The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  MAPS

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  INTRODUCTION

  The Hammer of the North

  “Wake early if you want another man’s life or land. No land for the lazy wolf. No battle’s won in bed.”

  – Edda of Sæmund the Wise, a collection of the sayings of Odin

  Just off the west coast of present-day Scotland, lies the small island of Iona, a grassy promontory with white sandy beaches, rising up out of the North Sea. Today it is a place of quiet contemplation, relatively undisturbed by the tour groups or visiting school children wandering among its enchanted ruins. Even for those who know, it is easy to forget that twelve centuries ago, these idyllic shores were the scenes of unimaginable violence.

  The monastery of Iona is the symbolic heart of Scottish Christianity, one of the oldest and most important religious centers in Western Europe. It was founded by the Irish monk Columba in the sixth century and became the focal point for the spread of the faith throughout Scotland.

  In the early centuries, the monks came to seek seclusion among the ‘desert’ of the Atlantic Ocean, and built simple beehive-shaped stone huts where they could concentrate on their prayers and vows of poverty and obedience. Over time, however, the small community became a major pilgrimage site, and a great medieval center of learning. It developed into a training school for monks with special rooms for the copying of manuscripts called scriptoriums that produced works of art famous throughout Europe. Chief among these was the ‘Book of Kells’, an illuminated collection of the four gospels that was described by its Irish contemporaries as “the most precious object in the western world”.

  In addition to its religious treasures, Iona also boasted an unrivaled collection of royal tombs. Most of the early Scottish kings, including the two made famous by Shakespeare – Macbeth and his victim Duncan – were interred in the monastery’s crypt.

  For centuries, the island was an oasis of peace, protected by the faith of its inhabitants and the vast ocean surrounding it. In 794, however, a ripple of fear penetrated the tranquility. Rumors reached the monks of terrible raids to the east, sister monasteries devastated by strange northern pagans. Early the next year, while the monks were celebrating a holy day, ships with prows carved to resemble serpents and dragons slipped onto the beach below the main abbey.

  Leaping onto the white sand of a shoreline, which would later bear the name ‘Martyr’s Bay’ in memory of the slain, the raiders headed for the buildings, cutting down the monks they found along the way. Smashing open the doors, they killed anyone who tried to resist, drenching the stone floors of the chapel with blood. Anything that looked valuable was seized, including rich vestments which were ripped off of the bodies of the dead or dying.

  As the surviving monks fled in all directions, the attackers set fire to the great abbey and then raced down to the beach with their considerable loot. Seemingly in the blink of an eye they were gone. Left behind were bloody corpses, burning buildings, and a shattered community.

  Virtually the only thing left intact was the high cross of St. Martin’s, one of a dozen or so large carved monoliths that had dotted the landscape. In the side facing away from the devastated church was carved the biblical figure of Abraham with his sword raised high – as if in warning of the terrible events that had just unfolded.

  The raids on the British Isles were only the beginning of a great hammer blow that fell on an unprepared Europe. The broken bodies and the blackened shells of buildings in places like Iona would be all too common in the centuries to come.

  The suddenness of the violence left many occupants of Europe disoriented and anxious. The shock and despair can still be felt in the words of Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon monk writing from Charlemagne’s imperial capital of Aachen after one of the first raids.

  “…never before in Britain has such a terror appeared as this we have now suffered at the hands of the heathen.”

  The fact that the word ‘Viking’ still conjures up that image of blond-haired barbarians leaping off of dragon ships to plunder a monastery – is a testament to the trauma inflicted on Western Christendom during the three hundred years of the Viking Age. It is burned into our collective memory.

  There is, even now, something alien about those northern warriors. The origin of the word ‘viking’ itself is unknown. Contemporary ninth century records call the raiders ‘Northmen’, ‘Danes’, ‘Norse’, or ‘Heathen’. The Anglo-Saxons, frequent targets of their attacks, did have a word ‘wicing’ which meant ‘sea-raider’, but it first appears only in the eleventh century. A better explanation comes from the Vikings themselves. In Old Norse vic meant inlet or bay and the Vic district near the Oslo Fjord was a main source of iron used in sword production. The word ‘Viking’ probably started off as a reference to men from the Vic district and gradually came to include all Scandinavian raiders.

  Endless speculation has centered on the question of why the Vikings suddenly erupted from their lands in the eighth century. Theories have ranged from overpopulation and political pressure to climate change and technological innovations.1 What is clear, however, is that there was a cyclical nature to the great waves of northern Europeans leaving their homes. The first recorded migration of Scandinavian people actually predates the ‘Viking Age’ by nearly five centuries. As the Western Roman Empire tottered toward its final collapse, the Goths, a people originating from what is now southern Sweden invaded the empire, eventually settling in southern France and Spain.

