripts they pillaged; ‘Viking art’ was not immune to Celtic influences. When the Irish king and ‘high priest’ Brian Boru led his armies to victory over the Norsemen at Clontarf in 1014 (though he himself died in the battle), the Norse were not expunged from Ireland. They continued to meld into Irish society, and one of the most significant markers of their assimilation was the adoption of the religion they had so mercilessly pillaged: Christianity was re
stored throughout the island, but it also needs to be said that Irish kings had seen the rich monasteries of Ireland as fair game, and the devastation reported in the Irish annals was as often the work of Celtic as of Norse armies.20

  II

  It is a moot point whether one can seriously use the word ‘Viking’ to describe the complex maritime world that was brought into being across the northern Atlantic by Norse settlers in long-inhabited lands such as Orkney and in barely inhabited lands such as Iceland and Greenland, where the Norse created brand new societies on virgin soil. The age of the marauders was still far from over when Greenland and North America were discovered; but Greenland was inhabited by the Norse for over 400 years, long past the time when violent Viking raids occurred. Moreover, the term does harm by emphasizing images of violence that appeal to those who like their history well spattered with blood. In Iceland, certainly, bloody conflicts between neighbours, conjured into the vivid tales of the sagas, show that Norse men, and indeed Norse women, were perfectly capable of creating havoc at home, without needing to take their weapons across the open seas. But settled societies did emerge out in the Atlantic, prospering through trade: in the Faroes, in Iceland and in Greenland.