  But the Goths wouldn’t have recognized themselves as ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Viking’ any more than the raiders of the eighth century would have. Although they had a common language, the Vikings were never a single people, and most of those who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking age never left home. The raiders were a somewhat suspect minority with multiple reasons for adventuring. Single explanations, therefore, are bound to be incomplete. Further complicating matters is the fact that the Viking story has largely been told by others – histories compiled by their victims, references in the annals of the older, more civilized nations to the south and east, and the tantalizing glimpses that archeology gives us.

  The Vikings vanished partly because their artists worked in wood. Summers were spent felling trees, which were turned into the feasting halls, ships, and later stave churches that made up their civilization. Of these, only the last remain more or less intact, and they represent the twilight of the Viking world.

  The Vikings themselves wrote very little down. Their runic alphabet was more suited to magical spells and marker stones than epics or histories. By the time the great Icelandic bard, Snorri Sturluson, composed his Heimskringla – The Lives of the Norse Kings – more than four centuries had passed since the Viking Age had ended.

  But those stories reflect a much older oral tradition, and they allow us to hear the spirit, if not the exact words, of the tales that Viking poets told to pass the long northern nights. They illustrate the Viking mindset in the same way that the Iliad illuminates that of the ancient Greeks: a true warrior went out, gained riches, built great halls and handsomely rewarded his loyal followers. Glory – and kingships – could only be won on the battlefield.

  Fired by this mindset, young Viking men sailed out to the glittering lands to the south and east of Scandinavia to win everlasting fame. A measure of their success can be found in the anxious prayers that soon echoed from European churches. The abbey of St. Vaast on the northern coast of France included in its daily chants the phrase “Deliver us, God, from the savage race of Northmen which lays waste our realms.”2 It was a sentiment that many would soon share, from Constantinople in the east to the Americas in the west.

  Prologue: The Viking Dawn

  “A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age. No longer is there mercy among men.”

&nbs
p; Völuspá Doomsday Prophecy from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda

  The Holy Island of Lindisfarne is an unlikely place to begin the story of an epoch of violence and blood. If anything, it seems today like a place outside of time, an inconspicuous and unimpressive bit of land sticking out of the North Sea. Covered by sparse vegetation, its rocky soil slopes gently towards the tidal coasts, unencumbered by much protection from either the northern climate or the pounding of the waves.

  As early as the sixth century, the island had become home to a small enclave of monks who were looking for a spiritual haven, a place where they could retreat from the world and its distractions. Within a century, a priory had been built on the island’s southern promontory, and its suitability for quiet prayer had attracted a monk named Cuthbert, Northumbria’s future patron saint. Renowned in life for his personal warmth and holiness, Cuthbert spent twenty-three years on the island, and his tomb – thanks to numerous miracles attributed to him after his death – became a popular place for pilgrimage among England’s Anglo-Saxon population.

  No other monastery better symbolized the new confidence of the late eighth century. Thanks to a series of strong rulers in both Britain and the continent, a measure of security had returned to Western Europe that hadn’t been seen since the Pax Romana. The crumbling relics of a more prosperous time lay on all sides, but farmers, craftsmen, and monks had settled in to the sure, steady rhythms of early medieval life.

  Politically, England was divided among seven kingdoms, four major and three minor ones. The most powerful of the major kingdoms was Mercia, which controlled nearly the entire central portion of the island from the Welsh border to the North Sea. The other major kingdoms were Northumbria, stretching from Edinburgh to the Humber River in the north east; East Anglia, a swampy area along England’s east coast; and Wessex, which covered all of southwestern England, including Cornwall. The three petty kingdoms were Sussex on the Channel coast, Essex which controlled London, and Kent, the area around Canterbury.

  Although all of England had been prospering in the eighth century, the northern regions in particular experienced a cultural flowering that was impressive enough to be remembered by historians as the ‘Northumbrian Renaissance’ six centuries before the more famous Italian one. Painting, metalwork, sculpture, and architecture all flourished, and it was during this time that the great Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts were produced – among them the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, and the Book of Durrow.3

  Throughout England, religious houses opened up schools that produced academics of such quality that when Charlemagne decided to sponsor his own school – the Palatine Academy – he staffed it with English scholars.4

  Monasteries like those at Jarrow, Lindisfarne, and Iona, on the northern coasts of England and Scotland, were the main beneficiaries of this artistic flowering. Gospel books with lavish covers and gilded pages appeared along with reliquaries5 studded with precious stones, bishop’s crosiers – their symbol of office – made of delicate ivory, and vestments inlaid with gold and silver. The eighth century, which had overseen this renaissance, seemed poised to end on a note of increased prosperity and harmony. In 787 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that the farmers of England worked their fields in ‘supreme tranquility’. The contentment was such that one chronicler was carried away enough to write that ‘even the burden-bearing frame of the oxen placed their necks under the yoke in dearest love.’ The shadow of things to come, however, was revealed that autumn when a look-out spotted three unidentified ships off the coast of the Isle of Portland in southern Wessex.

  Whenever ships were spotted – whether hostile or friendly – it was the duty of the coastguard to inform the king’s reeve, the chief magistrate of a district or town. The isle of Portland’s reeve, a man named Beaduheard, must have assumed the strangers were merchants and probably rode down to the beach to direct them to a manor where they would be able obtain the necessary permissions to conduct business. However we don’t know what he actually planned because before he had a chance to open his mouth, they loosed a volley of arrows, killing him and his men instantly.

  Poor Beaduheard had the misfortune of making Europe’s first recorded contact with the Vikings, and his family didn’t even have the satisfaction of punishing his killers. By the time the king’s men arrived the Vikings would have been long gone, sailing further along the coast or back home with whatever they had managed to snatch off the corpses. There was nothing to be done but bury the bodies and hope the strangers didn’t return.

  News of the attack spread quickly, and nervous local populations began to take defensive measures in case the raiders reappeared. On both sides of the English Channel farmers were recruited to serve in peasant ‘levies’, assemblies of local shock troops who could be called into service quickly. Some religious houses took similar precautions. In 792 the monasteries of Kent were required to contribute to raising coastal defenses against ‘pagan seamen’. The Vikings, however, were not simple pirates and soon revealed the English preparations to be hopelessly inadequate. Their previous raids had merely been probing attacks, intelligence gathering to test both the prize and the defenses. In 793 they struck in force.

  Their target was not – as might be expected – one of the rich trading centers such as could be found at Dorset or Southampton. These were well-guarded and in proximity to large populations which could rally to their defense. Instead, the cunning Vikings chose the monastery of Lindisfarne – isolated, prosperous, and guarded only by the prayers of unsuspecting monks.

  Over the past century, English monasteries had grown fantastically wealthy, a fact which spread to the Viking homelands either through word of mouth or through trading activity. Monasteries were natural sites for the sale of imported goods – wines for communion, high quality textiles for church vestments, and precious metals for plate and reliquaries. In addition to the fortunes accumulated through gifts by pious donors, they also acted as proto-banks since local magnates frequently used major churches as safe deposits for their own portable wealth. Raiding a monastery was the Viking equivalent of winning the lottery.

  Best of all, as far as the Vikings were concerned, these rich targets were virtually unguarded. All over Europe religious houses had been built in exposed coastal areas in the belief that the sea would protect their flank – an opinion that was now proved terribly wrong. The shock of that discovery can still be felt in the writings of the time. “It was not thought possible ” wrote one cleric after the first attack, “that such an inroad from the sea could be made.”

  Lindisfarne was wealthy even by monastic standards, and its selection as the Viking’s first target was no accident. It had been personally endowed by the Northumbrian king, and possessed a peerless collection of relics, including the sainted remains of the English monk Cuthbert and the equally famous Irish missionary Columba who had brought Christianity to Scotland. The lucrative pilgrim trade which had grown from the fame of these two alone had made the monastery fabulously rich. Various Viking groups had been active in the area for some time and, on June 8, 793, one of these groups, from what is today Norway, carried out a brutally efficient attack.

  An anonymous Northumbrian monk recorded the event.

  “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…

  No one was spared. Monks who tried to resist were hacked apart or dragged down to the beach and drowned. Reliquaries were pulled into pieces and their contents dumped on the ground. Rich tapestries adorning chapel walls were torn down, altars were smashed, and everywhere the corpses of the slain lay ‘like dung in the streets’.

  The disaster sent a shockwave through Europe. If the heart of English Christianity could fall, then surely no one was safe. Anxious monks trying to make sense of the calamity claimed that there had been divine warning signs before the attack: sheets of lightning had been spotted in the skies several
weeks before, supposedly accompanied by fiery dragons wheeling menacingly above the priory.

  The disaster was widely attributed to the moral laxity of the English church. A few weeks after the raid a letter was circulated quoting Jeremiah 1:14 – “Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land” – and calls for reform were made. The scholar Alcuin, writing to the Bishop of Lindisfarne with eerie clarity, identified both the cause and the proper response. “Either this is the beginning of a greater tribulation, or else the sins of the inhabitants have called it upon themselves. Truly it has not happened by chance… You who are left, stand mindfully, fight bravely, defend the camp of God…”